In the upcoming New Yorker, Rebecca Mead writes about Edith Wharton’s letters to her governess, Anna Bahlmann. “Wharton had requested that her letters be destroyed, but Bahlmann’s family ignored her wishes and, for the past ninety years, their correspondence sat in storage. On Wednesday, June 24th, the letters—which have not been seen until now—will be up for auction at Christie’s.”
The New Yorker website offers a slide show of the letters, which “reveal that the governess was a significant mentor and a greater intellectual companion than Wharton, in her retrospective self-fashioning, cared to remember.”
In addition to being one of the greatest writers the world will ever know, Wharton also had superb handwriting.
