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Edith Wharton (1862-1937) - original surname Jones |
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American author, best-known for her stories and ironic novels about upper class people. Edith Wharton's central themes were the conflict between social and individual fulfillment, repressed sexuality, and the manners of old families and the nouveau riche, who had made their fortunes in more recent years. Wharton was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel The Age of Innocence (1920). The jury had voted for Sinclair Lewis's highly popular book Main Street, but the Columbia University trustees overturned the decision. Lewis dedicated his next work, Arrowsmith, to Wharton. My mother, herself so little of a reader, was exaggeratedly scrupulous about the books I read; not so much the "grown-up" books as those written for children. I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it. You could do what you liked with the language if you did it consciously, and for a given purpose—but if you went shuffling along, trailing it after you like a rag in the dust, tramping over it, as Henry James said, like the emigrant tramping over his kitchen oil-cloth—that was unpardonable, there deterioration and corruption lurked. I remember it was only with reluctance, and because "all the other children read them", that my mother consented to my reading "Little Women" and "Little Men"; and my ears, trained to the fresh racy English of "Alice in Wonderland," "The Water Babies" and "The Princess and the Goblin", were exasperated by the laxities of the great Louisa. (from A Backward Glance, by Edith Wharton, New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1934, p. 51) Edith Newbold Jones Wharton was born in New York, N.Y., into a wealthy and socially prominent family. A few years after her birth, in 1866 the family went abroad due to financial troubles. Wharton was educated privately at home by European governesses, learning French, Italian, and German. Wharton was an unusual child. She learned to read by herself and her early years she spent rather with books than participating in the activities of high society. At the age of 14, Wharton wrote a novella under the pseudonym David Olivieri. She had started to compose poems in her teens and one of her poems was published in the Atlantic Monthly. The father of her tutor, Emelyn Washburn, introcuded Wharton to Emerson, Thoreau and other Transcendentalist writers; later she published a short story, 'Angel at the Grave' (1901), on their tradition. In 1885, after a broken engagement to Harry Stevens, Wharton married with no great enthusiasm Edward Wharton, who was twelve years her senior. Edward was a Boston banker and her brother's friend, but they had little in common. Wharton settled with her husband in Lenox. There she was an active member of the Lenox Public Library, serving on its board. From her father, she inherited the nucleus of her personal library. At the time of her death it contained about five thousand volumes. Wharton's role as a wife with social responsibilities and her writing ambitions resulted in nervous collapse, and she was advised that literary work might help her recover. Her early writings did not deal with New York high society, but urban poverty. 'Mrs. Manstey's View' was about an impoverished widow and 'Bunner Sisters' depicted realistically the harsh fate of two sisters. This novella waited for its publication for a long time and it finally appeared in Xingu and Other Stories (1916). Also ghost stories attracted her. 'Afterward' (1910) was set in a haunted country house. 'Pomegranate Seed' (1931) told of a widower who has remarried and who receives letters from his dead wife. The Great Inclination (1899), Wharton's first collection of short stories, included some of her most anthologized pieces, 'The Muse's Tragedy,' 'Souls Belated' and The Pelican'. Wharton's first book, The Decoration of Houses (1897), was coauthored by Ogden Codman Jr., an architect. In the 1890s Wharton started to contribute to Scribner's Magazine, but later, even at the height of her fame, she had problems with magazine censorship. 'The Day of the Funeral' was considered "too strong" for the Ladies' Home Journal in 1931. 'Beatrice Palmato,' a story of incest, was never finished, but it gave fuel to speculations that Wharton herself was a victim of abuse. She once wrote: "Brains & culture seem non-existent from one end of the social scale to the other, & half the morons yell for filth, & the other half continue to put pants on the piano-legs." Wharton's husband started to spend money on young women, and show increasing signs of mental instability. Between1907 and 1911 Wharton had an affair with the American journalist Morton Fullerton, the great love of her life. In her letters to the bisexual Fullerton, published in The Letters of Edith Wharton (1988), she often expressed her hurt feelings when he toyed with her affections – ''didn't you see how my heart broke with the thought that, if I had been younger & prettier, everything might have been different.'' The Whartons spent much time in Europe from 1906. Although she maintained after divorce in 1913 a residence in the U.S., she continued to live in France, where she spent the rest of her life. It was not an easy decision for Wharton to divorce husband. For several years, she subjected herself to an intense self-scrutiny. Wharton's last visits to the U.S. were in 1913 and 1923. However, many of her works still had American settings. At her Paris apartment and her garden home in the south of France Wharton became a literary hostess to young writers. Among her friends were Henry James, Walter Berry and Bernard Berenson, with whom she traveled in Germany in 1913. Berenson later told his wife Mary that when he had a dinner with Edith in a hotel, she "eyed a young man at a neighboring table and said: 'When I see such a type my first thought is how to put him into my next novel.'" Wharton had a lifelong passion for travel, but her travel books are largely ignored. She made more than 60 transatlantic crossings, mountaineered on a rope team in the Alps, and she has been often credited with being the first American novelist to have written about Mount Athos, where females are not allowed to enter the monasteries. In 1917 she went to Morocco, where she visited a harem. During World War I Wharton wrote reports for American newspapers,
but she refused to publish with Hearst's magazines because she thought
William Randolph Hearst had taken a pro-German stance. She assisted in
organizing the American Hostel for Refugees, and the Children of
Flanders Rescue Committee, taking charge of 600 Belgian children who
had to leave their orphanage at the time of the German advance. She was
also active in fund-raising activities, participating in the production
of an illustrated anthology of war writings by prominent authors and
artists of the period. With Walter Berry she toured the Alsatian front.
The mode of travel was her two-ton Mercedes Landaulet. A chauffeur
drove the car. When she had the chance to see a dead German, "a grey
uniform
huddled in a dead heap," she confessed, "it was almost a relief to find
it was after all a tangible enemy hidden over there across the
meadow..." Wharton's war essays came out in the book, Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort (1915). In 1916 she was made Chevalier of the French
Legion of Honor. Her 1918 war novella The Marne criticized
America's slowness to help France. Wharton's favorite place to write was her bedroom. "She used a writing board. Her breakfast was brought to her by Gross, the housekeeper, who almost alone was privy to this innocent secret of the bedchamber. (A secretary picked up the pages from the floor for typing.)" (from Edith Wharton by R.W.B. Lewis, 1975) Her villa, Pavilion Colombes, was situated near Saint Brice, Seine-et-Oise. At its garden she was helped by the reclusive expatriare American Major Lawrence Johnston. With the popular novelist Louis Bromfield, who lived at Senlis, not far from St-Brice, she talked frequently of their dahlias and petunias, and green peans and lettuces. Bromfield learned much of his gardening from Wharton. "Fashioned to adorn and delight," the 29-year-old protagonist Lily Bart in The House of Mirth (1905), is a beautiful but poor member of New York's society elite. To maintain her social status, she needs to marry money. At the end, after many failures, Lily overdoses herself with chloral hydrate. This work, which made Whartom into something of a celebrity, sold 30,000 copies within the fiest three weeks of publication. It was followed several other novels set in New York. The Custom of the Country (1913), first published in serial form in Scribner's, told about a spoilt and selfish young woman, through whose character Wharton draws a revealing and ironic picture of social behavior inside the doors of upper-class America. "She meant to watch and listen without letting herself go, and she sat very straight and pink, answering promptly but briefly, with the nervous laugh that punctuated all her phrases – saying 'I don't care if I do' when her host asker her to try some grapes, and 'I wouldn't wonder' when she thought any one was trying to astonish her." With The Age of Innocence Wharton became the first woman to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize. The story describes the frustrated love of a New York lawyer, Newland Archer, for unconventional, artistic Ellen Olenska, the separated wife of a dissolute Polish count. Wharton contrasts the manners of New York's social world with those of Old Europe. "You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one," Archer accuses Ellen. Finally Archer marries his calculating fiancée May Welland, representing the 19th-century domestic virtues. Archer's decision promotes his family's wealth underlined the novel's point that individual happiness is secondary to the continuation of the prevailing culture. Wharton's other major works include the long tale Ethan Frome (1911) which was set in impoverished rural New England. The Reef (1912) shows the influence of Henry James, whom Wharton knew during the last 12 years of his life. Following a fit of depression in 1909, James burned most of his personal papers, including his correspondence with Wharton, but the two writers enjoyed each other's company though they weren't lovers. Wharton campaigned to win James the Nobel Prize for Literature, and secretly diverted some of her own royalties to James to help her famous senior colleague in his financial worries. During the 1920s, Wharton was paid between $1,500 and $1,800 per short story. The novel Hudson River Bracketed (1929) and its sequel The Gods Arrive
(1932) compared the cultures of Europe and the sections of the U.S. she
knew. Wharton also wrote poems, essays, travel books, and her
autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934). In her short stories
Wharton wrote about women in turn-of-the-century America, their
loveless marriages, social responsibilities, expensive tastes, and
longing for freedom. In ''Autres Temps' one of her female characters
admits: "We're shut up in a little tight round of habit and
association, just as we're shut up in this room. Remember, I thought
I'd got out of it once; but what really happened was that the other
people went out, and left me in the same little room. The only
difference was that I was there alone. Oh, I've made it habitable now,
I'm used to it; but I've lost any illusions I may have had as to an
angel's opening the door.'' Despite regarding herself as a feminist, Wharton was against giving women the right to vote. The Buccaneers, Wharton's last novel, was left unfinished, but her literary
executor had the work published in 1938. The story
about Wharton's own New York City generation, was later completed by Marion Mainwaring. Whartion died in France,
St.-Brice-sous-Forêt, on August 11, 1937. For decades Wharton was regarded as anti-modernist, and she did not
gain the popularity of Henry James, but biographies and movies, especially Martin Scorsese's
adaptation of The Age of Innocence (1993), created new interest in her fiction. Literary critics have tried to find evidence of incest in Wharton's life from such
stories as 'The Confessional' (1901), about the secrets of a dying priest, and
'Confession' (1936), which alludes to the case of Lizzie Borden. Today, Wharton's popularity rests mainly on her ghost stories. For further reading: Portrait of Edith Wharton by P. Lubbock (1947); Edith Wharton: A Study of Her Fiction by B. Nevius (1953); Edith Wharton by O. Coolidge (1964); Edith Wharton and Henry James by Millicent Bell (1965); The Two Lives of Edith Wharton by G. Kellogg (1965); Edith Walton: A Critical Interpretation by G. Walton (1970); Edith Wharton by R.W.B. Lewis (1975); Edith Wharton by G.H. Lindberg (1976); Edith Wharton by R.H. Lawson (1977); A Feast of Words by C.G. Wolff (1977); The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton by C. Wershoven (1982); Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short Fiction by Barbara White (1991); No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton by Shari Benstock (1994); The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, ed. by Millicent Bell (1995); Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: from Silence to Speech by Dianne L. Chambers (2009); Edith Wharton : Sex, Satire, and the Older Woman by Avril Horner and Janet Beer (2011); Edith Wharton in France by Claudine Lesage (2018); Edith Wharton and Mary Roberts Rinehart at the Western Front, 1915 by Ed Klekowski and Libby Klekowski (2018); Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age by Melanie V. Dawson (2020); What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton's Library and Worldly Self-fashioning by Sheila Liming (2020) Selected works:
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