Edith Wharton and Travel Writing as Self-Discovery

Abstract

BETWEEN I907 and I9I0, Edith Wharton came to a momentous decision. She chose to reverse pattern of her life, to make France her home and America a place to visit. She had travelled so frequently in Europe between ages of five and twenty-one that, according to estimate of R. W. B. Lewis, she had lived a total of eight of her first twenty-one years abroad. After her marriage to Teddy Wharton in 1885, she made an annual pilgrimage to continent. Having rented Paris apartment of George Vanderbilts on Rue de Varenne in I907 and I908, and having spent entire year of I909 in Europe without returning at all to America, she determined to settle more or less permanently in Faubourg. In early I910 she did so, selling her New York apartment and leasing a flat in Paris.' Although she had various reasons for her decision, precisely why or how she reached it by I9IO is not yet clearly understood. Wharton herself attributed her expatriation to her husband's health. While Teddy Wharton required a climate more mild than that of New York, she longed for the kind of human communion, she wrote in her autobiography, that aimless wanderings about French and Italian Rivieras in search of warm weather for Teddy did not provide.2 Teddy's condition alone, however, does not account for her decision to live abroad permanently. She unquestionably loved art, architecture, history, entire texture of past that Europe offered. Further, she was