• Born: 24 January 1862
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: 11 August 1937
• Best Known As: Author of Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence

Name at birth: Edith Newbold Jones

Edith Wharton was one of the most celebrated female authors of the early 20th century, famous for naturalistic novels that depicted New York high society. Born into an upper-class New York family, she spent much of her adult life in France and did not begin her professional writing career until she was nearly 40 years old. Although she had published short stories and articles in the 1890s, and in 1902 published her first novel, The Valley of Decision, it was her 1905 novel, The House of Mirth, that brought her critical and popular success. Throughout her long career she published more than 40 books, including poetry, criticism and the novel Ethan Frome (1911). Wharton was also the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, for her 1920 novel The Age of Innocence. She is now considered one of the great novelists of the early 20th century and held to be in the same league as her longtime friend, Henry James.

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).

For more information on Edith Newbold Wharton, visit Britannica.com.

(1862-1937), author and philanthropist. Wharton was born into the wealthy "old New York" society of the late nineteenth century, and the atmosphere of her world permeates most of her work. She married a wealthy Bostonian and ostensibly settled into the life of the comfortable. But the marriage was not successful and the Whartons divorced in 1913.

Partly to release the energies confined by the rigid social strictures and anti-intellectualism of her aristocratic world, and later to relieve the unhappiness of her marriage, Wharton turned to writing. She privately printed her first book of poems in 1878, when she was sixteen. Wharton wrote two collections of short stories, The Greater Inclination (1899) and Crucial Instances (1901), and a book on interior decoration, The Decoration of Houses (1897), before publishing her first novel, The Valley of Decision, in 1902. By this time, Wharton had also formed a close personal and literary friendship with Henry James, and their work continues to be compared for similarities in both style and theme.

All her works were favorably reviewed, but Wharton did not receive critical acclaim until The House of Mirth appeared in 1905. Set in old New York in the first years of the twentieth century, The House of Mirth is a complex study of the rise and fall of the tragic heroine, Lily Bart, as she moves downward through the intricate class system of aristocratic New York. The novel is valuable not only for its study of human psychology but also for its depiction of the changing social patterns of a country undergoing rapid economic growth, and the consequent invasion of the nouveaux riches into this bastion of culture and what had become moral corruption.

The themes evident in The House of Mirth--the moral decay of an indolent society, the waste of treating women as decorative objects, the need for the social order to protect the values of decency, honesty, and commitment, the belief that the true dramas of history are worked out within the soul--characterized Wharton's work throughout the sixty years of her career. At her death she had published seventeen novels, seven novelettes, eleven volumes of short stories, and numerous miscellaneous works. Included in the novels was another masterpiece, the work for which she is best known, The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1921.

In her lifetime, Wharton endured the social upheavals perpetrated by the robber barons, the tremendous physical and psychic wounds of World War I (she won the Legion of Honor in 1916 for her refugee work), the frenetic healing of the 1920s, and the Great Depression. During much of this time she lived in France, satirically chronicling--with the advantages and disadvantages of distance--the disappearing world of the 1870s through the 1920s. Her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), is emblematic of her crisp, reticent style, her interest in the past, and her ability to foreshadow a time when women as artists, and as players, would be taken more seriously.

Because of the focus on women in most of her major fiction, Wharton's career had a revival in the 1980s, as critics came to realize that this artist who so often focused on an earlier culture had also predicted the new. Wharton's canon, then, remains valuable to students of history for what it reveals about a particular time and place in American culture and about the expatriates who fled it to live in Europe. It is valuable, too, for its revelations of the tragic aspects of human nature. As the New York Times said in her obituary, "There can be no reading of human character without ethics, no tragedy without conflict between things that matter. This Edith Wharton knew and never forgot, and by that token we know her for the artist she was."

Bibliography:

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton's Argument with America (1980); R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975).

Author:

Marlene A. Springer

See also Expatriates and Exiles; Literature.

1862–1937, American novelist, b. New York City, noted for her subtle, ironic, and superbly crafted fictional studies of New York society at the turn of the 20th cent. The daughter of a socially elect family, she was educated privately in New York and in Europe. In 1885 she married Edward Wharton, a Boston banker; after the first few years of marriage Edward Wharton became mentally ill, and the burden of caring for him fell upon his wife. Finally, in 1913, after she had settled permanently in France, Edith Wharton terminated the marriage by divorce.

Her early stories and tales were collected in The Greater Inclination (1899), Crucial Instances (1901), and The Descent of Man (1904); somewhat narrow in scope, they nevertheless show the unity of mood and the lucid, polished prose style of her more mature works. Much of her writing bears a resemblance to the fiction of Henry James, who was her close friend. However, the similarities are superficial, and in her best and most characteristic novels—The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920; Pulitzer Prize)—she asserts herself as a distinctive artist. Recreating the atmosphere of the unadventurous, ceremonious upper-class society of New York, she depicts in these and other works the cruelty of social convention, the changing fashions in morality, and the conflicts that arise between money values and moral values.

In the novella Ethan Frome (1911)—one of her best-known, most successful, and least characteristic works—Wharton evokes the tragic fate of three people against the stark background of rural New England. Among her many other novels are The Valley of Decision (1902), a historical novel of 18th-century Italy; The Custom of the Country (1913); Hudson River Bracketed (1929) and its sequel, The Gods Arrive (1932); and an unfinished work, The Buccaneers (1938). Collections of her short stories include Xingu and Other Stories (1916), Certain People (1930), and Ghosts (1937). Wharton also wrote travel books (e.g., Italian Backgrounds, 1905), books on interior design and architecture (e.g., The Decoration of Houses, 1897; Italian Villas and Their Gardens, 1904), literary criticism, and poetry. In 1915 she was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor by the French government for her services during World War I.

Bibliography

See her collected stories (2 vol., 2001); her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934, repr. 1998); her letters, ed. by R. W. B. Lewis (1988); biographies by L. Auchincloss (1971), R. W. B. Lewis (1975, repr. 1985), S. Benstock (1994), E. Dwight (1994), and H. Lee (2007); studies by M. B. McDowell (1976, repr. 1991), C. G. Wolff (1977, repr. 1995), E. Ammons (1980), G. Walton (rev. ed. 1982), G. S. Rahi (1983), D. Holbrook (1991), B. A. White (1991), K. A. Fedorko (1995), C. J. Singley (1995), J. Dyman (1996), J. Beer (1997), S. B. Wright (1997), A. R. Tintner (1999), and H. Hoeller (2000).

(1862-1937)

1897	The Decoration of Houses. Wharton's first publication is a treatise on interior design written with the architect Ogden Codman, who had helped her redecorate her home in Newport, Rhode Island.
1899	The Greater Inclination. Wharton's first fiction appears to positive reviews by English critics who detect echoes of Henry James and a mastery unexpected from an American woman writer. The collection includes three of Wharton's best stories, "The Muse's Tragedy," "The Pelican," and "Souls Belated."
1900	The Touchstone. Wharton's first extended work is very much in the Jamesian tradition, concerning the ethical conflict between a man's desire to marry for money and his reluctance to sell love letters written to him by a celebrated woman.
1901	Crucial Instances. Wharton's second story collection is judged inferior to her first, The Greater Inclination (1899), but includes at least one important story, "Copy."
1902	The Valley of Decision. Wharton's first full-length novel is set in eighteenth-century Italy, pitting the new antireligious beliefs promulgated by Rousseau and Voltaire against the dominant orthodoxy. It illustrates what will become one of the novelist's central themes: the high personal cost of violations of accepted conventions.
1903	Sanctuary. Wharton's novella concerns a young woman who discovers a troubling secret in her fiancé's past, an insight that leads her to recognize the "moral sewage" that surrounds her.
1904	The Descent of Man and Other Stories. Wharton's third story collection is called by Wharton biographer R.W.B. Lewis her best, showing her "full maturity as a satirist of American manners." Wharton also publishes her first travel book, Italian Villas and Their Gardens, illustrated with the watercolors of Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966).
1905	Italian Backgrounds. Wharton's first travel book is a compilation of Italian travel sketches. It includes "Sanctuaries of the Pennine Alps," her one major contribution to art history, which reattributes the terra-cotta sculptures at the monastery of San Vivaldo to Giovanni della Robbia. Although the book is generally well received, some reviewers complain that it is too pedantic and not "feminine."
1905	The House of Mirth. The story of Lily Barth's scheme to secure a rich husband provides one of Wharton's richest portraits of New York society and its crippling reliance on wealth and behavioral rules. Diana Trilling would call the novel "one of the most telling indictments of the whole of American society, of a whole social system based on the chance distribution of wealth, that has ever been put on paper."
1907	Madame de Treymes. Wharton's first book after her move to France explores the cultural differences between Americans and Europeans. She also publishes her only novel of social reform, The Fruit of the Tree, set in an American mill town.
1908	The Hermit and the Wild Woman. Wharton's story collection mixes the medieval allegory of the title with several stories--"The Pretext," "The Lost Asset," and "In Truth"--about social climbing, male dominance, and failed marital relationships.
1909	Artemis to Acteon. This is the first of the writer's two poetry collections. Besides the title work on the Greek myth, the volume contains a sonnet sequence "The Mortal Lease," concerning the author's romantic relationship with William Morton Fullerton, the Boston journalist who worked in the Paris office of the London Times. Biographer R.W.B. Lewis calls the collection a "genuine if modest poetic accomplishment" and cites Wharton as one of the few significant American novelists who produced poetry of quality. This collection would be followed by Twelve Poems (1926).
1909	The New Theatre. New York's first major art theater opens as the intended home of an American national repertory theater company. The theater's out-of-the-way location on Central Park West, bad acoustics, and weak productions forced it to close in 1911.
1910	Tales of Men and Ghosts. Wharton attempts versions of the Jamesian psychological ghost stories. "The Eyes," in particular, has been acclaimed as "a small masterpiece."
1911	Ethan Frome. Wharton's novella departs from her characteristic high-society settings to present a stark, ironic tragedy set in rural Massachusetts. Ethan Frome, married to a complaining, hypochondriacal wife, falls in love with his wife's cousin. Their decision to end their lives rather than forgo their love goes awry.
1912	The Reef. One of the author's most Jamesian novels, this is a complex story of sexual entanglements among expatriates in a French château. Daring for the times, the novel depicts the complex personal and social implications of human sexuality.
1913	The Custom of the Country. Ranking among Wharton's greatest achievements is this satirical account of Undine Spragg, a nouveau riche social climber. Spragg's experiences both puncture the pretensions of provincial Americans and demonstrate the influence of a corrupt society on the individual. The novel is one of Wharton's most expansive social commentaries.
1915	Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort. Wharton covers the first year of the war from her vantage point in Paris and her visits near the front lines.
1916	Xingu and Other Stories. Wharton's story collection includes the title satire on the snobbish hypocrisy of the Hillbridge Lunch Club as well as "Coming Home," about a French collaborator during the war, and "The Bunner Sisters," the story of two spinster sisters who operate a small shop in nineteenth-century New York.
1917	Summer. This novella is the story of a New England girl, Charity Royall, whose passionate affair gives way to adult responsibilities. Calling it her "hot Ethan," a complement to and contrast with the wintry Ethan Frome (1911), Wharton would regard Summer as one of her best works.
1918	The Marne. Wharton's war novella concerns a young American Francophile who serves in the ambulance corps to aid the French and, in his view, civilization, while participating in the climactic Second Battle of the Marne.
1919	French Ways and Their Meaning. Commissioned to make the ways of the French understandable to American servicemen stationed in France after the war, the book treats the country and its values from the perspective of an unapologetic Francophile.
1920	In Morocco. Accompanying a French military expedition to Morocco in 1918, Wharton provides this account of her trip, which is generally regarded as the best of her travel books.
1920	The Age of Innocence. Generally regarded as Wharton's masterpiece, the novel, set in the New York society world of the 1870s, concerns the fate of Newland Archer, who falls in love with his fiancée's cousin, Ellen Olenska. It is Wharton's most profound character study of desire hemmed in by social restrictions. The novel wins the Pulitzer Prize, the first for fiction by a woman, but Wharton stated that the award should have gone to Sinclair Lewis for Main Street. For this generosity, Lewis would dedicate his next novel, Babbitt, to Wharton. The Age of Innocence would be dramatized by Margaret Ayer Barnes (1886-1967) in 1928.
1922	The Glimpses of the Moon. Wharton's international comedy of manners concerns a parasitical young couple who accepts financial support for their discretion about their host's philandering.
1923	A Son at the Front. Drawing on her own wartime experiences in France, Wharton's novel shows an American painter's conversion to the Allied cause based on his son's experiences in battle. Although praised for its psychological acuity, the urgency and relevance of the novel's theme had diminished in the minds of many reviewers.
1924	Old New York. Four separate novellas--False Dawn, The Old Maid, The Spark, and New Year's Day--reflect social life during successive decades from 1840 to 1870.
1925	The Mother's Recompense. The novel presents a woman's relationship with the daughter she had previously abandoned.
1925	The Writing of Fiction. Wharton explicates her philosophy of composition, derived from her mentor Henry James, which emphasizes the fundamental veracity of her characters and the situations that they generate.
1926	Here and Beyond. Wharton's story collection includes social dramas and character studies set in Brittany, New England, and Morocco as well as ghost stories. It has been judged by Wharton biographer R.W.B. Lewis as the weakest of her story collections.
1927	Twilight Sleep. Wharton critiques contemporary New York society in a blistering account that shows the idle rich anesthetized by self-centeredness and aimless distractions.
1928	The Children. Wharton creates one of her most appealing woman characters, Judith Wheater, who tries to keep her family together as her parents contemplate divorce.
1929	Hudson River Bracketed. Wharton's novel studies a young Midwestern writer's reactions to sophisticated New York society. A sequel, The Gods Arrive (1932), adds a contrast with European society.
1930	Certain People. Although Wharton would complete only one novel during the decade (The Gods Arrive in 1932, a sequel to Hudson River Bracketed), she publishes this and three additional collections of short stories with contemporary and nineteenth-century settings. Subsequent volumes are Human Nature (1933), The World Over (1936), and Ghosts (1937).
1933	Human Nature. Wharton's ninth story collection contains "Her Son," "The Day of the Funeral," "A Glimpse," "Diagnosis," and "Joy in the House."
1934	A Backward Glance. The writer's autobiography includes observations about social life in New York, London, and Paris during the 1870s and 1880s, her relationship with Henry James and other writers, and statements about her artistic processes.
1936	The World Over. A short story collection that includes "Confession," adapted from the author's incomplete and unpublished play Kate Spain, which deals with two Americans who meet at a European hotel and the secret of one. The story echoes the notorious Lizzie Borden murder case, and critics have suggested that the story is an attempt to exorcise Wharton's own childhood traumas.
1937	Ghosts. This supernatural story collection is issued posthumously, with a preface in which Wharton discusses the writing of ghost stories and worries that the "ghost instinct" is being destroyed by the wireless and the cinema, "enemies of the imagination," in the writer's view.
1938	The Buccaneers. Wharton's last and unfinished novel concerns the attempt by socially ambitious American girls to enter English society. Although the novel breaks off before the moral climax, the book does provide the author's characteristically assured depictions of social manners and an accomplished portrait of Gilded Age society.

Quotes:

"When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say."

"A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue."

"My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!"

"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."

"There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow."

"I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast."

See more famous quotes by Edith Wharton

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