Edith Wharton

Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones in Manhattan in 1862, into a family so established that keeping up with the Joneses is said to describe her father's relations. Governesses raised her through years of travel across Europe, where she picked up fluent French, German and Italian and nearly died of typhoid at nine in the Black Forest. Her mother forbade her to read novels until she married. Her first publication, at 15, was a translated poem, printed under a man's name because writing was not considered proper work for a woman of her class. At 23 she married Edward Wharton, a genial Bostonian twelve years older, and settled into the life that was expected of her.

The marriage stalled quickly. Teddy Wharton had no interest in her writing and, from the late 1880s, a worsening depression that eventually confined them to The Mount, the house she designed herself in Lenox, Massachusetts. She did not publish a novel until she was forty, then made up the delay fast: The House of Mirth in 1905, Ethan Frome in 1911, The Age of Innocence in 1920, fifteen novels in all besides the stories and the travel writing. The Age of Innocence won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, making her the first woman to receive it, after Columbia's advisory board overruled judges who had voted for Sinclair Lewis. When war broke out in France in 1914, she stayed in Paris, ran refugee workrooms and hostels, and was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour for it in 1916.

None of this showed in the book she published about her own life. Teddy's depression worsened through the 1900s, and in 1908, with his condition already called incurable, Wharton began an affair with Morton Fullerton, a Times of London correspondent she found to be the intellectual match her husband never was. She divorced him in 1913, after twenty-eight years of marriage, at a time when divorce still cost a woman of her class real social standing. Her 1934 memoir, A Backward Glance, left out her mother's coldness, the marriage, and Fullerton entirely, and gave the impression of a life lived mostly on the surface of good houses and good manners. The full picture only became public in 1968, when Yale opened her papers, three decades after she was no longer alive to object.

Wharton suffered a stroke and died on August 11, 1937, at Pavillon Colombe, her house outside Paris, and was buried in the American cemetery at Versailles with the honors due a war veteran and a Chevalier of the Legion. For decades she was filed as a chronicler of manners, the lesser shadow of her friend Henry James. That reading has not survived contact with the archive: the war relief work, the design writing, the divorce and the affair the 1934 memoir hid all reshaped her into a harder and more interesting figure than the one she allowed the public to see while she was alive. She entered the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996.

Edith Wharton's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Decoration of Houses book
  Co-written with the architect Ogden Codman 1897
• The House of Mirth book
  Her breakthrough novel, published at 43 1905
• Ethan Frome book
  A short, bleak novel set in rural Massachusetts 1911
• Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort book
  War reporting from repeated trips to the front lines 1915
• American Hostels for Refugees company
  Relief organization she founded and ran in Paris 1915
• The Age of Innocence book
  Won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for fiction 1920

• January 24, 1862 aged 0 Born Edith Newbold Jones in Manhattan
• 1878 aged ~16 Publishes her first work, a translated poem, under a man's name
• April 29, 1885 aged 23 Marries Edward "Teddy" Wharton
• 1905 aged ~43 Publishes The House of Mirth
• 1908 aged ~46 Begins an affair with Morton Fullerton
• 1913 aged ~51 Divorces Edward Wharton after 28 years of marriage
• 1921 aged ~59 Wins the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence The first woman to receive it, after the advisory board overruled judges who had voted for Sinclair Lewis.
• August 11, 1937 aged 75 Dies of a stroke at Pavillon Colombe, outside Paris
• 1968 aged ~106 Yale opens her papers, revealing the marriage and the affair her memoir hid

• Henry James 1843–1916
  Novelist whose intricate explorations of consciousness and society bridged American and European literature. close friend and correspondent
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. wrote the introduction to her war book
• Sinclair Lewis 1885–1951
  First American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, whose satirical novels critiqued American capitalism. lost the Pulitzer to her
• Mary Cassatt 1844–1926
  Impressionist painter and printmaker who depicted the intimate bonds between mothers and children. fellow American expatriate in France