Edith Wharton: The Sense of Harmony

Gr 11 Up—This documentary offers a sweeping overview of the author's literary, humanitarian, and domestic accomplishments throughout her life, including time spent in France during World War I. She is portrayed as a cosmopolitan woman who enjoyed travel and living abroad. The film also highlights her keen interest in architecture and gardens. Interviews with prominent Wharton biographers, along with excerpts from personal correspondence, flesh out the subject and help viewers appreciate the link between her life experiences and her fiction. In addition to letters to and from Wharton, narrators read aloud sections of her works while personal photographs of Wharton and her contemporaries are shown on screen. The still photographs are interspersed with generic, vintage black-and-white film clips, some of which are rather grainy. The work is thorough, though a bit dry.