Edith Wharton

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About Edith Wharton

"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
—Edith Wharton, Vesalius in Zante

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This is a place for all things Wharton.

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Images of and from the life and works of novelist Edith Newbold Jones Wharton, 1862-1937. Such as... google & flickr

Stills from adaptations of Edith Wharton's work to motion pictures: IMDB

Book covers, pages and passages from the writings of Edith Wharton.





Edith Wharton, born Edith Newbold Jones (January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937), was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer.

Wiki

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Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones in New York in 1862 and raised among the city’s highest society; the elegance, decadence, and strict unwritten rules of behavior of this American aristocracy were to become a central subject of her fiction. One of the fabled Four Hundred—the city’s most elite residents as determined by Caroline Astor and Ward McAllister based on the number that could comfortably fit in Astor’s ballroom—Wharton wrote with a shrewd eye toward the hypocrisy, cruelty, and corruption sometimes evident in the conduct of her social class.

Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, Wharton moved to Paris; she never gave up her United States citizenship and returned to the States with some regularity, but for the rest of her life, France was her home. The majority of Wharton’s more than twenty novels, including Ethan Frome (1911), The Custom of the Country (1913), and A Son at the Front (1923), were written in France, after Wharton had fled the repressive culture of her New York circle. In spite of her distance from the city and its high society, however, Wharton continued to write about it, making it the subject of some of her best writing, including her well-respected novel The Age of Innocence (1920) and a collection of four short novels, Old New York (1924).

Edith Wharton Collection





One of the major figures in American literary history, Edith Wharton (1862-1937) presented intriguing insights into the American experience. Author of more than 40 volumes--novels, short stories, poetry, non-fiction--Wharton had a long and remarkable life. She was born during the Civil War, encouraged in her childhood literary endeavors by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and devoted to such varied friends as Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt; yet she had also read William Faulkner, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot, and had actually met Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her upbringing provided her with insights on the upper class, while her sense of humor and polished prose produced fiction that appealed to a large audience. Recipient of the French Legion of Honor for her philanthropic work during World War I and of the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence (1920), in 1923 she became the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale. Wharton was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

A naturally gifted storyteller, Wharton wrote novels and short fiction notable for their vividness, satire, irony, and wit. Her complex characters and subtly delivered point-of-view make the reading of Wharton's fiction both challenging and rewarding, while her own life illustrates the difficulties that a woman of her era had to surmount to find self-realization.

In 1885, when she was twenty-three, she married Edward ("Teddy") Wharton. Although from a similar social background, he lacked her artistic and intellectual interests and after nearly 30 years of marriage, she divorced him. Wharton eventually settled permanently in France, thereafter visiting the United States only rarely. In Paris in 1908 she began a briefly fulfilling but ultimately disappointing affair with Morton Fullerton, a journalist on the London Times and a friend of Henry James. In Paris she found intellectual companionship in circles where artists and writers mingled with the rich and well-born, and where women played a major role. Considered one of the major American novelists and short story writers of the 20th century, Edith Wharton died in France in 1937.

-- Abby Werlock, President, Edith Wharton Society





"No one fully knows our Edith who hasn't seen her in the act of creating a habitation for herself," remarked Henry James, Wharton's close friend.

The Mount is an autobiographical house. Every aspect of the estate –including its gardens, architecture, and interior design – evokes the spirit of its creator.

The Mount