BOOK REVIEW / Age of not so much innocence: Edith Wharton: No Gifts from Chance by Shari Benstock, Hamish Hamilton pounds 20

IN AUGUST 1910, Edith Wharton and her friend Claude Phillips, curator of the Wallace Collection in London, attended a beauty contest in Folkestone. Eighteen young women competed at the Victoria Pier Pavilion for the first prize of a piano, and Wharton later joked that she and Phillips had been joint winners. 'It was a lark', Shari Benstock remarks in her new biography of Wharton, 'but one amusing enough (sic) that she returned in future years.'

Seven years later, taking a break from her charity work for war refugees in Paris, Wharton visited Morocco. Travelling in her customary chauffeur- driven car, with an escort of government officials and French soldiers, she watched 'a violent dance of ritual self-mutilation at Moulay Idriss'. She also visited the sultan's harem where, in her own words, she found him reclining among lovely ballet russe concubines, 'in clothes such as Bakst never dreamed of'.

Wharton herself habitually overdressed in the way of upper-class fin-de-siecle and Edwardian women, seldom appearing in public without frills, lace, flounces and jewels. At a time when it was rare to see women unclothed, the revelation that she was an enthusiastic and uncritical spectator of beauty contests is at the very least surprising. So is her string-pulling to get into the harem, a place usually forbidden to Westerners and most particularly to Western women. We are accustomed to the objectification of women by men, but there is something chilling about Wharton's disengagement from the inherent vulgarity and exploitative aspects of both spectacles.

The excursions are suggestive of a strongly voyeuristic strain in Wharton's sexual make-up, a tendency often associated with physical abstinence. It is an especially interesting trait in view of the tradition that her marriage to the unstable Teddy Wharton (whom she eventually divorced) was a mariage blanc. Wharton's own opinion was that her mother's refusal to explain about sex on the eve of her wedding to Teddy was to 'falsify and misdirect' her life, a quotation which Benstock does little to amplify.

This is odd, given that one of the main justifications for the biography is that it provides a new account of Wharton's affair with William Morton Fullerton, the Times correspondent in Paris. According to Benstock, the affair with the troubled, bisexual Fullerton was even shorter than previously thought - so short, in fact, that it sounds like an experiment she was relieved to put behind her.

Benstock is Professor of English at the University of Miami and she has been able to draw on letters unavailable to R W B Lewis when he wrote his classic biography of Edith Wharton in 1975. She challenges Lewis's dating and interpretation of letters between Wharton and Fullerton in his 1988 selection (with Nancy Lewis) of the Letters of Edith Wharton, in which the physical consummation of the affair is placed in spring 1908. Claiming that in this matter 'Edith's rhetoric of passion outdistances her actions, as it often did', Benstock suggests that Wharton dithered until more than a year later when she and Fullerton finally spent a night together in the unromantic setting of the Charing Cross Hotel in London. The affair, she believes, was over in a matter of weeks.

This conclusion puts her in a difficult position, apparently supporting assumptions about Wharton's sexual coldness which do not suit Benstock at all. Her solution is to venture recklessly into the wilder realms of speculation: 'Although (Wharton's) poetic accounts of their lovemaking should never be read as factual accounts, they nonetheless suggest that she was at ease

with sexual intimacy, that she reached orgasm, and that even in the first sexual encounters, there were no embarrassments or awkwardnesses'.

This unf amiliar portrait of a sexually sophisticated Edith Wharton reads like a piece of late 20th-century revisionism. Benstock herself presents Wharton elsewhere in the book as an almost obsessively disengaged observer who surrounded herself with sexually unassertive male friends like the novelist Henry James and the 'perpetual bachelor' Walter Berry. She seems not to have been at ease with female friends and was, like the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward, an opponent of the emancipation of women; when asked to contribute to a fund for travel scholarships for women, she responded that 'they'd much better stay at home and mind the baby'. So dislikeable is Benstock's picture of Wharton that, when she arranges to rent Stocks, Mrs Humphry Ward's Essex mansion, it is almost as if some mischievous fate has intervened to bring these ageing and reactionary women together.

I have a gut feeling that this is unfair to Edith Wharton, not just because she is by far the better novelist. What Benstock's book conspicuously lacks is a sense of Wharton's inner life, the toughest but most essential area a biographer has to tackle. There is a bewildering mass of detail about where Edith travelled, her addresses in New York and Massachusetts and Paris, the phenomenal size of her book advances in later life, how much her charities raised for refugees during the First World War, what cars she owned, even the provision list for a cruise she took with friends in 1925 (168 bottles of rose wine, two dozen bottles of vin mousseux, 25 full bottles and five half bottles of Veuve Cliquot).

There are plot summaries of the novels, sales figures for individual books, even an account of the diamond and emerald necklace she ordered from Cartier in 1927 and rejected as too expensive. What we do not get are paragraphs of interpretation, of the life and the fiction, which would make sense of all the dizzying fragments; which would, to give just one example, distinguish Wharton's literary achievements from those of Henry James, with whom she is so often compared.

In 1921, when Sinclair Lewis congratulated her on The Age of Innocence, Wharton replied that she was resigned to being thought old-fashioned; she knew, she said, that 'les jeunes' considered her 'the Mrs Humphry Ward of the Western Hemisphere'. In spite of her access to previously unpublished material, Shari Benstock has neither the subtlety nor the vision to counter this charge. She has given us What Edith Did, not what she was.