I'm just back from yet another visit to Worthing (see Nigeness passim). This time my reading on the train was Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, which I resolved to read after enjoying The Age of Innocence so much. I'm about halfway through, and finding it even more impressive than The Age of Innocence, and every bit as enjoyable, with the satirical humour closer to the surface, though the tragic undercurrents are unmissable. Miss Lily Bart – beautiful, witty, sophisticated, and in need of a seriously rich husband – is a wholly convincing and attractive creation, painted in the round, with full awareness of her weaknesses.
I have just read the crucial chapter that revolves around an evening of tableaux vivants – a now defunct form of entertainment in which people posed as famous works of art, with suitable costume, lighting and props. This show is being lavishly staged by luminaries of New York society, under the direction of a fashionable artist, and is designed to impress. Lily Bart does indeed make an impression, eliciting a unanimous, spontaneous 'Oh!' from the spectators as soon as she appears, in the likeness of Joshua Reynolds's 'Mrs Lloyd'. Mrs Lloyd? This was not a painting I know, so I sought it out...
The portrait is of Mrs Richard Bennett Lloyd, wife of a British army captain who served in America, and it shows her as an ultra-elegant lady, carving her marital surname in the trunk of a tree. Lily Bart chose well when she decided to pose as Mrs Lloyd, and Wharton describes the effect: 'Her pale draperies, and the background of foliage against which she stood, served only to relieve the long dryad-like curves that swept upward from her poised foot to her lifted arm. The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden [who is in love with her, but not 'suitable'] always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of the eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part.' Oh dear...
The edition I'm reading (Virago Modern Classics) has as its cover image a portrait of Lady Colin Campbell by Giovanni Boldini, the 'Master of Swish' – a good choice.
As for Reynolds's Mrs Lloyd, that painting now hangs on the walls of Waddesdon Manor, the grand Rothschild mansion in Buckinghamshire.
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