Born into New York City's upper class in 1862, Edith Jones took her position for granted. Remarkably, unlike her peers, she maintained it not by marriage or inheritance but by her writing.

A good thing, too, for her marriage to Teddy Wharton was a poor one, and her inheritances were meager. Yet, on the strength of her writing income, she owned two homes with gardens in France, fully staffed and richly furnished when she died in 1937.

		"EDITH WHARTON" By Hermione Lee Knopf.($35)

Edith Wharton today is a full-fledged member of the American literary pantheon. Her contributions are an essential part of the country's cultural foundations. "The House of Mirth," "The Custom of the Country," "The Children" and her best-known novels, "The Age of Innocence" and "Ethan Frome," are among the best works of American fiction in the early part of the 20th century.

For readers of the 21st century, her books, not her life, matter most. While that conclusion is not the one Hermione Lee would want us to draw from her 762-page treatment of Wharton's 75 years, it seems to be a fair one to make.

When a book is that long, critics frequently call it "sprawling," but Lee's focus is so narrow, her attention so concentrated on the mundane and trivial, that the best adjective I can offer is "obsessive."

If World War I had not been anything less than a major international catastrophe, I'm afraid Lee would have confined Wharton's years in Paris during that time to her steady accumulation of furniture and steamship tickets.

In fact, the American expatriate was a generous benefactor to the French and Belgian people, one of the few times she extended her hand to any member of the masses she so scorned in America.

Wharton was a snob inside and out and anti-Semitic as well, a fine example of her tight-knit class of WASPs. Their chief concerns were their "cottages" in Newport, R.I., the social season in Manhattan and the proper unions of their sons and daughters.

Wharton was a dutiful participant. Yet she was different, Lee tells us. A lifelong observer of that society, Wharton reported on it from the inside, getting past its physical trappings to expose its soul. Admittedly it's not always a compelling one, usually repressed, stingy with emotion and, at its core, selfish. The writer revealed that spirit in all its petty, unhappy state.

In her few excursions beneath her, Wharton found little joy or happiness among the under-class as well. "Ethan Frome" is a bitter, cruel story of punishment and suffering.

Lee, a Brit who previously wrote 900 pages about Virginia Woolf, is a traditional biographer who seldom rises above the mountain of minutiae culled from letters, diaries and library collections.

She leaves the psychoanalysis to others, preferring to investigate her subject's pets, furs, paintings, friendships and incessant trips to Italy.

There are serious attempts to interpret Wharton's writings, but in Lee's approach, the works come across as just another activity like designing a garden. I never got the sense of what Wharton's writing process was amid the clutter of her overstuffed rooms.

As for her subject's views on society, including Jews and blacks, Lee confines her comments to a few pages among the 762, preferring to prepare a kind of Sotheby's catalog instead of Wharton's possessions. She also assumes that her readers know French, an assumption that can further slow the nearly funereal pace.

Sadly, after reading Hermione Lee's treatment of Edith Wharton, I will need some time before the memory of her dullness passes and I can read the novelist with anticipation again.