Edith Wharton

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Edith Wharton

• Legendary American Female Writer

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Ediths Early Years

• Born January 24th, 1862
• Edith Newbold Jones
• Born into wealthy NY family
• Grew up in NY Europe
• Educated by private tutors
• Began writing at young age with no parental
  support

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Incurably Ugly

• Married Edward Teddy Wharton at 23
• Family friend
• Wealthy
• Loved sports outdoors unlike Edith
• Spent summers in Newport, RI in house called
  Lands End
• She called it incurably ugly and hired interior
  decorators
• Later, she wrote her first book on interior design

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The Mount

• Next project was house called the Mount
• Built in Lenox, MA
• Her refuge
• Window into New England Society
• Home in the US for more than 10 years

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Whartons Literary Life

• 1st major successful novel The House of Mirth
  about wealthy NY society
• Brought her instant recognition
• Moved to France continued to write and form
  friendships w/other others like Henry James
• Literary life grew but personal life floundered
  husband suffered mental illness and they divorced

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Literary Life

• Sold the Mount moved to France
• Wrote best known work there Ethan Frome, The
  Age of Innocence, The Buccaneers
• Ethan Frome (American classic) was originally
  written in French

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Surprising Work

• Ethan Frome not about members of privileged
  class, Wharton knew so much about
• Spent years living in MA and had passed through
  small isolated villages like Starkfield setting
  of Ethan Frome
• This book imagines what it wouldve been like to
  live there

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For years I had wanted to draw life as it really
was in the derelict mountain villages of New
England, a life even in my time, and a
thousandfold more a generation earlier, utterly
unlike that seen through the rose colored
spectacles of my predecessors. Edith Wharton
Few books can have so surprised an authors
public as did Ethan Frome in 1911. For more than
a decade Mrs. Whartons fiction had dealt
exclusively with metropolitan and cosmopolitan
society, with a world whose pivots were money and
luxury and art and beautyyet in Ethan Frome she
accopmplished something as bleak and simple as a
sketch of Sarah Orne Jewett. E.K. Brown
author of Edith Wharton The Art of the
Novel
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Later Life and Awards

• Lived in France during WWI
• Avid supporter of the Allies
• 1916 France honored her with the cross of the
  Legion dhonneur
• 7 years later she was first female grand officer
  of the Legion

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Later Life and Awards

• 1921- 1st woman to win Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
  (The Age of Innocence)
• Received honorary degree from Yale
• Received Pulitizer Prize for Drama
• Died in 1937 w/more honors than any other
  American woman writer