WHARTON, EDITH 1862-1937

Novelist

An Elite Upbringing

Edith Wharton, one of the leading American novelists of the 1900s and 1910s, was born Edith Jones to wealthy and conservative parents who were part of New York City's high society. Wharton had the best that money could buy. She was privately tutored, traveled to Europe, and married at the age of twenty-three in 1885 to a member of her family's set, Edward Wharton. However, Wharton disliked playing the role of society matron and hostess in New York City and Newport, Rhode Island, a wealthy summer resort area. A few years into her marriage, she suffered a nervous break-down. Her doctor suggested that Wharton, who had written and had poems published as a child, should take up writing again as a cure for her nerves.

High Society

Wharton's fiction chronicled the manners of New York City society from the 1840s through the 1930s. Her novels and short stories centered on the conflict between an individual's desires and the constraints of social convention. Wharton's public career began when she started to publish her short stories, three collections of which came out in succession: The Greater Inclination (1899), The Touch-stone (1900), and Crucial Instances (1901). Wharton's early writing caught the eye of Henry James, who praised her work for its careful depictions of social situations and its psychological realism. Critics, however, saw her as derivative of James, a criticism that plagued Wharton throughout her career. James and Wharton became fast friends and avid fans of each other's work.

Europe and America

Wharton's yearly travels to Europe shaped much of her fiction. Her first novel, The Valley of Decision (1902), was set in Italy on the eve of the Napoleonic invasion. As Wharton explained to her editor, the novel was an attempt to picture Italy at the end of the eighteenth century "when all the old forms and traditions of court life were still preserved, but the immense intellectual and moral movement of the new regime was at work beneath the surface of things," a description she easily might have applied to the world of her youth. The House of Mirth (1905) brought Wharton critical acclaim. In this novel Wharton offered a scathing and realistic portrait of what she knew best: New York City society. By showing the wealthy as emotionally frivolous, Wharton shed light on the moral crisis besetting the wealthy in a time of social unrest and upheaval. The House of Mirth became a best-seller in 1905 and 1906.

Expatriate

Wharton moved to France in 1907, hoping to find in the exclusive Faubourg Saint-Germain quarter of Paris a literate and sophisticated society she found lacking in America. The same year, Wharton published Madame de Treymes, which explored the conflict between American and French high societies, and The Fruit of the Tree. While living in France, Wharton discovered the joys of automobile touring and wrote some travel pieces about her tours, most notably A Motor-Flight Through France (1908).

Ethan Frome.

Wharton wrote prolifically. She published two volumes of short stories before she published her third novel, Ethan Frome, in 1911 and her fourth, The Reef in 1913. Throughout this period Wharton struggled with the unhappiness of her marriage. Her husband increasingly suffered from neurasthenia, an emotional and psychological condition akin to hysteria. The two had never had much in common, either in terms of interests or worldview. While working on Ethan Frome, Wharton fell in love with an American journalist living in Paris, Morton Fullerton. At the same time, Wharton felt terribly guilty for breaking her marriage vows, which she took seriously. The affair between Wharton and Fullerton was intense and brief, but one of the happiest times of her life. The Reef, written in the wake of her affair, chronicled the tortured frustrations of unrequited love.

World War I

In 1912 Wharton left her husband, who was increasingly incapacitated by his mental illness and who had begun embezzling Wharton's trust fund. After her divorce Wharton traveled in Europe until World War I broke out in 1914. She returned to Paris and threw herself into journalism and war charities, organizing, among other things, a workroom for unemployed seamstresses and finding food and lodging for Belgian refugees. Wharton retold her wartime experiences in Fighting France and The Book of the Homeless, both published in 1915; in the novel A Son at the Fronty written in 1916 and published in 1923; and in The Marne (1918) and in French Ways and Their Meanings (1919).

The Age of Innocence.

In 1920 Wharton published what would become her best-known novel, The Age of Innocence. Set in the old New York City of her youth, the novel explored the European roots of traditional New York City society. Written as the world of civilized manners was giving way to the parties and gin fizzes of the Jazz Age, The Age of Innocence faithfully recounted the social rituals of a class now dead and buried, its attendance at the opera, its formal dinners, betrothal visits, and summers in Newport. The innocence Wharton recalled in her novel was as much about the sexual propriety and financial rectitude of her parents' age as it was about their aversion to the uglier side of life. Wharton won a Pulitzer Prize for the book in 1920.

Later Life

Wharton continued her energetic writing schedule, and by 1925 was considered the grande dame of American letters. She had received an honorary doctorate from Yale University and was consistently named as one of the "twelve greatest women in America." Few reviewers gave her negative reviews, but a handful complained that Wharton had nothing new to say. Between 1925 and her death in 1937 Wharton wrote one book of essays on the craft of fiction, five novels, five volumes of short stories, a volume of poems, and her memoirs.

Sources:

Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton, An Extraordinary Life (New York: Abrams, 1994);

R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).

Wharton, Edith [Newbold Jones] (1862–1937), member of a distinguished New York family, was privately educated in the U.S. and abroad. Her short stories, The Greater Inclination (1899), were followed by The Touchstone (1900), published in England as A Gift from the Grave (1900), which showed the influence of Henry James both in its form as a novelette and in its occupation with ethical values. It is concerned with a man torn between his desire to obtain money to marry the woman he loves and his reluctance to sell the love letters written to him by a celebrated woman. The Valley of Decision (1902), her first long novel, is notable for its depiction of an 18th‐century Italian aristocrat of liberal sympathies. After another novelette, Sanctuary (1903), she wrote The House of Mirth (1905), the story of a New York girl whose attempts to make a brilliant marriage lead to ostracism because she breaks conventional standards. As in Henry James, her study of the effects of false values here rises above the level of the novel of manners to become tragedy.

In 1907 Mrs. Wharton moved to France, which she made the scene of her novelette Madame de Treymes (1907), contrasting French and American concepts of honor. Her next novel, The Fruit of the Tree (1907), set with a background of a great American woolen mill, is concerned with the inner conflict of a business executive between the demands of his work and those of the two women he loves. Ethan Frome (1911), a sharply etched novelette concerning simple New England people, is considered her greatest tragic story, and shows a marked departure from the ironic contemplation of aristocratic mores and highly complex characters. Yet, as in The House of Mirth, the central problem is that of the barriers imposed by local conventions upon an individual whose happiness depends on rising above them. From the fine simplicity of this work the author returned to complex treatments of moral and social conflicts in The Reef (1912) and The Custom of the Country (1913), stories of Americans in France. The latter is an international novel of manners, contrasting the background of an American social climber with the standards of her third husband, a French patrician. Summer (1917) again employs the direct realism of Ethan Frome, in the study of a New England girl who returns to live with a degenerate group of outlaws in order to escape the mean life of the village to which she has been taken.

During World War I, Mrs. Wharton not only gave her energy to relief work, as described in Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort (1915), but also made the events of the time the subject of her fiction in The Marne (1918) and A Son at the Front (1923). The Age of Innocence (1920, Pulitzer Prize), considered her most skillfully constructed work, shows the obvious influence of James in the unified view of the action as revealed through the consciousness of one character, and in the ironic handling of Victorian social standards in New York high society. After an international novel of manners, The Glimpses of the Moon (1922), the author returned to the American scene in Old New York (1924), four novelettes, False Dawn, The Old Maid, The Spark, and New Year's Day, depicting the decades from the 1840s through the 1870s. Her next three novels deal with the relations of parents and children; they are The Mother's Recompense (1925), Twilight Sleep (1927), and The Children (1928). Hudson River Bracketed (1929) is a contrast of the culture of the Middle West with that of settled New York society, and its sequel, The Gods Arrive (1932), carries the contrast of morals and social conventions to England and the Continent.

Although she wrote two volumes of poetry, Artemis to Actoeon (1909) and Twelve Poems (1926), Mrs. Wharton's main form outside the novel was the short story. Her stories are collected in Crucial Instances (1901); The Descent of Man (1904); The Hermit and the Wild Woman (1908); Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910), cerebral ghost stories in the James manner, in which the ghosts are projections of men's mental obsessions; Xingu and Other Stories (1916), which in brief form uses her major themes—the brittle standards of high society, the supernatural, the background of the World War, the historical study, the stunted middle‐class lives in 19th‐century New York; Here and Beyond (1926); Certain People (1930); Human Nature (1933); The World Over (1936); and Ghosts (1937).

The Writing of Fiction (1925) shows her artistic credo to be that of James, who felt, she says, “every great novel must first of all be based on a profound sense of moral values, and then constructed with a classical unity and economy of means.” She insists that the author must “bear in mind at each step that his business is not to ask what the situation would be likely to make of his characters, but what his characters, being what they are, would make of the situation….” In addition to travel books, such as Italian Backgrounds (1905), A Motor‐Flight Through France (1908), and In Morocco (1920), she wrote an autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934). She left an unfinished novel, The Buccaneers (1938), concerned with the attempt of socially unsuccessful American girls to enter English society.

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton (1861-1937), American author, chronicled the life of affluent Americans between the Civil War and World War I.

Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones in New York City, probably on Jan. 24, 1861. Like many other biographical facts, she kept her birth date secret. Gossip held that the family's English tutor—not George Frederic Jones—was really Edith's father. The truth may never be known, but Edith evidently believed the story. After the Civil War, George Jones took his family to Europe, where they could live more cheaply.

Back in New York, by the age of 18 Edith had published poems in magazines and in a privately printed volume and had experimented with fiction. However, events deferred her writing career. The family's second long European trip ended in her father's death. In New York again, she evidently fell in love with Walter Berry; yet she became engaged to Edward Wharton, eleven years her senior, a wealthy Bostonian. They were married in 1885.

Marriage brought Edith Wharton two things she valued most, travel and leisure for writing. In the early 1890s her stories began appearing in magazines, but her first commercial success was a book written with an architect, The Decoration of Houses (1897). She sought help on it from Walter Berry, who remained in some uncertain way part of her life until his death (1927). Soon after this book, Mrs. Wharton suffered a nervous breakdown. For therapy her physician suggested she write fiction. In 1899 a collection of stories, The Greater Inclination, appeared—the first of her 32 volumes of fiction.

In 1905, after she began her friendship with Henry James, Wharton's first masterpiece, The House of Mirth, laid bare the cruelties of New York society. Her range was apparent in Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910), a collection of chillers, and in the celebrated novella Ethan Frome (1911). In 1910 the Whartons moved to France, where Edward Wharton suffered a nervous breakdown and was placed in a sanitorium. After their divorce in 1913, Edith Wharton stayed in France, writing lovingly about it in French Ways and Their Meanings (1919) and other books.

The Age of Innocence, a splendid novel of New York, won the Pulitzer Prize (1921), and a dramatization of Mrs. Wharton's novella The Old Maidwon the Pulitzer Prize for drama (1935). She died of a cardiac attack on Aug. 11, 1937, and was buried in Versailles next to Walter Berry.

Further Reading

The first edition of all of Wharton's short stories, edited with an introduction by R. W. B. Lewis, is The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton (1968). Wharton's autobiographical work, A Backward Glance (1934), and the book by her friend Percy Lubbock, Portrait of Edith Wharton (1947), convey a sense of the woman. A detailed, enthusiastic biography is Grace (Kellogg) Griffith, The Two Lives of Edith Wharton: The Woman and Her Work (1965), but it was written without access to the Wharton Papers in the Yale University Library. The more scholarly work by Millicent Bell, Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of Their Friendship (1965), although restricted to part of Mrs. Wharton's life, makes use of materials not available to Griffith. Useful critical studies include Blake Nevius, Edith Wharton: A Study of Her Fiction (1953); Irving Howe, Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays (1962); and Louis Auchincloss's short Edith Wharton: A Woman in Her Time (1971). □

Edith Wharton

Born: January 24, c. 1861
New York, New York
Died: August 11, 1937
Paris, France
American author

Edith Wharton, American author, chronicled the life of upper-class Americans between the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. She is best known for her novels The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.

Childhood

Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones in New York City, on January 24, probably in 1861. Like many other biographical facts, she kept her birth year secret. Gossip held that the family's English tutor—not George Frederic Jones—was really Edith's father. The truth may never be known, but Edith evidently believed the story. After the Civil War (1861–65), when Northern forces clashed with those of the South, George Jones took his family to Europe, where they could have a better quality of life. In Europe, young Edith began to develop her love of literature and writing.

Back in New York City, by the age of eighteen Edith had published poems in magazines and in a privately printed volume and had experimented with fiction. However, events put off her writing career. The family's second long European trip ended in her father's death. In New York City again, she evidently fell in love with Walter Berry; yet she became engaged to Edward Wharton, eleven years her senior and a wealthy Bostonian. They were married in 1885.

Time to write

Marriage brought Edith Wharton two things she valued most, travel and leisure for writing. In the early 1890s her stories began appearing in magazines, but her first commercial success was a book written with an architect, The Decoration of Houses (1897). She sought help on it from Walter Berry, who remained in some uncertain way part of her life until his death in 1927. Soon after this book, Wharton suffered a nervous breakdown. For therapy her physician suggested she write fiction. In 1899 a collection of stories, The Greater Inclination, appeared—the first of her thirty-two volumes of fiction.

In 1905, after Wharton began her friendship with writer Henry James (1843–1916), her first masterpiece, The House of Mirth, laid bare the cruelties of the New York City society. Her range was apparent in Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910), a collection of chillers, and in the celebrated novella Ethan Frome (1911). In 1910 the Whartons moved to France, where Edward Wharton suffered a nervous breakdown and was placed in a sanitorium, a hospital for the mentally unstable. After their divorce in 1913, Edith Wharton stayed in France, writing lovingly about it in French Ways and Their Meanings (1919) and other books.

The Age of Innocence, a splendid novel of New York, won the Pulitzer Prize (1921), and a dramatization of Wharton's novella The Old Maid won the Pulitzer Prize for drama (1935). Edith Wharton died of a heart attack on August 11, 1937, and was buried in Versailles, France, next to Walter Berry.

For More Information

Dwight, Eleanor. Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life. New York: Abrams, 1994.

Joslin, Katherine. Edith Wharton. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.

Kellogg, Grace. The Two Lives of Edith Wharton: The Woman and Her Work. New York: Appleton-Century, 1965.

Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Wharton, Edith. Backward Glance. New York: Scribner, 1934. Reprint, New York: Scribner, 1964.

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

Wharton, Edith, née Newbold Jones (1862–1937), American novelist and short story writer. She devoted her considerable energy to a cosmopolitan social life, which included a close friendship with H. James, and to a literary career. Her first volume of short stories, The Greater Inclination (1899), was followed by a novella, The Touchstone (1900), but it was The House of Mirth (1905), the tragedy of failed social climber Lily Bart, which established her as a leading novelist. Many other works followed, including Ethan Frome (1911), a grim and ironic tale of passion and vengeance on a poor New England farm; The Custom of the Country (1913), which wittily recounts a poor, provincial girl's ascent of the social ladder via a succession of marriages; The Age of Innocence (1920), which describes the frustrated love of a New York lawyer, Newland Archer, for Ellen Olenska, the separated wife of a dissolute Polish count; The Mother's Recompense (1925); and Hudson River Bracketed (1929), contrasting Middle West with New York society. She published many volumes of short stories, various travel books, and an autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934). Her observant, satiric, witty portrayal of social nuance, both in America and Europe, shows her keen interest in what she called the ‘tribal behaviour’ of various groups.