Edith Wharton

Edith Newbold Jones was born on January 24, 1862, in New York City, the third child and only daughter of George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones ^[1]. Both parents belonged to the closed circle of old New York families whose wealth rested on real estate and inherited fortunes rather than new industrial money. The family's social standing was so established that some commentators have linked the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses" to her father's relatives, though the attribution remains uncertain ^[2].

After the Civil War the Joneses spent six years traveling in Europe, and Edith passed portions of her childhood in Rome, Paris, and Germany. She learned French, German, and Italian, and read widely in her father's library at a time when girls of her class received little formal schooling ^[1]. She was educated at home by tutors and governesses, an arrangement typical for daughters of wealthy New York families in the 1860s and 1870s.

Her literary instincts appeared early. She wrote poetry and fiction as a teenager, and in 1878, when she was sixteen, her mother arranged the private printing of a collection of her poems titled Verses ^[3]. A few of her early poems also appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. Society expectations then intervened: she made her formal debut at seventeen, and writing was set aside for the rituals of courtship and marriage that her world demanded.

In 1885, at the age of twenty three, Edith Jones married Edward Robbins Wharton, a Boston banker's son twelve years her senior ^[1]. The couple shared a taste for travel and dogs but little else, and the marriage brought her decades of strain. During its early years she published little, though she continued to read seriously and to sharpen her observations of the society around her.

Her first major success came not in fiction but in design. In 1897 she and the architect Ogden Codman Jr. published The Decoration of Houses, a treatise that rejected cluttered Victorian interiors in favor of classical proportion, simplicity, and architectural coherence ^[4]. The book sold well and remains a landmark in the history of American interior design. Wharton put its principles into practice at The Mount, the house she designed and built in Lenox, Massachusetts, completed in 1902, where she wrote some of her best known fiction and laid out formal gardens of her own devising ^[4].

Her fiction gathered momentum in the same years. A story collection, The Greater Inclination, appeared in 1899, followed by the novella The Touchstone in 1900 and her first full length novel, The Valley of Decision, in 1902 ^[3]. Then came the breakthrough. The House of Mirth, published in 1905, traced the descent of Lily Bart, a beautiful but poor young woman destroyed by the marriage market of fashionable New York. The novel became a bestseller and established Wharton as a major American writer ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Edith Wharton usually meets her through three books: The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), and The Age of Innocence (1920). Ethan Frome, a spare novella set among poor farmers in wintry rural New England, departed from her usual society settings and became one of her most widely taught works ^[2]. The Age of Innocence, written in the aftermath of the First World War, looked back at the New York of the 1870s through the story of Newland Archer, a lawyer torn between his conventional fiancée May Welland and the unconventional Countess Ellen Olenska ^[1].

The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921, making Wharton the first woman to receive the award ^[5]. Among Edith Wharton achievements the Pulitzer is the most cited, but the honors continued. In 1923 Yale University gave her an honorary Doctor of Letters, the first it had awarded to a woman, and in 1930 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters ^[3]. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature on several occasions.

Her output was large and varied. Over her career she published more than forty volumes: novels, novellas, some eighty five short stories, poetry, travel writing, criticism, a war reportage collection, and works on houses and gardens, including Italian Villas and Their Gardens in 1904 ^[3]. Other significant novels include The Custom of the Country (1913), whose ruthless heroine Undine Spragg satirized the new American plutocracy, and The Reef (1912). Her ghost stories, collected across several volumes, retain a devoted readership.

The Wharton marriage deteriorated steadily. Edward Wharton suffered from recurring mental illness, later described by biographers as acute depression with manic episodes, and he mismanaged and misappropriated some of his wife's trust funds ^[2]. Edith Wharton obtained a divorce in Paris in 1913, a step still carrying social stigma for a woman of her background. The couple had no children.

Between roughly 1908 and 1910 she conducted an intense affair with Morton Fullerton, an American journalist working for The Times in Paris. The relationship, documented in letters that surfaced decades after her death, was by her own account the great passion of her life ^[2]. Her closest intellectual companion was the novelist Henry James, whom she met in the 1880s and with whom she maintained a deep friendship until his death in 1916. Her circle also included the art historian Bernard Berenson, the critic Percy Lubbock, and her longtime friend Walter Berry, an international lawyer whose judgment she trusted on literary matters ^[1].

Wharton settled permanently in France in 1911, selling The Mount shortly afterward. She lived first in Paris on the Rue de Varenne, then after the war divided her year between two houses: Pavillon Colombe at Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt north of Paris, and Sainte-Claire du Château at Hyères on the Riviera, where she created celebrated gardens ^[4]. An accomplished and demanding hostess, she organized her days around morning writing in bed, gardening, motoring trips, and a steady flow of guests.

When war broke out in 1914 Wharton stayed in Paris and threw herself into relief work. She organized workrooms for unemployed seamstresses, ran hostels and schools for Belgian and French refugees, and helped care for children evacuated from war zones, raising large sums from American donors ^[5]. She made repeated trips to the front lines and reported what she saw in articles collected as Fighting France in 1915. For these efforts the French government appointed her a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1916, a rare distinction for a foreign woman at the time ^[5].

The postwar decades were commercially her most successful. Magazine serialization and film rights made her wealthy in her own right, and novels such as The Glimpses of the Moon (1922), Twilight Sleep (1927), and The Children (1928) sold strongly even as some critics judged them below her earlier standard ^[3]. Her memoir A Backward Glance appeared in 1934 and remains a primary source on old New York and on her own carefully edited version of her life.

She continued writing almost to the end. Wharton suffered a stroke in the spring of 1937 and died at Pavillon Colombe in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt on August 11, 1937, at the age of seventy five ^[1]. She was buried in the Cimetière des Gonards at Versailles, near the grave of Walter Berry. Her final novel, The Buccaneers, left unfinished, was published posthumously in 1938.

Wharton's reputation dipped after her death, when critics dismissed her as a chronicler of a vanished class, then recovered strongly from the 1970s onward as scholars, including the biographer R. W. B. Lewis, whose 1975 life of Wharton won a Pulitzer Prize, reassessed her range and craft ^[2]. Feminist critics found in Lily Bart and Undine Spragg sharp studies of women's constrained economic choices, and her novels are now fixtures of American literature curricula. Any Edith Wharton biography written today treats her as one of the essential American novelists, not merely a society observer.

Her books have fed a long line of adaptations. Martin Scorsese filmed The Age of Innocence in 1993 with Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer, and The House of Mirth reached the screen in Terence Davies's 2000 version with Gillian Anderson ^[6]. Ethan Frome, The Buccaneers, and several of her stories have also been adapted for film and television.

Physical monuments to her life survive on both sides of the Atlantic. The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts, restored and opened to the public, operates as a cultural center devoted to her work and to the design principles she championed ^[4]. Among the more striking Edith Wharton facts is the durability of her nonfiction: The Decoration of Houses is still read by designers more than a century after publication, and her garden writing continues to influence landscape historians. Her papers, held principally at Yale's Beinecke Library, keep drawing new generations of scholars ^[3].