New Books Brooke Astor And Edith Wharton
But Astor, now 105 and out of the public eye, isn’t remembered for her books but for her philanthropy and her gilded name. As Frances Kiernan’s gracious new biography, “The Last Mrs. Astor,” makes abundantly clear, Edith Wharton wasn’t so much her role model—Wharton could have invented her. Brooke Russell Kuser Marshall Astor was a classic Wharton heroine—a vivacious girl from a family with manners but no money, who married well and then married better....