Edith Wharton - Infinite Women

Born: 24 January 1862, United States
Died: 11 August 1937
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Edith Newbold Jones

The following is excerpted from Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women. Written by Joseph Adelman, published 1926 by Ellis M Lonow Company.

Edith Wharton, an American novelist, born in New York, married to Edward Wharton of Boston, and has lived much abroad, chiefly in Paris. She has written many novels and short stories notable for their clean-cut brilliance and finished artistry. Among her best known stories are: The Valley of Decision, Sanctuary, The Greater Inclination and The Custom of the Country.
The House of Mirth, published in 1906, made a deep impression, and that novel in point of characterization, and as finely executed picture of a phase of American society, is probably her highest achievement in fiction.
In 1915 Mrs. Wharton wrote Fighting France, and edited The Book of the Homeless, to which well-known writers and illustrators contributed in order to aid the Belgian refugees whom the German invasion had brought to want. In other ways she did much for sufferers from the great war in 1916, being rewarded by the cross of the French Legion of Honor.

This biography is shared from The Dictionary of Art Historians, part of the Duke Digital Art History and Visual Culture Research Lab, in line with the Creative Commons licensing. See below for full attribution.

Writer whose early work focused art topics. Edith Newbold Jones was born to a prominent New York family, George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Rhinelander. Her private education included travel to Europe. In 1885 she married Edward “Teddy” Robbins Wharton of Brookline, Massachusetts. The socialite Teddy and intellectual Edith were mismatched from the start. Edith continued her trips to Europe–escaping the social scene of New York–where she met authors and art historians, including Violet Paget (“Vernon Lee”) and Bernard Berenson. After commissioning the architect Ogden Codman, Jr. (1863-1951) remodel her Newport, RI, home, Wharton co-wrote her first book in 1898, The Decoration of Houses. The architectural and home-decoration guide was influential among decorators and designers. Wharton demonstrated her technique by commissioning a house designed upon these principals in Lenox, MA, called “the Mount,” in 1901, though she and Codman disagreed so much on the home that she dismissed him for Francis Laurens Vinton Hoppin (1866-1941). Wharton wrote Italian Villas and their Gardens in 1904, her second art history, a survey of Italian Renaissance gardens and their villas. The work was inspired by an 1897 work by Paget/Lee, to whom she dedicated it. The book contained original illustrations by Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966), which unfortunately in keeping with Parrish’s style, are too fairly-tale-like to complement the accuracy of her text. The following year, her book Italian Backgrounds appeared. This work, with drawings by E. C. Peixotto (1869-1940), takes the imaginative approach that Italy, much like its art, must be studied both through its formal foreground (known through its guidebooks) as well as its background, the province of what she termed “the dreamer” and student. In a style popular with fin-de-siécle travel literature, village and architectural description is interspersed with speculative rambling on dating, provenance and attribution of art. Though Wharton left art writing after this to concentrate on literature, she remained exceedingly close to the art-historical community in Europe and the United States. A portrait of the art historian John C. Van Dyke as “Ned Van Alstyne” appears in her House of Mirth. She settled permanently in France in 1907. It was Wharton who secured Berenson work during World War I in Italy as a negotiator and translator. Wharton divorced Teddy in 1928, after an affair with the journalist, Morton Fullerton (1865-1952), the events of which are contained in her most famous novel, Ethan Frome, 1911. She lived between two homes she renovated in France, the Pavillon Colombe in Saint-Brice-Sous-Fôret and the Chateau Sainte-Claire in Hyères, on the French Riviera. She died after several strokes in her Saint-Brice-Sous-Fôret home and is buried at the Cimetière des Gonards in Versailles. Wharton’s art-historical writing consists of documenting period styles and gleaning their principles to a wider audience. The Decoration of Houses was written to promote standards home decoration by emphasizing architectural principals of architectural proportion and the eschewing needless ornament. Italian Villas again emphasized the harmony of design of the Italian garden and its relationship to the villa and native landscape. She died in the vicinity of Pavillon Colombe, Saint-Brice-Sous-Fôret, Paris.

Citation: “Wharton, Edith.” Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/whartone/.

The following is republished from the National Park Service. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).

The Mount, designed by Edith Wharton in 1902, documents the wide ranging talents of one of the finest American novelists of the 20th century. In 1897, Edith Wharton, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, co-authored The Decoration of Houses, with Boston architect Ogden Codman, Jr. Now considered one of the seminal works of professional interior design, this book clearly presents Wharton’s strong views about good taste and moderation. These views were successfully translated into her own new home, The Mount. During an era of flamboyant house decoration, Wharton designed an airy, informal mansion with many design elements drawn from the houses of continental Europe.

Wharton also collaborated with her niece Beatrix Farrand, an acclaimed landscape architect, to design the gardens and landscaping of The Mount. One of America’s great writers, Wharton wrote her first major work, The House of Mirth (1905), “a novel of manners” that described the tensions between New York’s “old” 19th-century elite society and the emerging economic power of industrialists and financiers while at The Mount. The cold Massachusetts’ winters spent there inspired Wharton’s 1911 Ethan Frome.

After Wharton and her husband sold The Mount in 1911, Wharton refused to visit the house as “a stranger.” She continued to write in her new home in Europe and in 1921 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence. In 1923, Wharton became the first woman to receive an honorary degree of doctorate of letters from Yale University. The Mount survived as the Foxhollow School for Girls until the 1970s and was later purchased and saved from neglect by Edith Wharton Restoration, Inc. through a grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation.