Edith Wharton

Titles in Fiction category:

• Age of Innocence, The    

  On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.

• Bunner Sisters

  In the days when New York's traffic moved at the pace of the drooping horse-car, when society applauded Christine Nilsson at the Academy of Music and basked in the sunsets of the Hudson River School on the walls of the National Academy of Design, an inconspicuous shop with a single show-window ...

• Ethan Frome    

  I had known something of New England village life long before I made my home in the same county as my imaginary Starkfield; though, during the years spent there, certain of its aspects became much more familiar to me. Even before that final initiation, however, I had had an uneasy sense that th ...

• Reef, The

  "Unexpected obstacle. Please don't come till thirtieth. Anna."

• Summer    

  A girl came out of lawyer Royall's house, at the end of the one street of North Dormer, and stood on the doorstep.

• Touchstone, The

  Professor Joslin, who, as our readers are doubtless aware, is engaged in writing the life of Mrs. Aubyn, asks us to state that he will be greatly indebted to any of the famous novelist's friends who will furnish him with information concerning the period previous to her coming to England. Mrs. ...

Titles in Short Stories category:

• A Venetian Night's Entertainment

  This is the story that, in the dining-room of the old Beacon Street house (now the Aldebaran Club), Judge Anthony Bracknell, of the famous East India firm of Bracknell & Saulsbee, when the ladies had withdrawn to the oval parlour (and Maria's harp was throwing its gauzy web of sound acros ...

• Afterward

  I

• Bolted Door, The

  I

• Dilettante, The

  It was on an impulse hardly needing the arguments he found himself advancing in its favor, that Thursdale, on his way to the club, turned as usual into Mrs. Vervain's street.

• Fulness Of Life, The    

  I

• House Of The Dead Hand, The

  I

• Kerfol

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• Mrs. Manstey's View

  The view from Mrs. Manstey's window was not a striking one, but to her at least it was full of interest and beauty. Mrs. Manstey occupied the back room on the third floor of a New York boardinghouse, in a street where the ash-barrels lingered late on the sidewalk and the gaps in the pavem ...

• Other Two, The

  I

• Reckoning, The

  I

• Verdict, The

  I had always thought Jack Gisburn rather a cheap genius -- though a good fellow enough -- so it was no great surprise to me to hear that, in the height of his glory, he had dropped his painting, married a rich widow, and established himself in a villa on the Riviera. (Though I rather thou ...

• Xingu

  Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition. The Lunch Club, after three or four winters of ...

About the Author

American author, best-known for her stories and ironic novels about upper class people. Wharton's central subjects 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 her 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.

"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. (from A Backward Glance, 1934)

Edith Wharton was born in New York, N.Y., into a wealthy and socially prominent family. She was educated privately by European governesses. Her early years Wharton spent rather with books than participating in the activities of high society. In 1885 she married with no great enthusiasm Edward Wharton, a Boston banker, who was twelve years her senior. Wharton's role as a wife with social responsibilities and her writing ambitions resulted in nervous collapse. She had started to compose poems in her teens and she was advised that writing might help her recover. Her early stories did not deal with New York high society, but urban poverty. 'Mrs. Manstey's View' was about an impoverished widow and the severe 'Bunner Sisters' realistically depicted 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). Wharton's first book, The Decoration of Houses, appeared in 1897. Her husband started to spend money on young women, and show increasing signs of mental instability. In 1906-09 Wharton had an affair with the American journalist Morton Fullerton, the great love of her life. In her letters to 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 their divorce in 1913 a residence in the U.S., she continued to live in France, where she spent the rest of her life. She became a literary hostess to young writers at her Paris apartment and her garden home in the south of France. 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.'"

During World War I Wharton wrote reports for American newspaper. 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. Wharton's novella 'The Marne' (1918) criticized America's slowness to help France. Her last visits to the U.S. were in 1913 and 1923. However, many of her works still had American settings. 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)

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 cencorship. '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 first collection of short stories appeared in the late 1890s.

Wharton gained first success with her book The House of Mirth (1905), a story of a beautiful but poor woman, Lily Bart, trying to survive in the pitiless New York City. It was followed several other novels set in New York. The Custom of the Country (1913) was a story of a young ambitious woman. Through the spoilt and selfish heroine 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."

Among Wharton's most famous novels is The Age of Innocence, which was filmed in 1993. The story described 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 manner of the New World with those of Old Europe. Finally Archer marries his calculating fiancée May, 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) show influence of Henry James, whom Wharton knew during the last 12 years of his life. During 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.

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."

Wharton's last novel, The Buccaneers (1938), was left unfinished, but her literary executor had the novel published in 1938. Whartion died in France, St.-Brice-sous-Forêt, on August 11, 1937. The Buccaneers, a story about Wharton's own New York City generation, was later completed by Marion Mainwaring. Wharton's work was regarded from her death into the 1970s as anti-modernist, but biographies and movies, such as Martin Scorsese's adaptation of her novel The Age of Innocence (1993), arose new interest in her work.

Author biographies courtesy of Author's Calendar. Used with permission.