Edith Wharton Biography
| Edith Wharton: Pulitzer-Prize winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. Wharton combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight. |
Edith Wharton, date and photographer unknown
Edith Wharton (née Jones), born in New York City in 1862, was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider’s knowledge of the upper-class New York “aristocracy” to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. She was related to wealthy, well-known families such as the Rensselaers and Astors.
From 1866 to 1872 the Jones family visited France, Italy, Germany, and Spain, where Edith became fluent in French, German, and Italian.
Education and Early Writing
While in Europe, she was educated by tutors and governesses. She rejected the standards of fashion and etiquette that were expected of young girls at the time, which were intended to allow women to marry well and to be put on display at balls and parties. She considered these fashions superficial and oppressive. Edith wanted more education than she received, so she read from her father’s library and from the libraries of her father’s friends. Her mother forbade her to read novels until she was married, and Edith obeyed this command.
As a young child, Edith would invent stories to tell her family. She began writing poetry, and at age 15, her first published work appeared — a translation of a German poem. However, the work was not credited to her as her family did not want her name to appear in print, since writing was not considered a proper occupation for a society woman of her time, and was published under the name of a family friend.
By 1880, at the age of 18, numerous of Wharton’s poems had been published under a pseudonym. Despite these early successes, she was not encouraged by her family or her social circle, and though she continued to write, she did not publish anything more until 1889. Between 1880 and 1890 Wharton put her writing aside to perform as debutante and socialite. Wharton keenly observed the social changes happening around her which would appear later in her writing. Wharton officially came out as a debutante to society in 1879.
Wharton married in 1885 and began to build upon three interests–American houses, writing, and Italy.
Marriage and Home
On April 29, 1885, at age 23, Wharton married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, who was 12 years her senior. From a well-established Boston family, he was a sportsman and a gentleman of the same social class and shared her love of travel. They traveled abroad during spring between 1886 and 1897 – mostly to Italy, but also to Paris and England.
In 1902, Wharton designed The Mount, her estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, which survives today as an example of her design principles. Edith Wharton wrote several of her novels there, including The House of Mirth (1905), the first of many chronicles of life in old New York. At The Mount, she entertained the cream of American literary society, including her close friend, novelist Henry James. The Mount was her primary residence until 1911.
Life in France
Wharton was living in Paris when World War I broke out, and she was a supporter of the French war effort. She opened a workroom for unemployed women where they would receive a meal and one franc per day in exchange for sewing. When the Germans invaded Belgium in the fall of 1914 and Paris was flooded with Belgian refugees, she helped to set up the American Hostels for Refugees, which managed to get them shelter, meals, clothes and eventually an employment agency to help them find work. Throughout the war she worked tirelessly in charitable efforts for refugees, the injured, the unemployed, and the displaced. She was a “heroic worker on behalf of her adopted country”.
On April 18, 1916, the President of France appointed her Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, the country’s highest award, in recognition of her dedication to the war effort. Her relief work included setting up workrooms for unemployed French women, organizing concerts to provide work for musicians, raising tens of thousands of dollars for the war effort, and opening tuberculosis hospitals.
She also kept up her own work during the war, continuing to write novels, short stories, and poems, as well as reporting for The New York Times and keeping up her enormous correspondence. Wharton urged Americans to support the war effort and encouraged America to enter the war. She returned to the United States only once after the war, to receive an honorary doctorate degree from Yale University in 1923. Wharton died in France in 1937.
Wharton’s Literary Works
The Age of Innocence (1920) won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making Wharton the first woman to win the award. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928, and 1930.
In addition to novels, Wharton wrote at least 85 short stories. She was also a garden designer, interior designer, and a taste-maker of her time. She wrote several design books, including her first major published work, The Decoration of Houses (1897), co-authored by Ogden Codman. Another of her “home and garden” books is the generously illustrated Italian Villas and Their Gardens of 1904.
She began her literary career as a writer of short stories, her first story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” appearing in Scribner’s Magazine in 1891. Her first long novel, The Valley of Decision, appeared in 1902, the scene being Italy toward the close of the seventeenth century. Her novel, The House of Mirth, appeared in 1905 and was highly successful. In 1908 it was translated into French by Paul Bourget, who called it the greatest American novel. It was dramatized with the help of Clyde Fitch, but had slight success.
After the outbreak of the World War she edited in 1915 The Book of the Homeless, sold for the benefit of Belgian refugees. Her works also include The Greater Inclination (1899); The Touchstone (1900); Crucial Instances (1901); Madame de Treymes (1907); The Fruit of the Tree (1907); The Hermit and the Wild Woman (1908); Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910); Ethan Frome (1911); The Custom of the Country (1913); and The Age of Innocence (1920).
