Edith Wharton

American · 1862 to 1937

Born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, into the old New York money of the Joneses and Rhinelanders, in a brownstone at 14 West 23rd Street in Manhattan, she was the family the saying "keeping up with the Joneses" is said to have meant. Tutors and European travel made her fluent in French, German, and Italian by adolescence. Her mother forbade her to read novels until she married, and she obeyed. She made a disastrous marriage in 1885 to the Boston banker Edward Wharton, twelve years her senior and increasingly ill with neurasthenia, and did not begin to publish seriously until her late thirties. The House of Mirth (1905), the slow social ruin of Lily Bart in a New York drawing room that no longer has any use for her, established her reputation. Henry James became her close friend and tireless correspondent. She built The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts, designed every room and garden of it, and made her own contribution to American letters as a writer on architecture and design. After her divorce in 1913 she settled permanently in France. During the First World War she organised hostels, sewing rooms, and clinics for refugees and tubercular soldiers in Paris and was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour for the work. The Age of Innocence (1920), the story of Newland Archer caught between two women and the codes of old New York, made her in 1921 the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She wrote more than forty books across novels, ghost stories, travel, and design. She died at her villa Pavillon Colombe in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt on August 11, 1937, at seventy-five.