Books by and for independent women

Bookish Birthdays: Edith Wharton

On 24th January 1862, as the United States was in the grip of civil war, one of New York’s most distinguished families celebrated the birth of a baby girl, Edith Newbold Jones, in their elegant townhouse on West 23rd Street.

Their opulent home is now a Starbucks, but the child they welcomed is still remembered as one of America’s greatest writers, under her married name: Edith Wharton.

As a member of the upper tier of American society at a time of colossal economic expansion, Edith Jones was granted a life of privilege which she embraced as enthusiastically as her peers.

After she married the equally well-to-do Teddy Wharton at the age of 23, the couple travelled the world together.

When her husband began to suffer with severe depression which curtailed their global adventuring, Edith began to focus more on her intellectual interests.

She embraced design, gardening and literature, and had the money and time to turn her enthusiasms to practical effect. She published her first book, a manual of interior design, in 1897 and was able to put her theories into practice in spectacular fashion by building her own estate in Massachusetts.

The Decoration of Houses was soon followed up by her first work of fiction, the short story collection The Greater Inclination (1899), and a novel, The Touchstone (1900). She would remain an extremely prolific author for the rest of her life, publishing over 40 books in the next 37 years.

Her work, for the most part, draws inspiration from her own life, dealing with the experience of the American aristocracy at the end of the nineteenth century, but her eye is both critical and empathetic and she is acutely aware of the ironic confinement which comes with wealth and privilege.

She manages to find a pitch of tragedy in the lives which can be stifled by the mores of high society. Characters like Lily Bart in The House of Mirth (1905) and Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence (1920) are emotionally broken by the need to move within the rigid conventions of their class.

The gloomy conclusions she draws do not mean, however, that her books are hard-going affairs. Her prose is dense and intricate but her voice is consistently witty and she shares with Jane Austen an ability to skewer her characters’ pretensions with a straight face.

One of her most popular novels, The Custom of the Country (1913), is a satire on a ruthless social climber, the beautiful but monstrous Undine Spragg, which is in its savage comedy comparable to an American Vanity Fair.

While Wharton’s characters often lose their struggles with society, she herself seemed to transcend it. She was a leading figure in the bohemian literary circles of the time.

She was a friend to Henry James and André Gide, and began a long-running affair with a journalist, Morton Fullerton (the inspiration for Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove). In 1911 she moved to France, where she would live for the rest of her life, and from where she would divorce Teddy a few years later.

Having been born into one war, she found herself in the thick of another in 1914 and was a leading light in Parisian charity work on behalf of refugees and the wounded. She was a strong advocate of American entry to the war, which she campaigned for through her journalism.

After 1918 she was firmly established, even from across the Atlantic, as the Grande Dame of American literature, a position confirmed by being, in 1921, the first woman ever to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

The reverence in which she was held doesn’t seem unreasonable for a woman who was born to great privilege but who augmented it at every opportunity with her own extraordinary intelligence, talent and ambition.

Recommended reading:

Much of Edith Wharton’s work is available in free electronic editions or cheaply second-hand. It’s hard to go wrong with any of her major books but The Custom of the Country and The Glimpses of the Moon are especially wonderful while among her less widely-read work, I particularly enjoyed the late pair of novels Hudson River Bracketed and The Gods Arrive.

Kate Phillips