# "Life and I"

## 1932

In 1932, Edith Wharton began to write her memoirs, completing a fifty-page manuscript called "Life and I," before abandoning this particular version of her early life. She may have felt that the narrative was too outspoken about her first erotic stirrings, as in the page here displayed. The autobiography she went on to write, *A Backward Glance* (1934), contains no such passages. "Life and I" gives further examples of Edith's timid erotic curiosity and of her mother's stern refusal to provide a single word of explanation.

From the estate of Mrs. Wharton, 1938

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library