Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton
Born	January 24, 1862; New York City, New York
Died	August 11, 1937 (aged 75); Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer, designer

Edith Wharton (January 24 1862 – August 11 1937) was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. ^[1]

Early life

Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones to the wealthy New York family often associated with the phrase "Keeping up with the Joneses". She combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous and incisive novels and short stories. As such, she was well-acquainted with many of her era's literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1885, at twenty-three years of age, she married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, who was twelve years her senior. From a well-established Boston family, he was a sportsman and a gentleman of Ms. Wharton's social class and shared her love of travel, although they had little in common intellectually. He began spending money on younger women and this began to take a toll on Wharton's mental health. They (hi)divorced in 1913, after he suffered a nervous breakdown and was confined to a hospital. Edith and Edward were married for twenty-eight years. Besides her writing, Wharton was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste-maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including her first published work,The Decoration of Houses and Italian Villas and Their Gardens.

Literary Success

In 1901 she built The Mount, her estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, which she designed as an example of her design principles. The house and its gardens have been extensively restored and are open to the public from May through October although, as of the end of February, 2008, the house museum is threatened with foreclosure.^[2] There, Edith Wharton wrote several of her novels, including The House of Mirth (1905), which is the first of many large-scale chronicles of the true nature of old New York.

She lived at The Mount until 1911, while simultaneously being attached to life in France. She lived initially at 58 Rue de Varenne, Paris, in an apartment belonging to George Washington Vanderbilt II. Then, in 1918, once World War I subsided, she abandoned the fashionable apartment for the Pavillon Colombe at nearby Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, and, finally, she bought Sainte-Claire le Château, a former convent, in the southern village of Hyères, where she lived during the winters and springs.

Helped by her husband and her influential connections in the French government, primarily Walter Berry (then president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris) and, in her words, "the love of all my life", she was of the few foreigners in France with any war-time access to their money; she was allowed travel to the front lines. Wharton described those trips in the series of articles Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort.

Throughout the war, she worked in charitable efforts for refugees, and, in 1916, was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in reward. The scope of her relief work included: work rooms for unemployed Frenchwomen, concerts to provide work for musicians, tuberculosis hospitals, and founding the American Hostels for Belgian refugees. In 1916, Wharton edited The Book of the Homeless, writings, art, and musical scores by most every major contemporary European artist. She returned to the U.S. only once after the war, to receive an honorary doctorate degree from Yale University in 1923.

Later life

The Age of Innocence (1920), perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. She spoke flawless French and many of her books were published in both French and English.

Wharton was friend and confidante to many gifted intellectuals of her time: Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide were all guests of hers at one time or another. Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark were valued friends as well, and she was the godmother of Clark's second son, Colin (1932–2002), who wrote the book The Prince, the Showgirl and Me about his work as third assistant director of the film The Prince and the Showgirl. Her meeting with F. Scott Fitzgerald is described by the editors of her letters as "one of the better-known failed encounters in the American literary annals". She was also good friends with Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1934 Wharton's autobiography A Backward Glance was published. In the view of Judith E. Funston, in the entry she wrote for American National Biography about Wharton, "What is most notable about A Backward Glance, however, is what it does not tell: her criticism of Lucretia Jones [her mother], her difficulties with Teddy, and her affair with Morton Fullerton, which did not come to light until her papers, deposited in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, were opened in 1968." ^[3]

Wharton continued writing until her death on August 11 1937, aged 75, in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France. She is buried in the Cimetière des Gonards in Versailles, France.

Wharton's last novel, The Buccaneers, was unfinished at the time of her death. Marion Mainwaring finished the story after carefully studying the notes and synopsis Wharton had previously written. The novel was published in 1938 (unfinished version) and 1993 (Mainwaring's completion).

Death

She died in 1937 at her villa, Pavilion Colombes, near Saint Brice, Seine-et-Oise. ^[1]

Characteristics of her writing

Many of Wharton's novels are characterized by a subtle use of dramatic irony. Having grown up in upper-class pre-World War I society, Wharton became one of its most astute critics. In such works as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence she employed both humor and profound empathy to describe the lives of New York's upper-class and the vanishing of their world in the early years of the 20th century.

Works

Verses, 1878 (novel)
Only a Child, 1879 (poem)
The Decoration of Houses, 1897
The Greater Inclination, 1899
The Touchstone, 1900
The Line of Least Resistance, 1900
The Rembrandt, 1900
April Showers, 1900
Crucial Instances, 1901
The Moving Finger, 1901
The Recovery, 1901
Margaret of Cortona, 1901 (poem)
The Valley of Decision, 1902
The Quicksand, 1902
The Reckoning, 1902
The Mission of Jane, 1902
The Dilettante, 1903
The Vice of Reading, 1903
Italian Villas and Their Gardens, 1904
The Last Asset, 1904
The Letter, 1904
The Other Two, 1904
The Pot-Boiler, 1904
The Best Man, 1905
The House of Mirth, 1905
Italian Backgrounds, 1905
In Trust, 1906
The Introducers, 1906
The Fruit of the Tree, 1907
Madame de Treymes, 1907
A Motor-Flight Through France, 1908
The Bolted Door, 1908
Expiation, 1908
Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses, 1909
A Grave, 1909 (poem)
Ogrin the Hermit, 1909
The Comrade, 1910
The Letters, 1910
Other Times, Other Manners, 1911
Ethan Frome, 1912
The Reef (novel), 1912
The Long Run, 1912
The Custom of the Country, 1913
Coming Home, 1915
Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort, 1915
The Great Blue Tent, 1915 (poem)
The Book of the Homeless, 1916
Xingu and Other Stories, 1916
The Bunner Sisters, 1916
Summer, 1917
The Marne, 1918
The Refugees, 1919
French Ways and Their Meaning, 1919
The Seed of the Faith, 1919
Writing a War Story, 1919
The Age of Innocence, 1920
In Morocco, 1921
In Provence and Lyrical Epigrams, 1920 (poem)
The Glimpses of the Moon, 1922
A Son at the Front, 1923
Old New York, 1924 (novel)
The Mother's Recompense, 1925
The Writing of Fiction, 1925
Here and Beyond, 1926
Twelve Poems, 1926
Twilight Sleep, 1927
The Children, 1928
Hudson River Bracketed, 1929
The Gods Arrive, 1932
Roman Fever, 1934
A Backward Glance, 1934
The Buccaneers, 1938

Additional Publications

Novels (R.W.B. Lewis, ed.) (The Library of America, 1986) ISBN 978-0-94045031-8. Includes The House of Mirth, The Reef, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence.
The Letters of Edith Wharton (R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, eds.) ISBN 0-02-034400-7, particularly the editorial introductions to the chronological sections, especially for 1902–07, 1911–14, 1919–27, and 1928–37, and the editorial footnotes to the letter to F.S. Fitzgerald (June 8, 1925)
Novellas and Other Writings (Cynthia Griffin Wolff, ed.) (The Library of America, 1990) ISBN 978-0-94045053-0, which contains her autobiography, A Backward Glance.
Collected Stories 1891-1910 (Maureen Howard, ed.) (The Library of America, 2001) ISBN 978-1-88301193-2
Collected Stories 1911-1937 (Maureen Howard, ed.) (The Library of America, 2001) ISBN 978-1-88301194-9
Selected Poems (Louis Auchincloss, ed.) (The Library of America, 2005) ISBN 978-1-93108286-0
Twilight Sleep (R.F.Godfrey, ed.) ISBN 0-684-83964-4

In Popular Culture

In The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Edith Wharton (Clare Higgins) travels across North Africa with Indiana Jones in Chapter 16, Tales of Innocence.

Edith Wharton is mentioned in the HBO television series "Entourage" in the third season's thirteenth episode: Vince is handed a screenplay for Wharton's The Glimpses of the Moon by Amanda, his new agent, for a film to be directed by Sam Mendes. A musical version of The Glimpses of the Moon [www.glimpsesofthemoon.com] opened in January 2008 in New York City in the Algonquin Hotel's Oak Room.

In the same episode, period films of Wharton's work are lampooned, by agent Ari Gold, who says that all her stories are "about a guy who likes a girl, but he can't have sex with her for five years, because THOSE WERE THE TIMES!" ; Carla Gugino, who plays Amanda, was the protagonist of the BBC-PBS adaptation of The Buccaneers (1995), one of her early jobs.

Suzanne Vega's seventh studio release Beauty & Crime contains a song named "Edith Wharton's Figurines."

References

^ ^a ^b "Edith Wharton, 75, Is Dead in France". New York Times. August 13, 1937. Retrieved 2007-07-21. Edith Wharton, American novelist, died yesterday afternoon at her villa, Pavilion Colombes, near Saint Brice, Seine-et-Oise. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
^ New York Times, February 23, 200. Retrieved on 2/26/08, "Landmark Massachusetts Building Where Wharton Wrote Faces Foreclosure".
^ Entry for Edith Wharton written by Judith E. Funston in American National Biography, New York, Oxford University Press, 1999, Vol 23, pp. 111–112. ISBN 0-19-512802-8.

External links

"Glimpses of the Moon -- A Jazz Age Musical
The Mount - Estate and gardens designed by Edith Wharton
The Edith Wharton Papers at the Lilly Library, Indiana University
"Edith Wharton's passionate realism". A review of Hermione Lee's Edith Wharton in the TLS, February 9th, 2007.
Edith Wharton Society includes links to all Wharton's works legally available on the web, links to resources, searchable texts, bibliographies, queries and replies, and other materials.

Works by Edith Wharton at Project Gutenberg
Pushkin Press - Edith Wharton - Glimpses of the Moon
Edith Wharton at the Internet Broadway Database
Edith Wharton at IMDb
Free book downloads in HTML, PDF, text formats at ebooktakeaway.com

Template:Persondata

[obit-1] "Edith Wharton, 75, Is Dead in France". New York Times. August 13, 1937. Retrieved 2007-07-21. Edith Wharton, American novelist, died yesterday afternoon at her villa, Pavilion Colombes, near Saint Brice, Seine-et-Oise. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

[2] New York Times, February 23, 200. Retrieved on 2/26/08, "Landmark Massachusetts Building Where Wharton Wrote Faces Foreclosure".

[3] Entry for Edith Wharton written by Judith E. Funston in American National Biography, New York, Oxford University Press, 1999, Vol 23, pp. 111–112. ISBN 0-19-512802-8.

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