THE REEF by Edith Wharton (fiction)

Sometimes it is a pleasant journey to return to an old classic and a bygone era.  Just so with this novel by Edith Wharton, written in 1912, that respite year, just before the great World War broke out. Woodrow Wilson had just been elected President, Charlie Chaplin had made his first film, and it was the year of the sinking of the Titanic. I had not read this book before, though I have read and enjoyed many of Wharton's other novels.  This book is not as well known as her other classics.  When Wharton wrote this book, her marriage was all but finished.  She was at loose ends and had just begun an affair with Morton Fullerton.  Women were enjoying more freedom and were traveling alone, taking jobs, freeing themselves from corsets, and expressing their independence.

Each of the three main characters in the story, as it unfolds, come to grips with a psychological struggle concerning the meaning of the lives they are living.

George Darrow is a single American diplomat who was shuttling between Paris and London.  He becomes reacquainted with an old love interest, a wealthy widow, with one child.  They rekindle their romance, but Anna Leath is a product of the old way of life and society.  She is a beautiful woman who feels comfortable in the upper class's rigid conformity to society's rules.  Anna has been protected from life's struggles.  However, her love for George causes her to awaken to the modern world which she is not a part of.  She questions the meaning of her life and her previous marriage which she realizes was neither real nor alive.

In his travel to Paris from London, George meets a vivacious and modern young woman, Sophy Viner who is charming in her natural openness. George is captivated by her, and as their friendship develops, he struggles with the dichotomy of his feelings for both women.  Sophy in turn, is uncomfortable with her feelings for a man that she instinctively recognizes is unobtainable.

How these characters lives affect each other and become entwined forms the plot of the story.  There is a point when George muses on their predicament feeling that, "They seemed like the ghostly lovers of the Grecian Urn, forever pursuing without ever clasping each other."

I enjoyed visiting this long lost time in the years before war brought changes, that caused life never to be the same again.  Wharton is adept at realizing her characters and setting the scene of the era that was her modern world.  Paris and the life of the French upper class, is beautifully written.