(The four novellas collected here, by the Pulitzer Prize-w...)
The four novellas collected here, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Age of Innocence, brilliantly capture New York of the 1840s, '50s, '60s, and '70s. Originally published in 1924, this outstanding quartet includes False Dawn, about a rocky father/son relationship; The Old Maid, the best known of the four, in which a young woman's hidden illegitimate child is adoted by her best friend, with devastating results; The Spark, involving a young man and his moral rehabilitation -- "sparked" by a chance encounter with Walt Whitman; and New Year's Day, an O. Henryesque tale of a married woman suspected of adultery. Each reveals the codes and customs that ruled society of the time, drawn with the perspicacious eye and style that is uniquely Edith Wharton's.
Pocket Books' enriched Classics present the great works of world literature enhanced for the contemporary reader. This valume reprints the orginal New York Times Book Review feature on Old New York, a piece that helps fix the stories in the contemporary critical landscape. Also included are critical perspectives, suggestions for further reading, and a visual essay composed of authentic period illustrations and photographs.
(The House of Mirth (1905), by Edith Wharton, is a novel a...)
The House of Mirth (1905), by Edith Wharton, is a novel about New York socialite Lily Bart attempting to secure a husband and a place in rich society. It is one of the first novels of manners in American literature.
Edith Wharton, née Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer.
Background
Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones to George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander on January 24, 1862, in New York during the Civil War. She had two older brothers. Her mother was a cold and uncaring woman and Edith had a troubled relationship with her.
Her family travelled frequently, and she made her first journey to Europe at the age of four in 1866. Over the next six years, the family visited France, Italy, Germany, and Spain, and as a result of her travels, she became fluent in French, German, and Italian.
Education
She received her primary education from tutors and governesses, and displayed an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Unsatisfied with the education she received, she started reading books from her father’s library on her own.
Career
She began writing short stories when she was six but never received any encouragement from her mother. So she decided to just write poetry. She would struggle for several years as a writer before finally receiving the acclaim she deserved.
She started writing earnestly only after marriage to Edward Wharton and submitted three poems for publication in 1889 of which one was selected.
Her struggles as a writer continued though she never gave up. During this time she became friends with people like Henry James, Egerton Winthrop, Walter Berry, William Brownell and Edward Burlingame who recognized her skills and encouraged her to write.
Edith Wharton finally found her first big success in 1905 with the publication of the novel ‘The House of Mirth’. The story of a well-born but poor woman of the high society of New York City appealed to the readers and became a bestseller.
She wrote many other novels in rapid succession and found even greater success with ‘Ethan Frome’, a novel published in 1911. Set in the fictitious town of Starkfield, Massachusetts, it told the tragic tale of an unhappily married farmer who falls in love with another woman. Elmer Davis once called the book "the last great American love story".
She was living in Paris when the World War I broke out. She opened a workroom for unemployed women and started a sewing business which thrived over time. When Germans invaded Belgium and the Belgian refugees flooded Paris, she helped to set up the American Hostels for Refugees.
Throughout the war, she remained actively involved in the charitable efforts for refugees, the injured, the unemployed, and the displaced. She collected more than $100, 000 on behalf of the refugees and organized the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee, which gave shelter to nearly 900 Belgian refugees.
She also continued writing throughout the war, publishing novels, short stories, and poems, as well as reporting for the ‘New York Times’. The most important of her works in the war period were the romantic novel ‘Summer’, the war novella, ‘The Marne’, and ‘A Son at the Front’.
In 1920, she published her most famous novel, ‘The Age of Innocence’. The novel explores the theme of moral values prevalent in the 1870s New York society. It became her best known work and earned her much acclaim.
Edith Wharton died of a stroke on August 11, 1937, and is buried next to her long-time friend, Walter Berry, in the American Cemetery in Versailles, France.
Achievements
She was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer who was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. She was best known for her stories and novels about the upper-class society into which she was born, and thus well-acquainted with. She was born into a wealthy family in New York City during the Civil War.
She published her first book in 1899 and it did not take her long to establish herself as a distinguished writer of short stories and novels. She received several honors for her writing including the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature.
Quotations:
"The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive. "
"One can remain alive . .. if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity interested in big things and happy in small ways. "
"How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be American before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?"
"Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions. "
"The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!"
"The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching searchlights. "
Connections
Edith Wharton married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, who was 12 years her senior, in 1885. He was a well-established banker and a sportsman. The initial years of their marriage were happy and the couple travelled together a lot. Her husband then started suffering from acute depression which took a toll on their married life.
She began an affair with Morton Fullerton, a journalist, in 1908.
She divorced Edward after 28 years of marriage in 1913.
