Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937

Born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, in New York City, Edith Wharton was from birth a part of the wealthy New York society she depicted so vividly in her fiction. Through her father, George Frederic Jones, and her mother, Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, she could claim descent from three families whose names were synonymous with wealth and position: the Stevenses, Rhinelanders, and Schermerhorns.

Educated at home with tutors and exposed at an early age to the classics in her father's large library, Edith Wharton showed early literary precocity. Although it cannot be said that her parents encouraged her writing, Lucretia Jones recognized her daughter's talent and in 1878 had a slim volume of her adolescent poems (titled simply Verses) privately printed and distributed to family and friends. By this time, however, Edith had already completed an unpublished novella of some 30,000 words that she called Fast and Loose.

After these youthful trials, Edith for the most part put aside her serious literary endeavors to play the role of a young society lady. Having suffered through a broken engagement with eligible young Harry Stevens when she was nineteen, Edith in 1885 married Edward R. "Teddy" Wharton, a member of a prominent Boston family and thirteen years her senior. The couple settled first in New York City, then purchased a home, "Land's End," in fashionable Newport. In 1902 they moved into "The Mount," their impressively large mansion in Lenox, Massachusetts, with Edith herself contributing to the design and interior decoration. She had already displayed her talent in this field in collaborating in 1897 with the architect Ogden Codman on The Decoration of Houses, her first full-length published work.

Edith and Teddy's marriage, however, was never on a very solid footing. From the first they experienced intellectual and sexual incompatibility, with Teddy's later neurological disorders adding to their estrangement. After living apart for many years, they divorced in 1913 when Edith was fifty-one. They had no children.

Although she never relinquished her American citizenship and made occasional visits to the United States, Edith Wharton lived permanently in France, from 1907 until her death, first in the fashionable Rue de Varenne in Paris and, after World War I, at her two homes: the chateau Ste. Claire at Hyères and the Pavillon Colombe near Paris. Here she graciously entertained many of the noted literati of Europe and took great delight in her gardens, which became famous throughout France. Among her closest acquaintances who experienced her friendship and hospitality were Walter Berry, Gaillard Lapsley, Percy Lubbock, Robert Norton, Bernard Berenson, Paul Bourget, and, most prominently, Henry James, with whom she discussed her writing and from whom she received much advice.

Still in Paris when World War I erupted, Edith Wharton spent most of the war years organizing various charities for war relief, the most prominent being her two organizations for war refugees, the Children of Flanders and the American Hostel for Refugees. For her unflagging aid to war-torn France and French and Belgian refugees, she was awarded numerous decorations by the French and Belgian governments, the most noted being the French Legion of Honor. After the war she continued for many years her aid to tubercular patients in France. In 1923 Edith Wharton was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters by Yale University for both her contributions to literature and her humanitarian endeavors.

From the publication of her first short story in 1889, Edith Wharton devoted her life to her writing. During her lifetime she published twenty-two novels, eleven collections of short stories, two volumes of poetry, four books of travel or cultural interpretations, an autobiography, three other works of non-fiction, several translations, and numerous uncollected poems, stories, or articles.

Although Edith Wharton's novels and stories reveal many themes and settings, those novels which unflinchingly depict New York aristocratic life have won her enduring fame. Among her most critically acclaimed titles are The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), The Custom of the Country (1913), and The Age of Innocence (1920), which won for her the Pulitzer Prize. She is best known as a novelist, but several of her many short stories have been judged among the best American stories of the twentieth century. Although most of her collections contain stories of note, two that are often singled out as exemplary are early collections: The Greater Inclination (her first published collection, 1899) and The Descent of Man and Other Stories (1904).

A complex woman of her day, Edith Wharton was long before her death generally regarded as one of the foremost American authors of the twentieth century, her work admired and acclaimed by many of the leading writers and critics of her time. The many biographies and critical studies devoted to her life and work give testimony to her enduring reputation, and her surviving correspondence with many leading men and women of letters, as well as her family and friends, gives clear indication of her varied interests and concerns and often includes perceptive comments on her unique world.

Edith Wharton died at her home in Hyères, France on August 11, 1937, at age seventy-five.