In the spring of 1907, a few weeks after Edith Wharton had met Morton Fullerton in Paris, she described him to a mutual friend as 'very intelligent, but slightly mysterious, I think'. Eight years later, by which time her passionate affair with Fullerton was long over, Henry James, in one of his last letters to her, confirmed her first thoughts about the man who had fascinated them both. 'WMF . . . is the most inscrutable of men - he will never pose long enough for the Camera of Identification.'

LRB 8 March 2001 | PDF Download