Edith Wharton's alternative reality

From Rebecca Mead's piece in the June 29, 2009 New Yorker about Wharton's early letters to her governess, Anna Bahlman (above, one written when she was 14): "In 'The Age of Innocence' Newland Archer, imagining an alternative existence to the one that convention has pressed upon him, is described as having 'built up within himself a kind of sanctuary' of 'his secret thoughts and longings.' Wharton goes on:"
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Little by little it became the scene of his real life, and of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes to bumping into the furniture of his room.

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"The central figure in Archer's imagined reality is the Countess Olenska, with whom a future is impossible; but as R. W. B. Lewis points out in an essay on the novel, Archer's predicament echoes passages in Wharton's autobiography in which she notes the divergence between the social life she was obliged by her upbringing to conduct, and her secret, passionate creative life. 'There was in me a secret retreat where I wished no one to intrude, or at least no one whom I had yet encountered,' she wrote. 'Words and cadences haunted it like song-birds in a magic wood, and I wanted to be able to steal away and listen when they called.'"

[From an 1889 letter, when she was 27:] "... she wrote... "I don't believe there is any greater blessing than that of being pierced through & through by the splendour or sweetness of words, & no one who is not transfixed by 'Die Sonne tönt nach alter Weise,' or 'thick as Autumnal leaves that strew the brooks,' has known half the joy of living. Don't you agree with me? — I wouldn't take a kingdom for it.'"