To the Editors:

Had James W. Tuttleton attempted to verify his allegations about me in his zealous defense of R.W.B. Lewis (March 1989), he would have discovered the inaccuracy of his assumptions about my work on Edith Wharton. As it is, I am pleased to set the record straight on some aspects of: (1) Edith Wharton’s alleged breakdown of 1894-6; and (2) the connections between my current work on the novelist and my past contributions to Mr. Lewis’s Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975).

Edith Wharton’s alleged two-year breakdown during the mid-i 890s is but one of many instances in Mr. Lewis’s Biography in which he advances as fact what ought to have been limited by sketchy evidence to no more than conjecture. In a recent letter to the Times Literary Supplement, Mr. Lewis insists anew that “there was undoubtedly a breakdown and a serious one” during 1894-6, although he now hedges on its duration. The “breakdown” plays a crucial part in the Biography, in which Edith Wharton’s identity crisis—involving both literary and conjugal misery—is ascribed largely to the philistinism of Old New York. The book’s fifth chapter, entitled “Breakdown,” is the fulcrum of this dual conflict. Partial resolution in the sixth chapter turns upon the novelist’s persistence in liberating herself from the “world she had been born into.” Her rewards: increasingly robust health, in spite of relapses; and the emergence, between March and luly of 1898, of “Edith Wharton’s sustained literary career.”

When Messrs. Tuttleton