Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton
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Born	January 24 1862(1862-01-24) 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 Wharton's social class and shared her love of travel, although it eventually transpired that they had little in common intellectually. He eventually began spending money on younger women and this began to take a toll on Wharton's mental health. They divorced in 1913, after he suffered a nervous breakdown and was confined to a hospital. Besides her writing, Wharton was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste-maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens.

Literary Success

The Mount, 2006

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. 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 . 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

Edith Wharton c. 1919

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. 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 Dilletante, 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

Further reading

• Hermione Lee (2007) Edith Wharton, Chatto & Windus, ISBN-10 0701166657 (UK)/Knopf (USA forthcoming)
• R.W.B. Lewis (1975) Edith Wharton: A Biography, Harper & Row.
• Cynthia Griffin Wolff (1977) A Feast of Words
• Shari Benstock (1994) No Gifts From Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton

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. 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

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about:

Edith Wharton

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Edith Wharton

• 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 the Internet Movie Database
• Free book downloads in HTML, PDF, text formats at ebooktakeaway.com