WHARTON, EDITH

(1862-1937), author and philanthropist. Wharton was born into the wealthy "old New York" society of the late nineteenth century, and the atmosphere of her world permeates most of her work. She married a wealthy Bostonian and ostensibly settled into the life of the comfortable. But the marriage was not successful and the Whartons divorced in 1913.

Partly to release the energies confined by the rigid social strictures and anti-intellectualism of her aristocratic world, and later to relieve the unhappiness of her marriage, Wharton turned to writing. She privately printed her first book of poems in 1878, when she was sixteen. Wharton wrote two collections of short stories, The Greater Inclination (1899) and Crucial Instances (1901), and a book on interior decoration, The Decoration of Houses (1897), before publishing her first novel, The Valley of Decision, in 1902. By this time, Wharton had also formed a close personal and literary friendship with Henry James, and their work continues to be compared for similarities in both style and theme.

All her works were favorably reviewed, but Wharton did not receive critical acclaim until The House of Mirth appeared in 1905. Set in old New York in the first years of the twentieth century, The House of Mirth is a complex study of the rise and fall of the tragic heroine, Lily Bart, as she moves downward through the intricate class system of aristocratic New York. The novel is valuable not only for its study of human psychology but also for its depiction of the changing social patterns of a country undergoing rapid economic growth, and the consequent invasion of the nouveaux riches into this bastion of culture and what had become moral corruption.

The themes evident in The House of Mirth—the moral decay of an indolent society, the waste of treating women as decorative objects, the need for the social order to protect the values of decency, honesty, and commitment, the belief that the true dramas of history are worked out within the soul—characterized Wharton's work throughout the sixty years of her career. At her death she had published seventeen novels, seven novelettes, eleven volumes of short stories, and numerous miscellaneous works. Included in the novels was another masterpiece, the work for which she is best known, The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1921.

In her lifetime, Wharton endured the social upheavals perpetrated by the robber barons, the tremendous physical and psychic wounds of World War I (she won the Legion of Honor in 1916 for her refugee work), the frenetic healing of the 1920s, and the Great Depression. During much of this time she lived in France, satirically chronicling—with the advantages and disadvantages of distance—the disappearing world of the 1870s through the 1920s. Her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), is emblematic of her crisp, reticent style, her interest in the past, and her ability to foreshadow a time when women as artists, and as players, would be taken more seriously.

Because of the focus on women in most of her major fiction, Wharton's career had a revival in the 1980s, as critics came to realize that this artist who so often focused on an earlier culture had also predicted the new. Wharton's canon, then, remains valuable to students of history for what it reveals about a particular time and place in American culture and about the expatriates who fled it to live in Europe. It is valuable, too, for its revelations of the tragic aspects of human nature. As the New York Times said in her obituary, "There can be no reading of human character without ethics, no tragedy without conflict between things that matter. This Edith Wharton knew and never forgot, and by that token we know her for the artist she was."

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton's Argument with America (1980); R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975).

Marlene A. Springer

See also Expatriates and Exiles; Literature.