Amazon Exclusive: A Letter from Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge, Author of The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton

A good book always makes me curious about the person who wrote it. That happened in a big way when I finished Edith Wharton's novel The House of Mirth. After I read the biographical sketch on the back cover and the dedication, I was more curious than ever and started devouring everything I could find about her.

I'd read plenty of books about people who escaped from poverty to pursue their dreams. What I discovered about Edith Wharton was that she escaped from a life of wealth and luxury to pursue hers: New York society women of the Gilded Age didn't work, and they most certainly didn't write fiction. Edith Wharton defied the expectations foisted upon her to become a best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist who made a terrific living with her pen. Why were there no books for young people about this courageous, fascinating woman?

Since I was a writer of picture books, I decided to try my hand at a short piece about her escape from society's expectations. But something else I discovered started pulling me another way. As an adult, Edith Wharton left the United States for Paris and found herself living there when World War I broke out. She should have decamped to England and waited things out in a luxurious country home she'd rented there. She chose instead to remain in Paris, endure the privations of the war years, and lay her writing aside in order to open a number of charities where orphans, refugees, and victims of tuberculosis could be cared for. I had the thought that maybe I should focus my picture book on her war work.

I pored over old letters in research libraries, visited Wharton's summer home in Lenox, Massachusetts, and found myself pulled in more and more directions. I began to think that I needed more room than a thirty-two-page book would give me--that I would have to write a full-length biography to tell Edith Wharton's story properly. But I was a picture book writer, a teller of very short, focused nonfiction tales. Should I defy the expectations I had imposed on myself and try this new thing? The answer was obvious: If Edith Wharton had the courage to strike out into uncharted territory, how could her would-be biographer do anything less?

So it was Edith Wharton's books that first drew me to her. But it was her determination to follow her writer's call, as well as her rich, well-lived life, that led me out of my own comfort zone and inspired me to write The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton.

I'd love to introduce you to Edith Wharton. As her writer friend Henry James observed, "You will find nothing stupid in her and nothing small."

Sincerely,
Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge

The Mount--Edith Wharton's Estate in Lennox, MA

(The Mount photo © David Dashiell)