A short life of the author
Edith Newbold Jones Wharton (1862–1937) was born on 24 January 1862 in New York City, into the highest reaches of old New York society — the “Four Hundred” who constituted the city’s social elite. Her family was wealthy, conservative, and philistine; her childhood was spent between brownstone New York, Newport, and extended European sojourns. She was educated by governesses, read voraciously, and began writing stories as a child, but her milieu regarded literary ambition in a woman as mildly embarrassing. The phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” derives, by popular account, from her family.
Life and Career
In 1885 she married Edward Robbins Wharton, a genial, sportsman-like Bostonian thirteen years her senior. The marriage was unhappy — Teddy Wharton suffered from mental illness and was eventually institutionalised — and Edith’s fiction is haunted by the theme of women trapped in loveless marriages by social convention. They divorced in 1913.
Wharton’s literary career began late. Her first novel, The Valley of Decision (1902), a historical romance set in eighteenth-century Italy, was well received but unremarkable. The House of Mirth (1905) was the breakthrough: the story of Lily Bart, a beautiful but poor young woman whose attempt to navigate New York’s marriage market ends in social disgrace and death. It was a sensation — a bestseller that was also a work of genuine literary art.
Ethan Frome (1911), a stark New England novella about a farmer trapped in a loveless marriage who falls in love with his wife’s cousin, demonstrated Wharton’s range beyond the drawing room. The Custom of the Country (1913), the picaresque story of the ruthlessly ambitious Undine Spragg, is Wharton’s most satirically devastating novel. The Age of Innocence (1920), set in the 1870s New York of her parents’ generation, is her masterpiece and won the Pulitzer Prize — the first awarded to a woman.
Wharton settled permanently in France in 1907 and became a prominent figure in Parisian intellectual life. During the First World War she organized relief efforts for Belgian refugees and was awarded the French Legion of Honour. She was a close friend of Henry James, who regarded her as his most gifted contemporary. She died on 11 August 1937 at her estate near Paris.
Major Works and Themes
Wharton’s subject is the collision between individual desire and social convention — the ways in which old New York’s rigid codes of behaviour constrain, punish, and sometimes destroy those who violate them. Her novels are studies in the exercise of social power, particularly the power exercised over women, and her heroines — Lily Bart, Ellen Olenska, Undine Spragg — are among the most vividly drawn in American fiction.
The House of Mirth (1905) traces Lily Bart’s descent from the heights of New York society to poverty and death with the precision of a naturalist and the compassion of a moralist. It is one of the great tragic novels.
The Age of Innocence (1920) is Wharton’s most perfectly crafted novel: Newland Archer’s passion for the unconventional Countess Olenska is thwarted by the immense, invisible pressures of New York tribal society. The novel’s irony is double: the society that destroys passion also preserves civilisation.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Wharton was a major figure in her lifetime but was often condescended to as a Henry James imitator or a novelist of “merely” social manners. Feminist criticism since the 1970s has established her as a great American novelist in her own right — the equal of James in psychological insight and his superior in social range. She is now recognised as one of the most important American writers of the first half of the twentieth century.
Key Works
- The House of Mirth (1905)
- Ethan Frome (1911)
- The Custom of the Country (1913)
- Summer (1917)
- The Age of Innocence (1920)
- The Mother’s Recompense (1925)
- A Backward Glance (1934, autobiography)
Collecting Wharton
Edith Wharton is one of the most actively collected American women writers, with a bibliography that spans four decades of Scribner’s and Appleton editions.
The House of Mirth (1905, Scribner’s, New York) is the most sought-after Wharton first edition. The first edition in red cloth with the original dust jacket brings $2,000–$8,000. The jacket, which rarely survives in good condition, is essential for premium prices.
Ethan Frome (1911, Scribner’s) first editions in the jacket bring $1,000–$4,000.
The Age of Innocence (1920, D. Appleton, New York) is the Pulitzer Prize novel. First editions in the original jacket bring $1,000–$5,000.
The Custom of the Country (1913, Scribner’s) first editions bring $500–$2,000.
The Decoration of Houses (1897, Scribner’s), Wharton’s first book (co-authored with Ogden Codman Jr.), is an architectural treatise rather than a novel but is collected as the first publication. Fine copies bring $500–$2,000.
Wharton signed copies are scarce. She was not a prolific signer in the public-event sense, and signed or inscribed copies carry a significant premium. Her letters — many of them published in R.W.B. Lewis’s comprehensive biography — are of high literary value; they surface at auction at $500–$5,000. The major Wharton archives are at the Beinecke Library (Yale) and the Lilly Library (Indiana).