My Dear Governess, edited by Irene Goldman Price

‘I have finished Julius Caesar since I last wrote & I cannot say that it left a very glowing impression on me. It was too much like my own earliest attempts at tragedy to move me in the least.’ So wrote the 16-year-old Edith Wharton in 1878 to Anna Bahlmann, her governess and literary confidante. Wharton’s letters to Bahlmann only came to light in 2009. Edited and carefully annotated by Irene Goldman-Price, they chart Wharton’s progress from precocious adolescent, to brilliant New York socialite, to sophisticated queen of European literary society, to tireless charity worker, divorced, estranged from her family, struggling to ease the plight of refugees in a Paris torn apart by the first world war.

Anna Bahlmann, a dumpy, penniless German spinster, was the perfect governess for the young prodigy. The early letters show how skilfully Bahlmann fed her pupil’s literary appetite, introducing her to Norse, Greek, Roman, Arthurian and Germanic mythologies, discussing poets from Tasso to Browning to Longfellow, teaching her German and Italian and introducing her to contemporary debates about music, art and architecture as well as literature.