Edith Wharton (born Edith Newbold Jones; 1862–1937) is born into a distinguished New York family. Her parents, George Frederic and Lucretia Jones, are descendants of English and Dutch colonists who had made their fortune in shipping, banking, and real estate. The family belongs to the small, interrelated, fashionable society of New York which lived on inherited wealth. From 1866 to 1872, the Jones family lives and travels for six years in Europe.
After their return to the United States in June 1872, the family lives near Fifth Avenue in New York City and spends the summers in Newport, Rhode Island (like many other wealthy New York families). Edith studies French and German among other subjects - as was normal for well-to-do girls, she is tutored at home. She is a studious girl and reads the classics as she is forbidden to read novels.
In 1876-77 Edith writes "Fast and Loose," a novella of 30,000 words (unpublished).
In 1878 a collection of her poetry is privately printed (paid for by her mother).
In 1879, Edith makes her debut in society according to the customs of her time.
In 1880, five of her poems appear in the Atlantic Monthly, and two in the New York World. Worried that such an intellectual daughter will not be able to marry, her parents discourage further literary efforts.
From 1881-82 Wharton again stays with her parents in southern France. In March 1882, her father dies in Cannes at the age of 61.
Edith spends the summer of 1883 in Bar Harbor, Maine (another summer resort for wealthy New Yorkers). She meets Walter Berry, who will become a close friend, and her future husband, Edward ("Teddy") Wharton, a wealthy banker from Boston. He is attractive and kindly, a man of leisure from a similar social background as Edith and a good sportsman. But he lacks Edith's artistic or intellectual interests.
Edith Wharton grew up at a time when women were discouraged from achieving anything beyond a good marriage and follows this recipe by in April 1885 marrying Edward Wharton. They move to a cottage on Edith's mother's estate in Newport where they live from 1885 to 1889; in that period, they spend every winter and spring in Europe (Italy) - travel seems to have been the only thing that bound them together in what was mostly an unhappy marriage.
Edith meets Egerton Winthrop, who becomes her literary advisor. He recommends her to read more systematically. He also introduces her to Darwin, Huxley, Spencer and other evolutionary theorists. She reads voraciously in literature, art and philosophy. This all helped Wharton apply an almost scientific detachment to her study of the world.
In 1888. the Whartons travel to the Aegean on a four-month cruise. In 1889 the couple buys a townhouse on Fourth Avenue and 78th Street in New York.
Although Edith Wharton had a book of her poems privately printed when she
was 16, it is not until after several years of married life that she begins to write in earnest. Her major literary model is Henry
James, and her work reveals James’s concern for artistic
form and ethical issues.
In 1890, Wharton writes her first story, "Mrs. Manstey's View." In 1892, she writes "Bunner Sisters," a long story that is not published until 1916 (in Xingu).
In 1893, the Whartons purchase Land's End, a house in Newport, and hire Ogden Codman as the interior designer. Edith works closely with him on the design for remodeling the house.
In 1893-94 she writes three more stories. In 1894, while traveling in Italy, she meets the English author Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), an engaged feminist and writer on aesthetics.
In 1897 Wharton begins work on her book The Decoration of Houses with architect Ogden Codman, later that year published by Scribner's. The two writers denounce Victorian decorating practices, and instead propose simple, classical design principles, based on symmetry, proportion, and balance. The Decoration of Houses was an immediate success, and encouraged the emergence of professional decorators in the new style.
In 1898, Edith Wharton writes several short stories, as "The Muse's Tragedy," "Souls Belated," and "A Coward."
In 1899 the Whartons stay 4 months in Washington DC where Walter Berry acts as Edith's literary advisor and supportive friend. Her first story collection, The Greater Inclination, is published. Later that year, the Whartons travel with French novelist and critic Paul Bourget and his wife in northern Italy and Switzerland. In the fall, they visit Lenox in western Massachusetts.
In 1900, Edith Wharton publishes the novella The Touchstone. Edith and Teddy Wharton travel to England and Paris, as well as northern Italy, where Edith gathers material for her historical novel, The Valley of Decision, which she continues to write after returning to Lenox.
After receiving both criticism and praise from Henry James for "The Line of Least Resistance," she withdraws the story from her second volume of short stories, Crucial Instances.
In 1901, the Whartons acquire a large piece of land in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Edith designs a country house in the style of famous British architect Christopher Wren ("The Mount"). In June, Edith's mother dies in Paris. From various inheritances, Edith has an income of about $22,000 per year, but this will soon be dwarfed by the income from her books.
In 1902 The Valley of Decision, Wharton's first novel, set in Italy, is published. When she thinks about writing a sequel, her mentor Henry James advises her "to do more New York."
In 1903 Sanctuary is published. In Italy, Wharton does research for a series of articles that later will appear in book form as Italian Villas and Their Gardens. In Rome, she rides for the first time in an automobile.
***
The wonder is that Wharton broke through her social strictures to become one of America’s greatest writers. All in all, she would wrote over 40 books in 40 years, including authoritative works on architecture, gardens, interior design, and travel. She would become the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University, and a full membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
As a writer, Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper class New York "aristocracy" to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. She wrote realistic, psychological stories and novels. But her fiction was not limited to the upper classes: in Ethan Frome, Summer and other works she wrote Naturalistic stories about people in straitened circumstances. A third type of tale she wrote has strong supernatural elements (a masterful story as "Afterwards"); a fourth type is proto-Modernist in its focus on the powers of texts, as well as the lives of writers and artists, through which Edith Wharton made the fictionality involved in producing stories manifest. And finally she was an American living in Europe, so in almost all her work we find a cultural comparison or conflict.
Edith Wharton's stories are modern because of the way in which they are told: she doesn't tell everything from A to Z as a 19th c. author would do, but cuts out scenes and important information, and lets the reader infer these. This demands a careful and intelligent way of reading.
[Edith Wharton]
A. Uncollected Tales (1891-98)
Mrs. Manstey's View (1891)
[Scribner's 10 (July 1891): 117-22 ]
A rather melancholy tale about an old lady who lives alone, and whose only real pleasure in life is to sit at her boarding-house window and watch the world go by. As a younger woman, she always wanted to live in the country, but that ambition was never fulfilled and her only real contact with nature now is by observing the plants in her neighbors' gardens. When her view becomes threatened, Mrs Manstey is distraught and goes to great lengths to protect it. It was not until Wharton was 29 that this first short story was published. "Mrs. Manstey's View" had very little success, and it took her more than a year to publish another story.
Bunner Sisters (1892, published in 1916)
A long story that was considered as too grim by Scribner's and therefore refused. It was finally published with Xingu in 1916. As it was never published in separate form, this subdued, realist masterpiece of thwarted lives never gained the status it deserved. The story tells about two sisters making ends meet with their shabby-genteel shop in a run-down corner of New York. The older one is self-abnegating and anxious, the younger one spoiled and dissatisfied. A creepy sensualist courts both of them and finally marries the younger one, but he turns out to be a drug addict and abandons her...
The Fullness of Life (1893)
[Scribner's 14 (December 1893): 699-704 ]
A nameless dead woman confides in the "Spirit of Life" she meets in the next world about her earthly marriage. She had been fond of her (rather dull) husband, but had never known with him the “fullness of life.” The pleasures she knew - flowers, literature, nature - all came from outside of her marriage. Though the Spirit offers the woman the opportunity to spend eternity
with a “kindred soul,” her sense of duty to her husband and the habits
of a lifetime prevent her from accepting the chance for joy. Clearly
Wharton was examining her own unfulfilling marriage with Teddy Wharton, to whom she had been married for eight years when she began to publish fiction.
Wharton uses one of her best-known images to depict her character’s sexual and emotional relationship with her husband: "I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes."
That Good May Come (1894) **
[Scribner's 15 (May 1894): 629-42. ]
Maurice wants to become a writer, but in the meantime his mother and sister are almost starving as he has given up his daytime job. His sister needs a white dress for confirmation at her church. To help her, he sells the only poem he has written that can be sold: a low satire on the sexual escapade of a certain woman. Will good come from evil?
The Lamp of Psyche (1895)
[Scribner's 18 (October 1895): 418-28 ]
Delia has married for the second time, after the demise of her first husband whose behavior made her very unhappy. She has never been more content in her life than she is now and adores her second husband's fastidious taste and his European manners. But then - from her stern Boston aunt - she finds out a detail in her husband’s past (that he evaded participation in the Civil War), which, for her, is not acceptable and changes her love of him forever.
The Valley of Childish Things, and Other Emblems (1896)
[Century 52 (July 1894): 629-42 ]
Ten short entries in a sort of fairy-tale style. A group of ironical fables about American infantilism and wastefulness.
B. The Greater Inclination (1899) - 7 stories (and a play)
Wharton's first collection of short stories. Although she had published several stories in magazines by this time, most of the stories for this book were new as she wanted to give her best. Each of the stories is a study in motives.
The Muse's Tragedy ***
[Scribner's 25 (January 1899): 77-84. ]
The story of Danyers, an aspiring scholar, and Mary Anerton, who used to be the muse of the famous poet Vincent Rendle (now deceased), whose work Danyers admires very much. He is thrilled when he meets Mary Anerton by chance in Italy, and falls in love with her. They agree to meet again in Venice, but that part of the story has been elided; instead, the tale finishes abruptly with a letter from Mrs Anerton in which she explains to Danyers why she can't marry him: far from having had a secret affair with Rendle, and despite having worshiped him for 15 years as friend and patron, her love was never returned - she has in fact only been "used", because Rendle took his inspiration from her, but offered nothing in return. She is heartily sick of Rendle and his poems (that is why she never wants to discuss his work with Danyers). She loves Danyers who has for the first time in her life made her feel what it means to be loved for her own sake - but finally renounces him, because deep-down, she is afraid that he is only interested in her because he wants to write Rendle's biography, and that she will be used again. Such is the "muse's tragedy."
A Journey ***
[First published in The Greater Inclination, 1899]
A very dark and suspenseful psychological story, one of Wharton's best. A woman has accompanied her husband to Colorado for his failing health, but he
has not improved, and the two are now returning home to New York City, where he probably will soon die. But then she finds her husband dead in their sleeping car... She has once seen that a woman whose husband had died during a train journey, was unceremoniously kicked off the train in the middle of nowhere - with the dead body - and, afraid that the same will happen to her, she tries to keep her husband's death a secret. She pretends to the other travelers that her husband is very sick (but still alive) and endeavors to keep the curtains of their compartment tightly closed. But as the train nears its final destination, she becomes increasingly nervous and confused...
The Pelican ***
[Scribner's 24 (November 1898): 620-29.]
Another winning - and this time humorous - story. After being widowed, Mrs. Amyot makes a living by lecturing to groups of ladies so that she can pay for the expense of raising her son and putting him through school. Her lectures are rather superficial and more about what she wants to say than offering any interesting content. The narrator encounters her several times over the years, and now and then helps her, for example to find new audiences. As the years go by, Mrs Amyot continues lecturing for the education of her son, long after he has grown up, as if she can't do anything else anymore. At the end of the story, the narrator meets an interesting person at one of her lectures, someone with a long beard...
Souls Belated **
[First published in The Greater Inclination, 1899]
Two lovers attempt to escape the consequences of their adultery - the story emphasizes how those who flout the conventions of upper-class society are forced to move outside it. Lydia has left her wealthy but boring Fifth Avenue husband for Gannett with whom she is now traveling in Italy, when the letter of divorce reaches her from New York. Under these circumstances, Lydia doesn't want to be asked in marriage by Gannett - it would look too much as if he were just doing his duty. But when they stay in a hotel where also many English people are residing (among them a rather vulgar couple in similar circumstances), they realize they can not go on living a lie. Should they go to Paris and get married? Or is it better to end their relationship?
A Coward
[First published in The Greater Inclination, 1899]
Vibart visits the Carstyles (mother, father, daughter) because he first likes the daughter, Irene, until he sees how much she is like her terrible mother. Instead, he learns to appreciate the father, whose honorable decision to pay back a group of people who were defrauded by his brother, is responsible for the difficult circumstances in which the family lives. But then Mr Carstyle tells Vibart the story of the event in his past which made him decide to be heroic...
The Twilight of the God
[First published in The Greater Inclination, 1899]
This is not a short story, but a brief play, a Wildean, 1890s drawing room comedy of disillusion.
A Cup of Cold Water ***
[First published in The Greater Inclination, 1899]
Woburn has made large debts and after that stolen money from the bank where he works - this all to be able to marry Miss Talcott who belongs to the upper crust of New York society. The morning that his theft will be discovered by an audit, he plans to escape by steamship. But the night before, he has two experiences. He visits a ball where he now sees Miss Talcott with other eyes, and he realizes the falseness and superficiality of his life. Later that night he stays in a cheap hotel and hears a woman crying in the room next to his. She seems on the verge of committing suicide (he hears the click of a revolver) and he breaks down the door to save her. He also helps her in her predicament by giving her the money for a train ticket to return to the husband she has left but whom she still loves. This good deed ultimately helps him to decide how he should solve his own crisis.
The Portrait
[First published in The Greater Inclination, 1899]
A group is discussing the pictures of Lillo (who always managed to bring out the - even ugly - truth of those whose portraits he paints, and his failure with his portrait of the monstrous politician Vard. Later Lillo himself explains the circumstances to the narrator: as the daughter who idolized her father was always at the sittings, Lillo could not bring out the true ugliness of Vard.
C. Early Uncollected Stories (1900) - 3 stories
April Showers
[Youth's Companion 74 (18 January 1900): 25-26 ]
An aspiring 17-year old writer has just finished her first novel (of high quality, she believes, not just a popular tale) and send it in to a magazine. She has neglected her family's household work to get it finished. After weeks she gets a positive answer by letter and is in the 7th heaven. But when the magazine comes out, it features another novel by a settled author. It was all a mistake... When Theodora returns from the magazine's offices in Boston, where she has gone to make her claim, she is happy to find her father waiting for her at the station. Wharton criticizes both the publishing business and America’s love of sentimental writers. At the same time, she stresses the importance of family relationships.
Friends
[The Youth's Companion: Vol. 74, Number 33 (August 23, 1900), 405-06 and Vol. 74, Number 34 (August 30, 1900), 417-180.
]
Penelope Bent has given up her teaching job in an industrial New England town because she thinks she is going to be married - but, abandoned by her lover, she returns to find her post has been given to an even needier - and much less intelligent - friend. What follows is a struggle between resentment and generosity.
The Line of Least Resistance **
[Lippincott's 66 (October 1900): 559-70.
]
An excellent story. The wealthy Mr. Mindon is a comic and absurd character who pays for the excesses of his wife without any complaint. That their marriage is almost non-existent is proven by the love letter from her to another man he happens to find in her boudoir one day. He suddenly decides to divorce his frivolous, expensive and adulterous wife but his decisiveness is condemned from the start to be short-lived. It is a pretense, and his return to the family (after being lectured by friends, family and church elders) will be the beginning of another and added level of pretense when his three comforters bring him back to his sham marriage.
D. Novella: The Touchstone (1900) ***
Edith Wharton was a great friend of Henry James, who initially acted as her mentor - and as she was more successful with the public, towards the end of his life she could give him some (secret) financial assistance. The Touchstone is built on one of James' eternal themes, for example in The Aspern Papers: all that counts is a writer's work, not his / her life - we should not pry into his / her biography. Stephen Glennard, the novella's protagonist, is suddenly impoverished and unable to marry Alexa Trent, the woman he loves. He therefore sells the private letters Margaret Aubyn, a former admirer, had written to him, before she had become a famous author (Margaret seems a character based on Wharton herself). He fully realizes he is betraying her and the one-sided relation they had in the past. His monetary motive is also dubious, and the fact that he conceals the matter from his fiancé (and later wife). He is later overcome by guilt for betraying one who had loved him, and by living very frugally he and his wife pay back the money he has received for the letters. In all respects a perfect novella, a worthy companion to The Aspern Papers - it is regrettable that Edith Wharton is not better known today.
E. Crucial Instances (1901) - 7 stories
Wharton's second short story collection, even better than the first one. Many of the stories try to look behind the masks that the characters wear.
The Duchess at Prayer ***
[Scribner's 28 (August 1900): 153-69.]
A dark and violent legend with a gothic feel set in Italy, told by the old caretaker of an estate, who has heard it from his grandmother. As the Duke is frequently away, the young Duchess often seeks refuge in her private chapel (a crypt), which leads to various suspicions. One day, under the pretext of being in Rome, the jealous Duke pays a
sudden visit to the Duchess. He brings along a marble sculpture of the Duchess as a praying Madonna, chiseled by a famous sculptor, which he has immediately placed over the entrance to the chapel, neglecting the protests of the Duchess. Reading between the lines, we understand the Duchess has been together with her lover, the Duke's cousin, who is now buried alive in the crypt. The high-strung Duchess soon dies of this psychological torture. And the marble statue, in supernatural sympathy with its living counterpart, changes its face into "one of frozen horror." The story invokes Browning's "My Last Duchess."
The Angel at the Grave ***
[Scribner's 29 (February 1901): 158-66.]
Paulina's grandfather was famous as one of the American Transcendentalists, like Emerson and Thoreau. She acts as a caretaker of his house and papers and as a guide to visitors. She also writes his biography, but when she takes it to a publisher she receives a shock: the publisher refuses it because her grandfather's fame has faded. The depiction of Paulina slowly realizing that her grandfather is no longer
the famous man he once was is beautifully done. She feels that her life has been wasted... but then a young man visits her and
shows interest in her grandfather’s papers for an entirely different reason (a scientific discovery the grandfather made in his younger years) - but it remains an open matter whether they will be able to restore his fame.
The Recovery ***
[Harper's 102 (February 1901): 468-77. ]
Kensington is a celebrated American painter, with a small circle of ardent admirers. Then he has a chance to travel to Paris and have his paintings shown in Europe. As soon as he is in Paris, he spends all his time in The Louvre to study the old masters - the high level of their complex art comes as a shock to him. At the same time, the small exhibition of his own paintings fails to attract viewers. Kensington realizes he has to rethink his ideas about art, and start again from zero - but happily he is still young enough to make a "recovery."
Copy: A Dialogue
[Scribner's 27 (June 1900): 657-63.]
A dialogue between two writers who were once lovers and now meet again. Each has kept the letters received from the other, and both have done so for a similar reason.
The Rembrandt ***
[Hearst's International Cosmopolitan 29 (August 1900): 429-37. ]
A wonderful story. The narrator is in charge of acquiring art for a New York museum. He is introduced by his cousin Eleanor to a Mrs. Fontage, a distressed gentlewoman, who owns an unsigned Rembrandt. He realizes immediately that it is not worth a dime, but wanting to ease her difficulties, tells her that it is worth $1,000. He ends up buying the piece for the museum, but worries what the committee will say about it - will it help that in the same period he has been able to buy another, genuinely valuable painting as well?
The Moving Finger ***
[Harper's 102 (March 1901): 627-32. ]
Ralph Grancy marries a woman whom he loves
very deeply and he asks a friend, Claydon, to paint her picture. The result is more wonderful than the actual looks of his wife, but that is how he sees her. When Mrs. Grancy dies, Mr. Grancy goes abroad for several years, but when he returns he has Claydon alter
the picture to bring his wife closer to what she would look like if she
were still alive - by making her look older. In that way, he says, he can still communicate with her in his mind. When Grancy himself dies, the painting is according to his last will given to Claydon, who again restores it to the original image, for a very specific reason....
The Confessional
[First published in Crucial Instances]
The longest story in the book, mainly set in Italy, and told by an Italian priest, Don Egidio. The first two thirds of the story show how political battles between
Lombardy and the ruling Austrians determine the family life of Count
Roberto, a nationalist, and his young wife the Countess Faustina, who
supposedly takes an Austrian lover. The political background is sketched in great detail - the political
feud seems to play out as a family feud. The Count persuades Don Egidio, his wife’s confessor, to let him take his
place and listen to his wife’s confession. Having done so, he publicly
exonerates her, even though she must have confessed to the
affair. The Count goes off to fight for Lombardy and Italy. The priest is sent to the United States as punishment for
betraying his spiritual duty. Later he is joined by the count who spends his life lecturing and raising money to support the Italian cause. One of the least interesting stories of Wharton, although the idea behind the "confessional" is interesting.
F. Novella: Sanctuary (1903) ***
Kate Orme is about to be married to a wealthy, charming man, but discovers that his morality is weak and flawed (he is indirectly is responsible for the suicide of two people). However, she goes through with the marriage because she believes that knowing what she knows she is the only one who can properly bring up the children of her husband (in the event, they have only one child, a son). She apparently believes in nurture over nature. She does everything in her power to instill in their son the highest moral principles to save him from the same moral degeneration as his father. Yet, when 25 years later the son is faced with his own moral dilemma, she has to face her possessiveness and neurotic inability to let go of her son's life. She is her son's "sanctuary," but this is title is meant darkly ironic...
Webpages about Edith Wharton
An Edith Wharton Chronology
Short Stories, Publication Information
Study: The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, edited by Millicent Bell.