I Dreamed Of Africa

In golden Marrakesh, a solo sojourn inspired by Edith Wharton’s classic travel memoir, “In Morocco”, unfolds in adventureready khakis, creams and camels.

- Thessaly La Force

IN 1920, EDITH Wharton published “In Morocco”, a detailed account of her time spent travelling through the region with Hubert Lyautey, who served as the resident general of French Morocco from 1912 to 1925. By the end of the First World War, Morocco was still a colonial entity, divided between French and Spanish powers (the country would claim independence in 1956). There were no English-language guidebooks and few accounts from those who had travelled past the international port city of Tangier (“frowsy, familiar Tangier, that every tourist has visited for the last forty years,” Wharton complained in her book). It’s difficult to imagine a Morocco so unknown to such fashionable Western society — Wharton, who kept company with dukes and duchesses and Teddy Roosevelt, and who ran in the same circles (and traveled through much of Europe) with her dear friend, the American writer Henry James, was not writing about the same place that has become so well exoticised since by everyone from Yves Saint Laurent to Marella Agnelli.

Few women travelled as Wharton did, and even fewer wrote about their journeys with such clarity and beauty — then or now. She is well known for her novels, including “The Age of Innocence” (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921) and “The House of Mirth” (1905) — both grand, moral tales of the elite echelons of New York society during the Gilded Age — but Wharton, who died in 1937, has often been, as the biographer Hermione Lee writes in The New York Review of Books, “downgraded as a reactionary, an antimodernist, a rich old school genteel snob and a minor female version of Henry James.” In the last 50 years, much more attention has been given to the parts of Wharton’s life that don’t fit as neatly into her larger successes: her lesser-known fiction; her work on interiors, landscaping and architecture; and her travel writing.