Edith Wharton
Edith Newbold Jones was born on January 24, 1862, into one of the oldest and wealthiest families in New York City — a family so socially prominent that the expression “keeping up with the Joneses” may have originated as a reference to her relatives. She was educated by governesses and tutors, traveled extensively in Europe, and was launched into New York society as a debutante in 1879. She married Edward “Teddy” Wharton, a Boston socialite, in 1885, in a union that would prove deeply unhappy — Teddy eventually developed severe mental illness — and the marriage was finally dissolved in 1913. These experiences of upper-class social constraint, of women trapped by wealth and convention, and of the penalties exacted from those who step outside the rules of their class, would furnish the central material of her fiction.
Wharton published her first major novel, The House of Mirth, in 1905, and it was immediately recognized as a work of the first order. The story of Lily Bart — beautiful, clever, and charming, yet unable to secure the wealthy marriage she needs to survive in the New York society she has been trained to inhabit — is one of the most searching studies in American fiction of the economic and social trap in which women of Wharton’s class and era were caught. Lily is destroyed not by melodramatic villainy but by the cumulative weight of social disapproval and financial necessity, and the novel’s ending is among the most devastating in American literature. Wharton followed it with Ethan Frome (1911), a bleaker, more compressed tragedy of poverty and thwarted desire in rural New England, and The Custom of the Country (1913), a satirical portrait of an American social climber of unstoppable ambition.
The Age of Innocence (1920), for which Wharton received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction — the first woman to receive the award — is widely regarded as her masterpiece. Set in the 1870s New York society of her own girlhood, it follows Newland Archer, an idealistic young lawyer engaged to a conventional young woman, who falls in love with her European-educated cousin Ellen Olenska, who has escaped a disastrous marriage. The novel is an elegy for and an indictment of a society so governed by convention that its members can destroy one another through pure social pressure, without a single act of deliberate cruelty.
Wharton was a close friend and aesthetic peer of Henry James, and their relationship has shaped much of the critical discussion of her work — sometimes to her disadvantage, as critics have measured her against James rather than evaluating her on her own terms. Her prose is elegant, precise, and deeply ironic, marshaling the formal tools of social comedy for purposes of tragic analysis. She was also a prolific and gifted writer of short fiction, travel writing, and literary criticism, and her book The Writing of Fiction (1925) remains a valuable document of her aesthetic principles.
Edith Wharton died on August 11, 1937, in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France, where she had lived for most of her adult life after the war. She was the most celebrated American woman novelist of the early twentieth century and is now recognized as one of the essential American writers of her era. The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence remain canonical texts, and Wharton’s unsparing analysis of class, gender, and social convention speaks with undiminished force to contemporary readers.
