Edith Wharton

Abstract

Edith Wharton (b. 1862– d. 1937) was born Edith Newbold Jones to George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander in New York City. Her upper-class family background and the wealthy New York world in which she was raised would influence the themes of her fiction, in which she both celebrated and critiqued the cultural norms of her society. As a child, Wharton traveled through Europe with her parents. This experience instilled in her a lifelong interest in travel and her great interest and expertise in art. She eventually moved to France and lived the latter half of her life abroad. She married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton in 1885, but the marriage was unhappy, and she had an affair with the journalist Morton Fullerton. Wharton and Teddy Wharton divorced in 1913. Wharton’s first book on interior design, The Decoration of Houses (1897), was coauthored with Ogden Codman Jr., and in 1902, she designed and built a home in Lenox, Massachusetts, known as the Mount. Her first major novel, The House of Mirth (1905), was a best seller exploring the exacting social codes of the upper classes and their effects on the young unmarried protagonist, Lily Bart. However, Wharton would also explore rural life in New England tales such as Ethan Frome (1911) and Summer (1917). She organized relief efforts for child refugees in France during World War I, and her experience of the war influenced her nonfiction and fiction. Many of her serialized novels and short stories appeared in major literary and popular magazines. Indeed, she became a skilled advocate for her work as she interacted with book and magazine editors, and she was heavily involved in the production and marketing of her writing. In 1921, she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence (1920), and she received an honorary doctorate degree from Yale University in 1923. In her 1920s and 1930s fiction, she explored issues of modern life, particularly as they affect her female characters. In addition to the novel, Wharton wrote in other genres, including the short story, drama, poetry, travel writing, and nonfiction. She is an incisive critic of her class and of American culture more generally, and although she was reluctant to be categorized as a feminist, her work often critiques patriarchal structures and norms while operating within them. Ongoing scholarship on and interest in her life and writing attests to the significance of her work.