In a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement, Marion Mainwaring has taken to task R W. B. Lewis for errors of fact and interpretation in composing his Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975). These errors could have been avoided, she avers, if only Lewis had properly attended to the information that she—as his research assistant in Paris—had provided him back in the 1970s. Charging him with remarkable carelessness, she complains that “it is the nature, number, scale, and cascade-effect of Lewis’s [errors] that are extraordinary.”

It would be tedious to rehearse Lewis’s alleged mistakes here: readers may consult her claims in “The Shock of Non-Recognition” (TLS, December 16-22, pp. 1394, 1405). But briefly they come down to a few mistranslations, some misspelled or misunderstood names, a few wrong addresses and dates, and an alleged misinterpretation of the cloudy relationship between Morton Fullerton, a scapegrace journalist in Paris, and his several inamoratas, one of whom was Edith Wharton herself According to Ms. Mainwaring, she had no opportunity to read and correct the Paris chapters of Edith Wharton in page proof; hence, Lewis’s errors survived into the published biography and have propagated errors in subsequent Wharton literary criticism. Most of Lewis’s mistakes are repeated, she claims, in The Letters of Edith Wharton(1988), recently edited by R W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis. There are also, Ms. Mainwaring ominously warns, serious deficiencies in Lewis’s account of Mrs. Wharton’s early life in New York—errors that will be