Wharton, Edith

Wharton, Edith (1862–1937), novelist, feminist.Born in New York City to socially prominent parents who expected her only to marry and entertain, Edith even as a child announced her determination to write. She married the banker Edward Wharton in 1885. They lived in Manhattan and traveled widely, but Wharton chafed at this “comfortable” life: Men could use their intelligence, pursue careers, even create art; women were confined to the domestic realm and, even worse, stifled by sexual ignorance and the notion that no “decent” woman could enjoy sex.

Longing for escape, Wharton resumed writing and studied decorative arts and landscape architecture. The Decoration of Houses, coauthored with the architect Ogden Codman, appeared in 1897. Persevering despite a disabling emotional crisis in 1898, she designed and built The Mount, an estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, in 1901–1902. The House of Mirth, a brilliant novel examining contemporary New York society, appeared in 1905.

Settling in Paris, Wharton found a friend and mentor in Henry James and in 1908 had a brief but intense relationship with the American journalist Morton Fullerton. She divorced her husband in 1913. These years brought a dazzling series of novels: Ethan Frome (1911), a stark tale of thwarted love in backwoods New England; The Reef (1912); and The Custom of the Country (1913). Marshaling her considerable organizational skills during World War I, Wharton raised and disbursed money as head of a vast relief agency and wrote journalistic accounts of the conflict, urging America to join the Allied cause. France awarded her the Legion of Honor in 1916. Her novel Summer (1917) was followed in 1920 by the Pulitzer Prize–winning Age of Innocence, a somewhat elegiac story of New York society in the 1870s. Never explicitly autobiographical, her work nonetheless drew powerfully upon her own stifling upbringing and unhappy marriage to a chronically unfaithful husband in portraying society's mutilation of women's lives. Moving to Pavillon Colombe, an eighteenth‐century estate outside Paris, she continued to write until her death, exploring taboo sexual themes in some late, unpublished work.
See also Feminism; Gilded Age; Literature: Civil War to World War I; Sexual Morality and Sex Reform.

Bibliography

R.W.B. Lewis , Edith Wharton: A Biography, 1975.
Cynthia Griffin Wolff , A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, 1995.

Cynthia Griffin Wolff