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Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American novelist, short story writer and designer.
dith Newbold Jones was born to parents George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander. She had two brothers, Frederic Rhinelander and Henry Edward. The saying "Keeping up with the Joneses" is said to refer to the family of her father. She combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous and incisive novels and short stories.
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In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats; but they were not sown more than once.
Ch. 31
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
Ch. 34
There's no such thing as old age; there is only sorrow.
"A First Word"
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
The Writing of Fiction (1925), ch. I
After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them & invent others that (one is fairly sure) don't exist — or exist in a less measure.
I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, & consequently suggests more tugging, & pain, & diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.
Encyclopedia
Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American novelist, short story writer and designer.
Early life
Edith Newbold Jones was born to parents George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander. She had two brothers, Frederic Rhinelander and Henry Edward. The saying "Keeping up with the Joneses" is said to refer to the family of her father. She combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous and incisive novels and short stories. As such, she was well-acquainted with many of her era's literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt.
In 1885, at 23 years of age, she married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, who was twelve years her senior. From a well-established Boston family, he was a sportsman and a gentleman of her social class and shared her love of travel, although they had little in common intellectually. He began spending money on younger women and this began to take a toll on Wharton's mental health. They divorced in 1913, after she suffered a nervous breakdown and was confined to a hospital. She then moved to Europe. Edith and Edward were married for 28 years, though she later called the marriage her "greatest mistake."
In addition to her famous novels, Wharton wrote at least 85 short stories, and was also a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste-maker of her time. She authored several influential books, including her first published work,The Decoration of Houses, co-authored by Ogden Codman, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens.
Literary success
In 1902 she built The Mount, her estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, which survives today as the supreme example of her design principles. The house and its gardens have been extensively restored and are open to the public from May through October although, as of the end of March 2008, the house museum is threatened with foreclosure. There, Edith Wharton wrote several of her novels, including The House of Mirth (1905), the first of many chronicles of the true nature of old New York, and entertained the cream of American literary society, including her close friend, the novelist Henry James.
Although she spent many months traveling in Europe nearly every year, The Mount was her primary residence until 1911. When she was there, as well as traveling abroad, Wharton was usually driven to her appointments by her longtime chauffeur and friend Charles Cook, a native of nearby South Lee, Massachusetts. When her marriage deteriorated, however, she decided to move permanently to France, living initially at 58 Rue de Varenne, Paris, in an apartment that belonged to George Washington Vanderbilt II.
Helped by her influential connections to the French government, primarily Walter Berry (then president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris), she was one of the few foreigners in France who was allowed travel to the front lines. Wharton described those trips in the series of articles Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort.
Throughout the war she worked tirelessly in charitable efforts for refugees, and, in 1916, was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in recognition of her commitment to the displaced. The scope of her relief work included setting up work rooms for unemployed Frenchwomen, organizing concerts to provide work for musicians, opening tuberculosis hospitals, and founding the American Hostels for Belgian refugees. In 1916, Wharton edited The Book of the Homeless, composed of writings, art, and musical scores by almost every major contemporary European artist. When World War I ended in 1918 she abandoned the fashionable urban address for the delights of the country at the Pavillon Colombe in nearby Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt.
Wharton was a committed supporter of French imperialism, describing herself as a "rabid imperialist". After World War I, she travelled to Morocco as the guest of the Resident General, General Hubert Lyautey, and wrote a book In Morocco, about her experiences. Wharton's writing on her Moroccan travels is full of praise for the French administration and for Lyautey and his wife in particular.
After the war she divided her time between Paris and Hyères, in Provence, where she finished The Age of Innocence in 1920.
In 1927 She purchased a villa, Castel Sainte-Claire, on the site of an 17th century convent, in the hills above the city of Hyères in Provence, where she lived during the winters and springs. She called the villa "Sainte-Claire du Chateau" and filled the garden with cactus and subtropical plants. She returned to the U.S. only once after the war, to receive an honorary doctorate degree from Yale University in 1923.
Later life
The Age of Innocence (1920) won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. She spoke flawless French as well as several other languages and many of her books were published in both French and English.
Wharton was friend and confidante to many gifted intellectuals of her time: Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide were all guests of hers at one time or another. Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark were valued friends as well, and she was the godmother of Clark's second son, Colin (1932–2002), who wrote the book The Prince, the Showgirl and Me about his work as third assistant director of the film The Prince and the Showgirl. Her meeting with F. Scott Fitzgerald is described by the editors of her letters as "one of the better-known failed encounters in the American literary annals". She was also good friends with Theodore Roosevelt.
In 1934 Wharton's autobiography A Backward Glance was published. In the view of Judith E. Funston, in the entry she wrote for American National Biography about Wharton, "What is most notable about A Backward Glance, however, is what it does not tell: her criticism of Lucretia Jones [her mother], her difficulties with Teddy, and her affair with Morton Fullerton, which did not come to light until her papers, deposited in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, were opened in 1968."
Wharton continued writing until her death, lying in bed and dropping each finished page to the floor to be collected when she finished. On August 11, 1937, in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France, she suffered a stroke and died at the age of 75. She is buried in the American Cemetery in Versailles, France.
Wharton's last novel, The Buccaneers, was unfinished at the time of her death. Marion Mainwaring finished the story after carefully studying the notes and synopsis Wharton had previously written. The novel was published in 1938 (unfinished version) and 1993 (Mainwaring's completion).
Death
She died in 1937 at the domaine Le Pavillon Colombe, her eighteenth-century house on Rue de Montmorency in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, in the then existing département of Seine-et-Oise (78), but now in Val d'Oise (95). The street is today called Rue Edith Warthon.
Writing style
Many of Wharton's novels are characterized by a subtle use of dramatic irony. Having grown up in upper-class pre-World War I society, Wharton became one of its most astute critics. In such works as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence she employed both humor and profound empathy to describe the lives of New York's upper-class and the vanishing of their world in the early years of the 20th century. In contrast, she used a harsher tone in her novel Ethan Frome to convey the atmosphere of lower-class rural Massachusetts.
In popular culture
In The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Edith Wharton (Clare Higgins) travels across North Africa with Indiana Jones in Chapter 16, Tales of Innocence.
Edith Wharton is mentioned in the HBO television series "Entourage" in the third season's thirteenth episode: Vince is handed a screenplay for Wharton's The Glimpses of the Moon by Amanda, his new agent, for a film to be directed by Sam Mendes. In the same episode, period films of Wharton's work are lampooned by agent Ari Gold, who says that all her stories are "about a guy who likes a girl, but he can't have sex with her for five years, because those were the times!" Carla Gugino, who plays Amanda, was the protagonist of the BBC-PBS adaptation of The Buccaneers (1995), one of her early jobs.
A musical version of The Glimpses of the Moon was presented in New York City in the Algonquin Hotel's Oak Room in early 2008.
Suzanne Vega's seventh studio release Beauty & Crime contains a song named "Edith Wharton's Figurines."
"Edith Wharton's Journey" is a radio adaptation, for the NPR series Radio Tales, of the short story "A Journey" from Edith Wharton's collection The Greater Inclination.
Books
- Verses, 1878 (poems)
- The Decoration of Houses, 1897 (non-fiction)
- The Greater Inclination, 1899 (stories)
- The Touchstone, 1900 (novel)
- Crucial Instances, 1901 (stories)
- The Valley of Decision, 1902 (novel)
- Sanctuary, 1903 (novel)
- The Descent of Man and Other Stories, 1903 (stories)
- Italian Villas and Their Gardens, 1904 (non-fiction)
- The House of Mirth, 1905 (novel)
- Italian Backgrounds, 1905 (non-fiction)
- Madame de Treymes, 1907 (novel)
- The Fruit of the Tree, 1907 (novel)
- The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories, 1908 (stories)
- A Motor-Flight Through France, 1908 (non-fiction, travel)
- Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse, 1909 (poems)
- Tales of Men and Ghosts, 1910 (stories)
- Ethan Frome, 1911 (novel)
- The Reef, 1912 (novel)
- The Custom of the Country, 1913 (novel)
- Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort, 1915 (non-fiction, war)
- Xingu and Other Stories, 1916 (stories)
- The Book of the Homeless, 1916 (editor)
- Summer, 1917 (novel)
- The Marne, 1918 (novel)
- French Ways and Their Meaning, 1919 (non-fiction)
- The Age of Innocence, 1920 (novel, pulitzer prize winner)
- In Morocco, 1920 (non-fiction, travel)
- The Glimpses of the Moon, 1922 (novel)
- A Son at the Front, 1923 (novel)
- Old New York, 1924 (novel)
- The Mother's Recompense, 1925 (novel)
- The Writing of Fiction, 1925 (non-fiction, essays on writing)
- Here and Beyond, 1926 (stories)
- Twelve Poems, 1926 (poems)
- Twilight Sleep, 1927 (novel)
- The Children, 1928 (novel)
- Hudson River Bracketed, 1929 (novel)
- Certain People, 1930 (stories)
- The Gods Arrive, 1932 (novel)
- Human Nature, 1933 (stories)
- A Backward Glance, 1934 (autobiography)
- The World Over, 1936 (stories)
- Ghosts, 1937 (stories)
- The Buccaneers, 1938 (novel)
- Fast and Loose, 1938 (first novel, written in 1876-1877)
In addition to penning several respected novels, Wharton produced a wealth of short stories and is particularly well regarded for her ghost stories.
Additional publications
- Novels (R.W.B. Lewis, ed.) (, 1986) ISBN 978-0-94045031-8. Includes The House of Mirth, The Reef, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence.
- The Letters of Edith Wharton (R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, eds.) ISBN 0-02-034400-7, particularly the editorial introductions to the chronological sections, especially for 1902–07, 1911–14, 1919–27, and 1928–37, and the editorial footnotes to the letter to F.S. Fitzgerald (June 8, 1925)
- Novellas and Other Writings (Cynthia Griffin Wolff, ed.) (, 1990) ISBN 978-0-94045053-0, which contains her autobiography, A Backward Glance.
- Collected Stories 1891-1910 (Maureen Howard, ed.) (, 2001) ISBN 978-1-88301193-2
- Collected Stories 1911-1937 (Maureen Howard, ed.) (, 2001) ISBN 978-1-88301194-9
- Selected Poems (Louis Auchincloss, ed.) (, 2005) ISBN 978-1-93108286-0
- Twilight Sleep (R.F.Godfrey, ed.) ISBN 0-684-83964-4
Further reading
- Hermione Lee (2007) Edith Wharton, Chatto & Windus, ISBN-10 0701166657 (UK)/Knopf (USA forthcoming)
- R.W.B. Lewis (1975) Edith Wharton: A Biography, Harper & Row.
- Cynthia Griffin Wolff (1977) A Feast of Words
- Shari Benstock (1994) No Gifts From Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton
External links
- at the Lilly Library, Indiana University
- . A review of Hermione Lee's Edith Wharton in the , February 9, 2007.
- includes links to all Wharton's works legally available on the web, links to resources, searchable texts, bibliographies, queries and replies, and other materials.
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