"High-flying Harley-Davidson executive Shelley Paxton had an enviable life by most measures - money, travel, excitement. Yet the trappings of success hid a growing discontent, which spiraled into addiction, divorce and despair before a long-overdue break forced her to face all the fears and dreams she'd been ignoring. She left a 26-year corporate career and took a "Soulbattical" - a deeply personal journey to reconnect with her true purpose and deepest...

Biographer Lee gives us a new Edith Wharton--tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction. Born in 1862, Wharton escaped the suffocating fate of the well-born female, traveled adventurously in Europe and eventually settled in France. She developed a forceful literary professionalism and thrived in a luminous society that included Bernard Berenson, Aldous Huxley and most famously Henry James, who here emerges more as peer than...