Background

Edith Wharton was born on January 24, 1862 in New York City, the youngest of three children and the only daughter of George Frederic and Lucretia Stevens (Rhinelander) Jones. She came of old and distinguished American stock; indeed, when Washington Irving, sixty years earlier, wrote of the Hudson River as bordered by the "stately towers of the Joneses, the Schermerhorns and the Rhinelanders" he was enumerating her principal ancestors. Others were Pendletons, Gallatins, and Ledyards. Her maternal grandfather, Gen. Ebenezer Stevens, served under Lafayette in the defeat of Cornwallis at Yorktown. Her father's inheritance enabled him to live, as she once put it, "a life of leisure and amiable hospitality, " though to make his funds go farther he took his family for long sojourns abroad. Edith Jones grew to maturity in a small, wealthy society, an old aristocracy that came to feel itself threatened by the new industrialism. She later characterized her group as having "a blind dread of innovation, an instinctive shrinking from responsibility. " But she was of this tight little world, with its splendid decencies, its stratified codes, its tradition of elegance, and its brownstone mansions, soon to be fenced in by skyscrapers. More than any other American novelist, Edith Wharton became the authentic historian of this society. She was reared, too, in a family circle distinctively masculine. Her two brothers were grown men while she was still a child, and she was deeply attached to her father, of whom she drew an intimate portrait in her memoirs. The tone she adopted toward her mother in the same volume was one of tender tolerance of her weakness for fashionable clothes and society life. Perhaps this male circle framing her childhood caused her in later life to seek a similar frame and to surround herself as she did with distinguished men. It was said of her that she added a man's strength to the sympathy and solicitude of a woman and a man's organizing power to a woman's interest in dress and decor, and Henry James, her friend of later years, said that in her novels the "masculine conclusion" tended "so to crown the feminine observation. "

Education

Edith Jones never went to school or college, education being in her patrician world but a polishing process and a preparation for marriage. Yet no other eligible debutante ever learned so much and so well from her governesses and tutors. During the family's long residences abroad she read widely and acquired fluency in French, German, and Italian.

Career

When the family was in America, summers were spent at Newport, in a big house looking on the bay. Edith scribbled from the first. She used to tell how she read her first venture in story-telling to her mother, a story which began with Mrs. Brown saying to Mrs. Tompkins, "If only I had known you were going to call I could have tidied up the drawing-room. " To which Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander rejoined: "Drawing-rooms are always tidy. " In the world of Edith Wharton drawing-rooms were always tidy, and certainly her later interest in the decoration of houses, in the grandeur and repose of Italian villas, and in the creation of perfect gardens, stemmed from her mother's acute sense of order. What she was to discover for herself, however, was that life had a way of blundering into the tidiest of drawing-rooms. In Lenox, Massachussets Mrs. Wharton designed "The Mount, " one of the group of splendid houses with which her name is associated. Here she drew to herself a small but distinguished social and literary group. However, because of Wharton's poor health (she described his condition in her memoirs as "the creeping darkness of neurasthenia"), they increasingly traveled abroad in England or Italy. By 1907she and her husband had established themselves in the large apartment at No. 53 Rue de Varenne in Paris that was to be her home for many years. Although she had had some verses privately printed in Newport as early as 1878, when she was sixteen, and had published a few poems in the Atlantic Monthly soon afterwards through the good offices of Longfellow, Mrs. Wharton's first fiction did not appear until she was thirty. Her first book was The Decoration of Houses, written in collaboration with Ogden Codman, Jr. , and published in 1897. It is said that she turned seriously to writing upon the advice of her physician and as a way of channeling nervous energy that had brought her to the verge of a breakdown. In 1899 she brought out her first collection of tales, The Greater Inclination. This in a sense marked her final breaking away from the boundaries of her society, for that society regarded a career in letters as a serious breach of conformity, if not a rude descent into bohemia. A long historical novel followed, The Valley of Decision, set in eighteenth-century Italy. Published in 1902, it was dedicated to one of her early friends and masters, the French novelist Paul Bourget. It was with her second novel, however, The House of Mirth (1905), that Edith Wharton found a wide public and her major subject: the fixed aristocratic American society which in reality cannot remain fixed because it is destroyed by its own rigidity; which finds its values of elegance and perfection diluted by an industrial-mercantile class; a society in which the individual who wishes to escape cannot do so because he is of it, molded beyond change and beyond escape. Her penetrating analysis of her own caste continued in a vein of sharp irony and caricature in The Custom of the Country (1913), one of her most vigorous works, and in a nostalgic mood in The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she received a Pulitzer Prize. In the same mood she wrote four novelettes under the common title of Old New York (1924), the best known of which is The Old Maid, successfully dramatized in 1935. To this group belong also the late novels, The Mother's Recompense (1925), Twilight Sleep (1927), Hudson River Bracketed (1929), and The Gods Arrive (1932). Molded in the tradition of George Eliot and Flaubert and her American predecessor Henry James, these novels had in them a prophetic vein and a high moral vision, essentially tragic. "No other American aristocrat, " one critic observed, "has addressed the members of his class in such a mood. " What that mood was, Edith Wharton cogently explained in her later reminiscences. The value of a subject for a novelist, she wrote, "depends almost wholly on what the author sees in it, and how deeply he is able to see into it. There it was before me, in all its flatness and futility, asking to be dealt with as the theme most available to my hand, since I had been steeped in it from infancy. A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implications lie in its power of debasing people and ideals. " Other works, while partaking of her central theme, touched as well the international theme first developed by Henry James - the contrast of foreign and domestic manners. Outstanding examples were the early Madame de Treymes (1907), The Reef (1912), which James praised for its "fine asperity, " and The Glimpses of the Moon (1922). But where James probed these contrasts in manners ever more deeply on a psychological level, Mrs. Wharton remained close to the actual data she found in the drawing-rooms at home and abroad. Distinct from all her other work in background and method, but not in underlying theme, are her two novels of New England, Ethan Frome (1911) and Summer (1917). The first, in its sparse realism, its granite-like, solitary winter setting, tells of a large nature harnessed to a mean spirit. Ethan Frome is not only frustrated in love; so cruelly has he been treated by the fates that he must be frustrated as well in his attempt to seek death. Thus he is doomed to a life of both physical and spiritual confinement. The second New England novel is substantially the same in theme; only the season has changed. Summer has never had the popularity of its predecessor, but it is a tightly told story of a girl who cannot rise above her environment, and Mrs. Wharton herself deemed it the better of the two. Together with a third and briefer tale, "The Bunner Sisters, " these novels show Mrs. Wharton empathizing with individuals in environments wholly different from her own, and as a result they possess a certain factitiousness. But the personal equations remain unchanged: pursuit by the Eumenides, frustration, the individual trapped and isolated with all avenues of escape sealed. The more than half a hundred volumes Mrs. Wharton saw through the press during her writing years include a substantial number of collections of short stories, as well as volumes of travel, essays, and criticism, and two collections of verse, Artemis to Actae (1909) and Twelve Poems (1926). Notable among her collections of tales are The Descent of Man and Other Stories (1904), Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910), Xingu and Other Stories (1916), Here and Beyond (1926), and Certain People (1930). She had a distinct command of the shorter form and preferred the sharply framed anecdote, the ironic moment, to the "slice of life. " Many of her tales suffer, however, from too close an adherence to the formula popular at the end of the nineteenth century, that of the sudden twist, the coup de théâtre. Her nonfictional writings include Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904), Italian Backgrounds (1905), A Motor-Flight Through France (1908), French Ways and Their Meanings (1919), and In Morocco (1920). The first World War engaged her distinct talents for organization and her boundless sympathies. She founded a committee of aid for French war orphans, was a moving spirit in the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps in France, and associated herself with a large number of war charities. In 1915 she published Fighting France, From Dunkerque to Belfort, describing her visits to the front. With Walter Berry, an international jurist and an old friend of her youth with whom she spent much time during and after the war, she visited hospitals and served on many committees. In 1918 she published a long war story, The Marne, and in 1923 A Son at the Front. For her war work France made her a chevalier (later an officer) of the Legion of Honor and Belgium a chevalier of the Order of Leopold. Edith Wharton's writings fall into two distinct periods. Most critics have agreed that her best work was done during the years preceding 1914 and that her later work is but an echo of it. Three explanations have been offered for this decline. Those close to Mrs. Wharton say that she did her best to produce "potboilers" capable of publication in large-circulation magazines in order to earn large sums for the charities to which she committed herself after the war. Edmund Wilson, however, has suggested that she was "a brilliant example of the writer who relieves an emotional strain by denouncing his generation, " and that, when that strain had been relieved, her writing was no longer a personal necessity: thus blandness and nostalgia replaced the acerbity of her earlier social criticism. Her biographer, Percy Lubbock, believed that Walter Berry, a man of "a dry and narrow and supercilious temper, " had the effect of shutting Mrs. Wharton's mind "in a box" and contributed to the "doom of an imagination that alights on sterile ground. " Whichever reason is right - and probably all three contributed - there is agreement that the Edith Wharton of The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and Ethan Frome will endure, rather than the writer of the later fictions. Of her other friends, more literary and artistic than Berry, one could compile a long and imposing list, beginning with Charles Eliot Norton and ending with Bernard Berenson. The name most often invoked is that of Henry James, whose influence upon her has been perhaps exaggerated, although she was in certain distinct respects - choice of theme, moral attitude, interest in technique - a disciple. How much James's technical innovations interested her may be gathered from The Writing of Fiction, which she published in 1925, a decade after his death. Theirs was not a long friendship. They met in 1904, twelve years before he died and at a time when his major work was behind him. They became fast friends, visiting with each other on both sides of the Channel, but the friendship had deeper meaning for Mrs. Wharton than for James, so deep indeed that at one moment, seeking to help his morale when he complained of reduced royalties, she had Scribner's divert a substantial sum from her own to James's account. She was a friend and an admirer of President Theodore Roosevelt; she knew among French diplomats Cambon, Jusserand, Paléologue, Chambrun, and French writers ranging from André Gide to Cocteau and the critic Charles du Bos. She was a welcome figure in the great houses of England. Among her American intimates during the late years were Gaillard Lapsley, a Harvard graduate who became a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a friend of A. E. Housman - a friendship shared by Mrs. Wharton. Lapsley was named her literary executor and edited her unfinished novel, The Buccaneers, published posthumously. In her rather dispassionate memoirs, written between 1931 and 1934, she describes her many friendships among the circle of Howard Sturgis at Qu'Acre in England, which she frequented with Henry James. Her last years were divided between her two homes, the Pavillon Colombe at St. Brice-sous-forêt, just outside Paris, and Sainte-Claire Le Château at Hyères. In both she practised her finished hospitality to an ever-dwindling circle of friends. She died at St. Brice of an apoplectic stroke and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Versailles next to the grave to which she had committed, a decade earlier, the ashes of Walter Berry. At her request a marble headstone was placed on her grave bearing the words O crux spes unica.

Achievements

• Wharton combined an insider's view of American aristocracy with a powerful prose style. Her novels and short stories realistically portrayed the lives and morals of the late nineteenth century, an era of decline and faded wealth. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1921, the first woman to receive this honor. Wharton was acquainted with many of the well-known people of her day, both in America and in Europe, including President Theodore Roosevelt.

Works

More photos

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  • Old New York

    (The four short novels in this collection by the author of...)

  • Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural)

    (Traumatised by ghost stories in her youth, Pulitzer Prize...)

  • The Decoration of Houses (Dover Architecture)

    ( Thousands of books on interior design have come and gon...)

  • Novels: The House of Mirth / The Reef / The Custom of the Country / The Age of Innocence (Library of America Edith Wharton Edition)

    (The four novels in this Library of America volume show Wh...)

  • Edith Wharton: The Custom of the Country

    (Highly acclaimed at its publication in 1913, The Custom o...)

  • Summer

    (A young girl from a rural New England town longs to escap...)

  • The Age of Innocence

    (The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton's twelfth novel, in...)

  • Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth

    (The House of Mirth (1905), by Edith Wharton, is a novel a...)

  • Ethan Frome (Dover Thrift Editions)

    ( Perhaps the best-known and most popular of Edith Wharto...)

  • book

Connections

She was married at twenty-three, in 1885, to Edward Wharton, a wealthy Bostonian thirteen years her senior. The marriage ended in divorce in 1913, and a few years later Wharton died.

Father:

George Frederic Jones

Mother:

Lucretia Stevens (Rhinelander) Jones

Spouse:

Edward Wharton

References

• Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life: An Illustrated Biography
• Edith Wharton: A Biography
• Edith Wharton
• Edith Wharton at Home: Life at the Mount
• The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton