After being a skeptic of Edith Wharton, probably holding a distorted impression of her writing based on her old-fashioned name and stuffy era, I fell madly in love. (It was an experience I began to exuberantly chronicle here, here, and here). I care for The House of Mirth best, but The Age of Innocence had me rapt as well. Her New York Stories sit on my bookshelf like a pile of gold. Wharton writes with rare wisdom and wit. She writes about class like no one else can; with ease, she both satirizes social pretensions, while keeping her sharp eye on the very desperate stakes of money (and, relatedly, for her time in particular, marriage).
Today is the author's 150th birthday. Edith was born into the well-off Jones family in New York City -- the very family that the phrase 'keeping up with the Jones'' is said to have come from. She married, wrote fiercely and frequently, established herself as a designer and decorator with her famed home at The Mount, and traveled. When she divorced shortly after Ethan Frome was published in 1911, she moved to France to live out the rest of her life. During World War I, she immersed herself in relief efforts, which in part inspired her editing of The Book of the Homeless, an eclectic collection of poems, essays, pictures, and (rumor has it; I haven't seen a copy), erotica. Contributos included Joseph Conrad, Jean Cocteau, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Maurice Maeterlinck, George Santayana, Igor Stravinsky, and W.B. Yeats; Theodore Roosevelt wrote the introduction. For her relief work, she was awarded the French Legion of Honor and other decorations.
In 1921, Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, her novel of desire. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer. Edith Wharton died in 1937 after a stroke, and she is buried in France. Altogether, she wrote forty books in forty years, including novels, short stories, poetry, anthologies, and nonfiction on architecture, gardens, interior design, and travel.
In The New York Times, Wharton is viewed through the legacy of strategic cross-Atlantic courtships. A photo essay walks us through Wharton's life in Old New York. The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts, is kicking off a year-long celebration of Wharton and her writing. The Telegraph pays tribute to Wharton as a "genius on sex, love, and class." Hermione Lee's biography of Edith Wharton was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award and remains on my must-read list.
I like the idea of feeling grateful for Wharton on the occasion of her birthday by spending a bit of time with her own words. While best served as part of the whole novel, here are a few excerpts that had me reaching for my pen and little not-so-blank book while I was reading Wharton.
From The Age of Innocence:
But when he had gone the brief round of her, he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of facetious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and lon-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.
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It was the traditional maidenly interrogation, and he felt ashamed of himself for finding it singularly childish. No doubt she simply echoed what was said for her; but she was nearing her twenty-second birthday, and he wondered at what age "nice" women began to speak for themselves.
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Winsett was not a journalist by choice. He was a pure man of letters, untimely born in a world that had no need of letters; but after publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations, of which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away, and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per contract) to make room for more marketable material, he had abandoned his real calling, and taken a sub-editorial job on a women's weekly, where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.
On the subject of "Hearth-Fires" (as the paper was called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up. His conversations always made Archer take the measure of his own life, and feel how little it contained; but Wimsett's, after all, contained still less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests and curiousities made their talks exhilarating, their exchange of views usually remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism.
Image Credit: Joe Sheriffius