Edith Wharton

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Edith Wharton

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]

Contents

[edit] Early life

Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones to parents George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander. She had two brothers, Frederic Rhinelander and Henry Edward. The saying "Keeping up with the Joneses" is said to refer to the family of her father.[2] 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 23 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 her social class and shared her love of travel, although they had little in common intellectually. He began spending money on younger women and this began to take a toll on Wharton's mental health. They divorced in 1913, after she suffered a nervous breakdown and was confined to a hospital. She then moved to Europe. Edith and Edward were married for 28 years, though she later called the marriage her "greatest mistake."

In addition to her famous novels, Wharton wrote at least 85 short stories, and was also a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste-maker of her time. She authored several influential books, including her first published work,The Decoration of Houses, co-authored by Ogden Codman, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens.[3]

[edit] Literary success

The Mount, 2006

In 1902 she built The Mount, her estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, which survives today as the supreme example of her design principles. The house and its gardens have been extensively restored and are open to the public from May through October although, as of the end of March 2008, the house museum is threatened with foreclosure.[4] There, Edith Wharton wrote several of her novels, including The House of Mirth (1905), the first of many chronicles of the true nature of old New York, and entertained the cream of American literary society, including her close friend, the novelist Henry James.

Although she spent many months traveling in Europe nearly every year, The Mount was her primary residence until 1911. When she was there, as well as traveling abroad, Wharton was usually driven to her appointments by her longtime chauffeur and friend Charles Cook, a native of nearby South Lee, Massachusetts.[5][6] When her marriage deteriorated, however, she decided to move permanently to France, living initially at 58 Rue de Varenne, Paris, in an apartment that belonged to George Washington Vanderbilt II.

Helped by her influential connections to the French government, primarily Walter Berry (then president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris), she was one of the few foreigners in France who was allowed travel to the front lines. Wharton described those trips in the series of articles Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort.

Throughout the war she worked tirelessly in charitable efforts for refugees, and, in 1916, was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in recognition of her commitment to the displaced. The scope of her relief work included setting up work rooms for unemployed Frenchwomen, organizing concerts to provide work for musicians, opening tuberculosis hospitals, and founding the American Hostels for Belgian refugees. In 1916, Wharton edited The Book of the Homeless, composed of writings, art, and musical scores by almost every major contemporary European artist. When World War I ended in 1918 she abandoned the fashionable urban address for the delights of the country at the Pavillon Colombe in nearby Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt.

Wharton was a committed supporter of French imperialism, describing herself as a "rabid imperialist".[7] After World War I, she travelled to Morocco as the guest of the Resident General, General Hubert Lyautey, and wrote a book In Morocco, about her experiences. Wharton's writing on her Moroccan travels is full of praise for the French administration and for Lyautey and his wife in particular.

After the war she divided her time between Paris and Hyères, in Provence, where she finished The Age of Innocence in 1920.

In 1927 she purchased a villa, Castel Sainte-Claire, on the site of a seventeenth-century convent, in the hills above the city of Hyères in Provence, where she lived during the winters and springs. She called the villa "Sainte-Claire du Chateau" and filled the garden with cactus and subtropical plants. She returned to the U.S. only once after the war, to receive an honorary doctorate degree from Yale University in 1923.

[edit] Later life

Edith Wharton c. 1919

The Age of Innocence (1920) won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature,[8] making her the first woman to win the award. She spoke flawless French as well as several other languages 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.

In 1934 Wharton's autobiography A Backward Glance was published. In the view of Judith E. Funston, in the entry she wrote for American National Biography about Wharton, "What is most notable about A Backward Glance, however, is what it does not tell: her criticism of Lucretia Jones [her mother], her difficulties with Teddy, and her affair with Morton Fullerton, which did not come to light until her papers, deposited in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, were opened in 1968."[9]

[edit] Death

She died in 1937 at the domaine Le Pavillon Colombe, her eighteenth-century house on Rue de Montmorency in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, in the then existing département of Seine-et-Oise (78), but now in Val d'Oise (95). The street is today called Rue Edith Wharton. [1][10] She is buried in the American Cemetery in Versailles, France.

Wharton continued writing until her death, lying in bed and dropping each finished page to the floor to be collected when she finished. 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).

[edit] Writing style

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. In contrast, she used a harsher tone in her novel Ethan Frome to convey the atmosphere of lower-class rural Massachusetts.

In addition to penning several respected novels, Wharton produced a wealth of short stories and is particularly well regarded for her ghost stories.

[edit] 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.

A musical version of The Glimpses of the Moon was presented in New York City in the Algonquin Hotel's Oak Room in early 2008.

Suzanne Vega's seventh studio release Beauty & Crime contains a song named "Edith Wharton's Figurines."

"Edith Wharton's Journey" is a radio adaptation, for the NPR series Radio Tales, of the short story "A Journey" from Edith Wharton's collection The Greater Inclination.

In 2009, Edith Wharton's home, The Mount, was investigated for paranormal activity in the hit SciFi Channel reality series Ghost Hunters.

In an episode of the CW show Gossip Girl, "The Age of Dissonance", the cast star in a production of Wharton's "The Age of Innocence".

[edit] Books

[edit] Novels

[edit] Short Story Collections

  • The Greater Inclination, 1899
  • Crucial Instances, 1901
  • The Descent of Man and Other Stories, 1903
  • The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories, 1908
  • Tales of Men and Ghosts, 1910
  • Xingu and Other Stories, 1916
  • Here and Beyond, 1926
  • Certain People, 1930
  • Human Nature, 1933
  • The World Over, 1936
  • Ghosts, 1937

[edit] Poetry

  • Verses, 1878
  • Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse, 1909
  • Twelve Poems, 1926

[edit] Non-Fiction

  • The Decoration of Houses, 1897
  • Italian Villas and Their Gardens, 1904
  • Italian Backgrounds, 1905
  • A Motor-Flight Through France, 1908 (travel)
  • Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort, 1915 (war)
  • French Ways and Their Meaning, 1919
  • In Morocco, 1920 (travel)
  • The Writing of Fiction, 1925 (essays on writing)
  • A Backward Glance, 1934 (autobiography)

[edit] As Editor

  • The Book of the Homeless, 1916

[edit] Additional publications

[edit] Further reading

  • Shari Benstock (1994) No Gifts From Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton
  • 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.
  • Lowry, Elizabeth (December 2008). "What Edith Knew: Freeing Wharton from the Master's Shadow". Harper's Magazine 317 (1903): 96-100, 102. 
  • Cynthia Griffin Wolff (1977) A Feast of Words

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b "Edith Wharton, 75, Is Dead in France". New York Times. August 13, 1937. http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0124.html. Retrieved on 2007-07-21. "Edith Wharton, American novelist, died yesterday afternoon at her villa, Pavilion Colombes [sic], near Saint Brice, Seine-et-Oise." 
  2. ^ Benstock, Shari. No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. (New York: Scribner's, 1994), 26.
  3. ^ Edith Wharton, Ogden Codman, Pforzheimer Bruce Rogers Collection (Library of Congress) (1897). The Decoration of Houses. Charles Scribner's Sons. http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=rtMDAAAAYAAJ&dq=edith+wharton+codman&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=Rd4FvSeOqT&sig=Zw_q7Me4kWJJvYfsLJZ138LMhjw. 
  4. ^ New York Times, February 23, 2008. Retrieved on 2/26/08, "Landmark Massachusetts Building Where Wharton Wrote Faces Foreclosure".
  5. ^ No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton, Shari Benstock, University of Texas Press, 2004
  6. ^ Photograph of Edith Wharton, Teddy Wharton, Henry James and Chauffeur Charles Cook, A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton, Carol J. Singley, Oxford University Press, 2003
  7. ^ Wegener, Fredrick "Rabid Imperialist"': Edith Wharton and the Obligations of Empire in Modern American Fiction, American Literature 72: 4
  8. ^ Nelson, Randy F. The Almanac of American Letters. Los Altos, California: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1981: 9. ISBN 086576008X
  9. ^ Entry for Edith Wharton written by Judith E. Funston in American National Biography, New York, Oxford University Press, 1999, Vol 23, pp. 111–112. ISBN 0-19-512802-8.
  10. ^ Domaine du Pavillon Colombe à Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt (95)

[edit] External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about:
Sister project Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Edith Wharton
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Persondata
NAME Wharton, Edith
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Jones, Edith Newbold
SHORT DESCRIPTION American novelist, short story writer, designer
DATE OF BIRTH January 24, 1862
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH August 11, 1937
PLACE OF DEATH
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Wharton"
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