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My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann. Ed Irene Goldman-Price. New Haven: Yale UP, 2012.
"The romantic notion that Edith Wharton was a solitary autodidact is one of her most successful fictions." (7)
In publishing the letters from Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann, Irene Goldman-Price's My Dear Governess provides future scholars with dissertation, article, book, and conference topics. Goldman-Price has transcribed edited and annotated 134 out of the 135 letters written by Wharton to Bahlmann between 1874-when Bahlmann was twenty-five and Wharton twelve-to 1916-when Bahlmann died at sixty-seven and Wharton was fifty-four. (She only omits a lunch invitation.) In so doing, Goldman-Price provides us with a new perspective on Wharton and an introduction to Bahlmann; corrections of facts and assumptions about both; and incisive observations about the worlds of the two women in her Introduction and commentaries about the letters within the chapters. Reading My Dear Governess gives us' the privilege and pleasure of being transported into the worlds of both Anna Bahlmann and Edith Wharton.
In her Preface, Goldman-Price enumerates two goals in publishing Wharton's letters to Bahlmann: to provide an accurate, annotated transcription of the letters and to tell the story of Wharton's "hitherto obscure governess and companion" (x). She explains how Bahimann's papers came to auction in 2009, the documentation gaps they fill in Wharton's life, and the information they provide about Bahimann's biography. Goldman-Price also explains in the Preface the many editing decisions she had to make in transcribing Wharton's letters and the scholarly detective work required to date the letters.
Goldman-Price's Introduction provides captivating background about Anna Catherine Bahlmann, about Wharton's education in the context of her time, and about the relationship of the two women and "its significance to Wharton's life and work" (1). Goldman-Price tells Bahimann's story and discusses possible reasons for Bahimann's absence or slight mention both in Wharton biographies and in her autobiographies, A Backward Glance (1934), "A Little Girl's New York"(1938), and the unpublished "Life and 1." in the process, Goldman-Price points out facts and assumptions about both Bahlmann and Wharton that need correction and reassessment as a result of the letters. They range from small details, for instance, that Bahlmann "forbade the reading of Goethe, who was the governess's favorite...