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| Edith Wharton |
Today, The Grandma is resting at home. The weather is better than yesterday but it is still bad and she has decided to read a little and relax.
She has received the visit of Jordi Santanyí, one of her closest friends. Jordi and The Grandma love Literature and they have been talking about Edith Wharton, the American novelist, short story writer, playwright, and designer, who was born on a day like today in 1862.
Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862-August 11, 1937) was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper class New York aristocracy to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1921. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996.
Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862 to George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander at their brownstone at 14 West Twenty-third Street in New York City. To her friends and family she was known as Pussy Jones. She had two older brothers, Frederic Rhinelander, who was 16, and Henry Edward, who was 12. She was baptized April 20, 1862, Easter Sunday, at Grace Church.
Wharton wrote and told stories from an early age. When her family moved to Europe and she was just four or five she started what she called making up. She invented stories for her family and walked with an open book, turning the pages as if reading while improvising a story.
More information: BBC
Wharton began writing poetry and fiction as a young girl, and attempted to write her first novel at age eleven. Her mother's criticism quashed her ambition and she turned to poetry. At age 15, her first published work appeared, a translation of a German poem Was die Steine Erzählen, What the Stones Tell by Heinrich Karl Brugsch, for which she was paid $50.
Her family did not want her name to appear in print, since writing was not considered a proper occupation for a society woman of her time. Consequently, the poem was published under the name of a friend's father, E. A. Washburn, a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson who supported women's education. In 1877, at the age of 15, she secretly wrote a 30,000 word novella Fast and Loose.
In 1878 her father arranged for a collection of two dozen original poems and five translations, Verses, to be privately published. Wharton published a poem under a pseudonym in the New York World in 1879.
In 1880 she had five poems published anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly, an important literary magazine. Despite these early successes, she was not encouraged by her family or her social circle, and though she continued to write, she did not publish anything more until her poem The Last Giustiniani was published in Scribner's Magazine in October 1889.
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| Edith Wharton |
Between 1880 and 1890 Wharton put her writing aside to perform as debutante and socialite. Wharton keenly observed the social changes happening around her which appeared later in her writing. Wharton officially came out as a debutante to society in 1879.
Wharton was allowed to bare her shoulders and wear her hair up for the first time at a December dance given by a wealthy socialite, Anna Morton. Wharton began a courtship with Henry Leyden Stevens, the son of a wealthy businessman. Henry's father was Paran Stevens, a hotelier and real estate investor from rural New Hampshire. His sister Minnie Stevens Paget married Arthur Paget (British Army officer). Wharton's family did not approve of Stevens.
In the middle of Wharton's debutante season, the Jones family returned to Europe in 1881 for Wharton's father's health. Wharton's father, George Frederic Jones, died in Cannes in 1882 of a stroke. Stevens was with the Wharton family in Europe during this time. Wharton and her mother returned to the United States and Wharton continued her courtship with Stevens, announcing their engagement in August 1882. The month the two were to marry, the engagement abruptly ended.
Wharton's mother, Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander, moved back to Paris in 1883 and lived there until her death in 1901.
Wharton married in 1885 and began to build upon three interests -American houses, writing, and Italy.
On April 29, 1885, at
age 23, Wharton married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, who was 12 years
her senior, at the Trinity Chapel Complex. From a well-established
Boston family, he was a sportsman and a gentleman of the same social
class and shared her love of travel. The Whartons set up house at
Pencraig Cottage in Newport. They then bought and moved to Land's End on
the other side of Newport in 1893 for $80,000.
More information: WBUR
Wharton decorated Land's End with the help of designer Ogden Codman. The Whartons purchased their New York home, 884 Park Avenue, in 1897. They traveled abroad from February to June between 1886 and 1897 -mostly to Italy, but also to Paris and England.
From the late 1880s until 1902, Teddy Wharton suffered from acute depression, and the couple ceased their extensive travel. At that time his depression manifested as a more serious disorder, after which they lived almost exclusively at their estate The Mount. During those same years, Wharton herself was said to suffer from bouts of depression and health issues with asthma.
In 1908 her husband's mental state was determined to be incurable. In the
same year, she began an affair with Morton Fullerton, a journalist for
The Times, in whom she found an intellectual partner. She divorced
Edward Wharton in 1913 after 28 years of marriage. Around the same time,
Edith was beset with harsh criticisms leveled by the naturalist
writers.
In addition to novels,
Wharton wrote at least 85 short stories. She was also a garden designer,
interior designer, and a taste-maker of her time. She wrote several
design books, including her first major published work, The Decoration
of Houses (1897), co-authored by Ogden Codman. Another of her home and
garden books is the generously illustrated Italian Villas and Their
Gardens of 1904.
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| Edith Wharton |
The Age of Innocence (1920) won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making Wharton the first woman to win the award.
The three fiction judges -literary critic Stuart Pratt Sherman, literature professor Robert Morss Lovett, and novelist Hamlin Garland- voted to give the prize to Sinclair Lewis for his satire Main Street, but Columbia University's advisory board, led by conservative university president Nicholas Murray Butler, overturned their decision and awarded the prize to The Age of Innocence. She was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928, and 1930.
Wharton
was friend and confidante to many gifted intellectuals of her time:
Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide were all her
guests at one time or another. Theodore Roosevelt, Bernard Berenson, and
Kenneth Clark were valued friends as well. Particularly notable was her
meeting with F. Scott Fitzgerald, described by the editors of her
letters as one of the better known failed encounters in the American
literary annals. She spoke fluent French, Italian, and German, and many
of her books were published in both French and English.
On June 1, 1937, Wharton was at the French country home of Ogden Codman, where she was at work on a revised edition of The Decoration of Houses, when she suffered a heart attack and collapsed.
Edith
Wharton later died of a stroke on August 11, 1937 at Le Pavillon
Colombe, her 18th-century house on Rue de Montmorency in
Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt. She died at 5:30 p.m., but her death was not
known in Paris. At her bedside was her friend, Mrs. Royall Tyler.
Wharton was buried in the American Protestant section of the Cimetière des Gonards in Versailles, with all the honors owed a war hero and a chevalier of the Legion of Honor...a group of some one hundred friends sang a verse of the hymn 'O Paradise'...
More information: The Guardian
Many of Wharton's novels are characterized by subtle use of dramatic irony. Having grown up in upper-class, late-19th-century society, Wharton became one of its most astute critics, in such works as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.
American children's stories containing slang were forbidden in Wharton's childhood home. This included such popular authors as Mark Twain, Bret Harte or Uncle Remus. She was allowed to read Louisa May Alcott but Wharton preferred Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Charles Kingsley's Water Babies.
Wharton's mother forbade her from reading many novels and Wharton said she read everything else but novels until the day of my marriage. Instead Wharton read the classics, philosophy, history, and poetry in her father's library including Daniel Defoe, John Milton, Thomas Carlyle, Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Jean Racine, Thomas Moore, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, John Ruskin, and Washington Irving.
Biographer Hermione Lee describes Wharton as having read herself out of Old New York and her influences included Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, T. H. Huxley, George Romanes, James Frazer, and Thorstein Veblen. These influenced her ethnographic style of novelization. Wharton developed a passion for Walt Whitman.
More information: Freeditorial
I have never known a novel that was good enough
to be good in spite of its being adapted
to the author's political views.
Edith Wharton
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