Edith Wharton

American Writer -- Edith Wharton

A critic once described American writer Edith Wharton as a "self-made

man." She liked the comment and repeated it. Others said she was a product of

New York City. But the New York she wrote about was different from the New

York of those who came after her.

Edith Wharton was born in New York City in Eighteen-Sixty-Two. New York

then was several different cities. One New York was made up of people who

worked for a living. The other was much smaller. It was made up of families who

were so rich they did not need to work.

Edith was born into the wealthy New York. But there was a "right" wealthy

New York and a "wrong" wealthy New York. Among the rich there were those

who had been given money by parents or grandparents. Then there were those

who earned their own money, the newly rich.

Edith's family was from the "right" New Yorkers, people who had "old" money.

It was a group that did not want its way of living changed. It also was a group

without many ideas of its own. It was from this group that Edith Wharton created

herself.

Like many girls her age, Edith wrote stories. In one of her childhood stories,

a woman apologizes for not having a completely clean house when another

woman makes an unexpected visit. Edith's mother read the story. Her only

comment was that one's house was always clean and ready for visitors. Edith's

house always was.

Edith spent much of her childhood in Europe. She was educated by special

teachers, and not at schools.

If Edith's family feared anything, it was sharp social, cultural, and economic

change. Yet these were the things Edith would see in her lifetime.

The end of the Civil War in Eighteen-Sixty-Five marked the beginning of

great changes in the United States. The country that had been mostly agricultural

was becoming industrial. Businessmen and workers increasingly were gaining

political and economic power.

Edith Wharton saw these changes sooner than most people. And she

rejected them. To her, the old America was a victim of the new. She did not like

the new values of money replacing the old values of family.

In Eighteen-Eighty-Five, she married Edward Wharton. He was her social

equal. They lived together for twenty-eight years. But it was a marriage without

much love.

In Nineteen-Thirteen, she sought to end the marriage. That she waited so

long to do so, one critic said, was a sign of her ties to the idea of family and to

tradition.

Some critics think that Edith Wharton began to write because she found the

people of her social group so uninteresting. Others say she began when her

husband became sick and she needed something to do.

The fact is that Wharton thought of herself as a writer from the time she

was a child. Writing gave her a sense of freedom from the restrictions of her

social class.

Writing was just one of a series of things she did. And she did all of them

well. She was interested in designing and caring for gardens. She designed her

own house. She had an international social life and left a large collection of

letters at her death. In her lifetime she published about fifty books on a number

of subjects.

Many critics believe Edith Wharton should have written the story of her

social group. To do this, however, she would have had to remove herself from the

group to see it clearly. She could not do this, even intellectually. Her education

and her traditions made it impossible.

The subject of Edith Wharton's writing became the story of the young and

innocent in a dishonest world. She did not make a connection between her work

and her own life. What she had was the ability to speak plainly about emotions

that, until then, had been hidden.

She also was among the first American women writers to gain a sense of the

world as an evil place. "Life is the saddest thing," she wrote, "next to death."

To show that she could do more than just write stories, she wrote, with

Ogden Codman, The Decoration of Houses. It was very successful. About the

same time, her poems and stories also began to be published in Scribner's

Magazine.

In Eighteen-Ninety-Nine her collection of stories, The Greater Inclination,

appeared. It was an immediate success. When she was in London, she visited a

bookstore. The store owner, who did not know who she was, handed her the

book. He said to her, "This is what everyone in London is talking about now.

Three years later her first novel, The Valley of Decision, was published. Three

years after that she published her first great popular success, the novel, The

House of Mirth.

The House of Mirth is the story of a young woman who lacks the money to

continue her high social position. As in so many stories by Edith Wharton, the

main character does not control what happens to her. She is a victim who is

defeated by forces she does not fight to overcome.

This idea is central to much of Edith Wharton's best writing. The old families

of New York are in conflict with the newly rich families. The major people in the

stories are trapped in a hopeless struggle with social forces more powerful than

they. And they struggle against people whose beliefs and actions are not as

moral as theirs.

This is the situation in one of Wharton's most popular book, Ethan Frome,

published in Nineteen-Eleven. Unlike her other novels, it is set on a farm in the

northeastern state of Massachusetts. It is the story of a man and woman whose

lives are controlled, and finally destroyed, by custom. They are the victims of

society. They die honorably instead of fighting back.

If they were to reject custom, however, they would not be the people they

are. And they would not mean as much to each other.

In Nineteen-Thirteen, Wharton's marriage ended. It was the same year that

she published another novel that was highly praised, The Custom of the Country.

In it she discusses the effects of new wealth in the late Nineteenth Century on a

beautiful young woman.

Most critics agree that most of Edith Wharton's writing after Nineteen-

Thirteen is not as good as before that time. It was as if she needed the difficulties

of her marriage to write well. Much of her best work seems to have been written

under the pressure of great personal crisis. After her marriage ended her work

was not as sharp as her earlier writing.

In Nineteen-Twenty, however, she produced, The Age of Innocence. Many

critics think this is her best novel. In it she deals with the lack of honesty that lies

behind the apparent innocence of the New York social world. A man and woman

see their lives ruined because they have duties they cannot escape.

Edith Wharton received America's top writing award, the Pulitzer Prize, for

The Age of Innocence. A recent movie of The Age of Innocence created new

interest in her work.

In the later years of her life, Wharton gave more and more of her time to an

important group of diplomats, artists, and thinkers. Among her friends was the

American writer Henry James. She liked James as a man and as a writer. She often

used her car and driver to take him on short trips.

At one time, Henry James was hoping that his publisher would bring out a

collection of his many novels and stories. Wharton knew of this wish. And she

knew that the publisher thought he would lose money if he brought out such a

collection. She wrote to the publisher. She agreed to secretly pay the publisher to

print the collection of her friend's writings.

In Nineteen-Thirty, the American National Institute of Arts and Letters gave

Wharton a gold medal. She was the first woman to be so honored. Four years

later she wrote the story of her life, A Backward Glance. Edith Wharton died in

Nineteen-Thirty-Seven at one of the two homes she owned in France.