Maureen E. Montgomery

[In the following original essay, Montgomery discusses Wharton's life, career, awards and recognition, and overall body of work, while also examining the era in which Wharton wrote and the critical reception of her works.]

Wharton was born during the early part of the American Civil War and died on the eve of the Second World War, having actively participated in war relief work during the First World War. Abraham Lincoln occupied the White House during her infancy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was its resident in 1937. When she was born the horse was the most common form of travel, with steam trains and steamships providing the means for long-distance travel. She witnessed the birth of the automobile and took up this new form of transport with relish: shipping her motor-car to Europe and going on long motor trips through Italy and France. She crossed the Atlantic Ocean about sixty times and it was early in life that her love of Europe and its culture was nurtured. By the time she died, passenger travel by air was becoming well established, although she herself was never tempted to fly. She did not care much for moving pictures, even though some of the best-known Hollywood film studies purchased the film rights to some of her best-sellers. She abhorred the glare of electric light and tried to educate Americans on how best to light their rooms and she found it difficult to live without a telephone.

Wharton was born on 24 January 1862 in her parents' brownstone townhouse on West 23rd Street, in Gramercy Park, a fashionable quarter of Manhattan. Her father, George Frederic Jones, was a gentleman of leisure, living off the interest from investments in real estate and banks. Both her father and her mother, Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander, were descended from old New York families who could “trace their ancestry” back to English and Dutch colonial settlers. Of the various ancestors, most of whom were prosperous merchants, lawyers and bankers, Wharton had particular admiration for her great-grandfather, Major-General Ebenezer Stevens, who had participated in the Boston Tea Party of 1773 and fought in the War of Independence. She liked him for his gallantry, his energy and love of luxury. Wharton described her parents' generation as being blinded by a dull conformity and horrified by any irregularity, moral or financial. The usual routine of New York Society in the second-half of the nineteenth century was to spend the winter season in town and the summers at Newport, Rhode Island. The Joneses were no exception to this. And when their fixed income was a little stretched, like many of their social circle, they would travel around Europe, where they could live more cheaply.

Wharton was a late addition to the Jones family: her elder brother, Frederick, was sixteen and her younger brother, Henry, was eleven years old when she was born. A prominent figure in her childhood was her Irish nurse, “Doyley,” whom she fondly described in her memoirs as someone “who understands everything, feels everything, can arrange everything, and combines all the powers of the Divinity with the compassion of a mortal heart like one's own!”¹ Her earliest memories are of “sunny violet-scented” days in Rome, to where the family moved in 1866, rather than of New York. One of her favorite preoccupations as a young child was to “make up” stories. For this she had to be alone and hold a book (sometimes upside down) with dense black print for the words to flow.

On the family's return to New York in the summer of 1872, Wharton recoiled at the squalor of the city. Such feelings of dismay at the contrast between United States and Europe became almost routine for Wharton every time she returned, so it is perhaps not surprising that later in her life she went to live permanently in France. New York of the 1870s was a burgeoning city, attracting fortune-seekers and newly-minted millionaires from other parts of the country. Old New Yorkers, like the Jones, experienced the influx as an invasion and derided the vulgarity of the nouveaux riches. Lucretia Jones demonstrated her distaste for the showiness of these new arrivals by arranging for Edith to have her début into Society at the private ballroom of Mrs. Levi P. Morton, wife of a brilliant financier who later went into politics and served as the Governor for New York State. This was a formal occasion which traditionally took the form of a reception with a supper followed by dancing. Edith had to stand by her mother as she was introduced to members of her parents' social set and later recalled that “the evening was a long cold agony of shyness” for her. After the supper, she “cowered” beside her mother in speechless misery, “unable to accept the invitations to dance from the young men who were friends of her brothers.”² In spite of this apparent initial trauma and her impatience with the tedious formalities of a young débutantes social routine, Edith enjoyed her first social season being invited out to dinners given by the young married set. By the end of the summer season she had a beau, Harry Stevens, even though there is no mention of him in her autobiography.

Edith's relationship with Harry between 1880 and 1883 is somewhat shrouded in mystery. The problem was he was the son of—what Lucretia would have called—a “parvenu.” Harry Stevens's father, who had died in 1872, had been a hotel proprietor, owning the famous Parker House in Boston and Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. His mother was an ambitious Society hostess who scandalized matrons like Lucretia by hosting musical entertainments on Sunday evenings during the New York social season. Mrs. Stevens' keen social aspirations had led her, in the early 1870s, to take her daughter, Minnie, to Europe in the hope of capturing a titled husband. Although Minnie did not bag a hereditary peer, she did succeed in marrying into the family of the Marquis of Anglesey and in becoming a prominent hostess in the Prince of Wales's set. This was sufficient for Mrs. Stevens to make headway into New York's high society but not across the threshold of Lucretia Jones's home. Even though Edith's début in New York society was cut short by a recurrence of her father's ill health, necessitating the family's return, in the fall of 1880, to Europe, contact between Harry and Edith was maintained. In fact, it was Harry who accompanied Edith and her mother home to New York when George Jones died in Cannes in 1882. What then happened in the late summer and early fall of that year is not entirely clear. In August, Newport newspapers and the gossipy Society magazine, Town Topics, reported the couple's engagement; but two months later news appeared that the engagement was postponed. This would have been extremely embarrassing to the Joneses, not least because their private lives were being splattered across the press. It is possible that Mrs. Stevens was the prime actor in breaking the engagement either because she felt insulted that Edith's family had not accorded her social recognition or because she wanted to maintain control over the considerable property Harry had inherited from his father, control which she would have lost on his marriage. Town Topics unkindly reported, possibly at the behest of Mrs. Stevens, that the reason why the engagement had been broken was because Edith had “an alleged preponderance of intellectuality” and had literary ambitions, qualities disparaged by New York society. Such allegations were undoubtedly harmful to the marriage prospects of a young society woman in those days.

Lucretia managed to guide her daughter safely through this period and marry her off to a man whom Lucretia would have regarded as eminently suitable. It is from the utter lack of any commentary by Edith about her courtship with Teddy Wharton in her autobiography and the bluntness with which she announced, “At the end of my second winter in New York I was married,” that we may deduce a certain degree of pain if not trauma associated with this period in her early life. Edward Robbins Wharton was a Bostonian of modest independent means with no profession, who occupied his days socializing. Although he enjoyed travel, his interests were scarcely compatible with Edith's, but he was a close friend of her brother, Harry, and had known the family for more than ten years. Teddy asked for Edith's hand in marriage in January 1885 and, after Easter, the couple were married in a quiet ceremony at Trinity chapel by the Reverend Morgan Dix.

Wharton's relationship with her mother was never a close one and she had a lifelong struggle dealing with emotional intimacy. Lucretia could be incredibly cruel. Lucretia's disapproval of novels and obsession with propriety led her to disparage her daughter's nascent efforts at writing a novel with an “icy comment” that crushed her dream of writing fiction. On the other hand, Lucretia showed slightly more sympathy for Wharton's early efforts at writing poems—even though she only supplied her daughter with scraps of wrapping paper for her writing. She arranged for Wharton's first poems to be privately printed in 1878, but Wharton felt this to be a gross intrusion of her privacy. A couple of years later William Dean Howells published five of her poems in the prominent magazine, Atlantic Monthly, but did so anonymously—Lucretia would not allow her daughter's name to appear in print. It was another nine years before Wharton returned to writing poetry. In the meantime, as Wharton became the focus of her mother's attention during her début, she did her best to please Lucretia who lavished upon her only daughter clothes and jewelry but not love. Being a dutiful daughter, however, meant, in Lucretia's household, a high degree of repression of her natural instincts and passionate nature. One act of cruelty that had a lasting effect on Wharton's life and an impact on her psychological make-up was when Lucretia steadfastly refused to enlighten her daughter about the physical side of marriage. Wharton recalled in an early draft of her autobiography how cold and icy the encounter with her mother had been that day when she dared to ask her what would happen to her. Later, she would blame Lucretia for falsifying and misdirecting her whole life, and when she finally experienced a fulfilling sexual relationship at the age of 47 (with Morton Fullerton), she felt betrayed by her mother's stony silence and peremptory dismissal of her questions.³

Wharton began her married life with Teddy Wharton unprepared for sexual let alone emotional intimacy. Her difficulty in dealing with the situation manifested itself in the way she threw herself into organizing her homes and gardens and European travel—and in ill health. The damp climate of Newport brought on innumerable chest infections and asthma, which kept Teddy at a distance. Meanwhile Teddy preoccupied himself with sporting pleasures (hunting, fishing, golf and riding) and offered his wife little or no encouragement in pursuing her literary ambitions. For the first eight years of married life, the couple lived at Pencraig Cottage, across the avenue from Lucretia's house in Newport, spending four months of the year traveling around Italy. Then, in 1888, the Whartons' financial fortunes took a turn for the better when Wharton unexpectedly inherited a large sum of money from a distant cousin. She was able to purchase a townhouse in Manhattan on Park Avenue and a property in Newport. The mid-1890s were taken up with refurbishing these properties and led to the publication in 1897 of Wharton's first book, The Decoration of Houses, co-written with the architect, Ogden Codman, whom she had commissioned to remodel “Land's End.” Wharton also began to indulge her creative abilities more assiduously in her writing and, by the end of the decade, published her first volume of short stories, The Greater Inclination, with Charles Scribner. The book sold more than 3,000 copies and she was praised by critics as “that rare creative power called genius.”⁴ It was at this time that she established what was to be her lifelong routine: reserving the morning for writing in bed, with at least one of her dogs snuggled up beside her. She was encouraged in her literary endeavors by Edward Burlingame, the first editor of Scribner's, whom she described as her “first and kindest critic.”⁵

Invigorated by a tour around Italy with the French novelist and critic, Paul Bourget, and his wife, Minnie, Wharton returned to the United States in the fall of 1899 ready to embark on a historical novel set in eighteenth-century Italy. It was at this time that she decided to make Lenox her home. Nestled in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts, Lenox had become a fashionable country retreat and was also the country home of Teddy's mother and sister. In 1901 Wharton purchased a 113-acre property and hired Francis V. L. Hoppin to design a house, modeled on Christopher Wren's Belton House in Lincolnshire, England. Lenox provided Wharton with a much healthier climate and she suffered far less from all the debilitating ailments of the previous twelve years or so. Visitors to The Mount included historian Gaillard Lapsley, a lifelong friend, the writer and critic Percy Lubbock, and novelist Howard Sturgis, whom Wharton frequently visited in England at his Windsor home, “Qu'Acre.” She now entered upon the most productive period of her life, while maintaining an active social schedule and engaging in even more frequent overseas travel. Notwithstanding all the details that she had to attend to in supervising the design of her new house and garden, Wharton proceeded with her first novel, which appeared to favorable reviews at the beginning of 1902. After recovering from a brief physical relapse, she then began work on what was to become The House of Mirth. Work on her second novel was interrupted, however, by travels in Italy, during which she wrote articles for Century magazine on Italian villas and gardens, by work on her third collection of short stories, The Descent of Man and by her second novella, Sanctuary. She finally settled down in the summer of 1904 to work on The House of Mirth, although even then this did not cramp her desire to entertain in her new home. Her house guests that fall included Henry James on his first trip back to the United States in twenty years.

Wharton had first met James at a dinner at the Parisian home of a Bostonian water-colorist, in the late 1880s, but despite trying to attract his attention by wearing one of her latest designer gowns from Paris, she did not get to speak to him. The breakthrough came in 1900 after she had sent him a copy of The Greater Inclination. He acknowledged it, somewhat belatedly, but sent an encouraging note praising her work and inviting her to call on him. Both Wharton's sister-in-law, Minnie Cadwalader Jones, and the Bourgets helped to facilitate the contact between the two writers. Minnie sent James copies of Crucial Instances and The Touchstone, while Wharton herself sent him a copy of her first novel, which convinced him more than ever of her need to write about American society and, above all, he wrote to her: “Do New York!” They finally met in London, in December 1903, when James called on the Whartons at their hotel and lunched with them. He invited them to visit him at his home, Lamb House, in Sussex, which they did on their way back to the United States the following spring, and he promised to come and stay at The Mount later that year. Thereafter James became a lifelong friend.

During James's visit, he and Wharton explored the New England countryside in her new motor, a Pope-Hartford. Wharton's first experience of being in an automobile occurred in 1903 when she was working on Italian Villas and Their Gardens. The U. S. Ambassador to Italy, a personal friend, offered her a lift to the Villa Caprarola. She wrote in her autobiography that it was “blissful not to have to worry about tired horses or inconvenient trains” and she was immediately convinced of her need to have her own motor-car.⁶ She and Teddy purchased their first car, a secondhand Panhard-Levassor, in 1904 for motor tour around the south of France. Motoring around the countryside, whether in New England or in France and England, provided Wharton with material for not only her travel writings but also her fiction. She attributed her two New England novels, Ethan Frome and Summer to her motor excursions into the remoter parts of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, where the villages were “still bedrowsed in a decaying rural existence, and sad slow-speaking people living in conditions [had] hardly changed since their forbears held those villages against the Indians.”⁷ In 1908 Wharton published A Motor-Flight through France, based on two tours, one of which was made with Teddy and Henry James in March 1907. James had expressed envy on learning of her literary pilgrimage the year before to the home of George Sand (1804-76), the French novelist, at Nohant, and begged her to take him if she were to make another visit in her “Vehicle of Passion.” Edith willingly obliged and whisked James off to Nohant in “George,” named in honour of their mutual regard for the work of Sand.

It was Henry James who introduced Wharton to the young American journalist, Morton Fullerton, who briefly became her lover in 1909. Fullerton was working at the time as a correspondent in Paris for the London Times and had offered to assist her with the serialization of The House of Mirth, which had been translated into French. James had encouraged his protégé to visit Wharton at The Mount, which he did in October 1907 while on a lecture tour. Wharton had been intrigued by Fullerton when she first met him in Paris and felt a certain affinity with him. This grew into an obsessive passion during his visit to Lenox, and she began a secret journal, known as the Love Diary, in which she poured out her repressed emotions and sensuality. The flood gates had been opened and life was never to be the same.

Wharton was eager to be back in Paris and booked passage for herself and Teddy in December 1907. The previous winter she and Teddy had resolved to spend the winter months in Paris, “where I could see people who shared my tastes, and whence it was easy to go south for sunshine when the weather grew too damp for my husband.”⁸ During the next five months Fullerton was a frequent visitor at the Whartons' apartment in rue de Varenne and often accompanied Wharton to the theatre. After one evening at the theatre, in March, she wrote in her secret diary how she felt “for the first time that indescribable current of communication flowing between myself and someone else,” and commented: “This must be what happy women feel.”⁹ By this time in her married life, things had become unbearable with Teddy. Both his physical and mental health had begun to deteriorate and, in late March, he returned to the United States to take a cure at Hot Springs, Arkansas. Wharton's uncertainty about herself and the possibility of a relationship with Fullerton meant that she confined her innermost thoughts of passion to her diary. She was also extremely discreet when arranging meetings with him: she felt she was being watched by the domestic staff. As the time for her departure home approached, she decided to consummate the affair and had in mind a country inn, but Fullerton's work kept him in Paris. In an extraordinary act of self-revelation, just before she left Paris, Wharton handed her Love Diary to Fullerton to read. She wrote frequently to him, expressing her love, but he only responded sporadically and finally his letters ceased. They met when she returned to Paris in January 1909 and he gave her an account of the troubles he had been having with a woman who had been blackmailing him. Wharton, however, never knew the complete story, nor about Fullerton's various entanglements with a variety of women and men. In June, on the eve of his departure for New York, Fullerton and Wharton spent the night together in the Charing Cross Hotel, London.

The affair with Fullerton was a brief one. They saw each other again in England later that same summer but, once back in Paris, the difficulties of sustaining a discreet affair proved insuperable. Moreover, Teddy's health problems became critical and demanded more and more of Wharton's time and energy. Teddy had enjoyed reasonably good health up until about 1903, but then he began to experience violent mood swings. While Wharton reveled in her busy social life in Paris, hosting visits from members of her regular literary circle including Henry James, Walter Berry, Howard Sturgis, Percy Lubbock and Gaillard Lapsley, Teddy grew ever more irritable. He felt increasingly out of place amongst this intellectual set of his wife's and went on numerous trips out of Paris in search of cures. These would give him only a brief respite from his depression. His doctor expressed concern about his alternating moods of exaltation and lethargy and felt that he was better off at The Mount, “the one place in the world he is most fond of.”¹⁰

In December 1909, Wharton was devastated by the news that Teddy had been embezzling her money and speculating with her trust funds on the stock market. It was also at this time that he confessed that he had bought a house in Boston for his mistress, a woman thirty years his junior. Wharton's own description of her husband's illness, namely that “his sweetness of temper and boyish enjoyment of life struggled along against the creeping darkness of neurasthenia,” belied the danger to which she was at risk at this time. His instability meant that she could not be alone with him. Teddy's doctor advised that Teddy be admitted to a sanatorium, but Teddy's brother and sister were staunchly opposed to this, fearing he would take his own life just as their father had done in the McLean Hospital 17 years earlier.¹¹ Wharton did, however, manage to organize a two-month stay for Teddy at a clinic in Switzerland. Her close friends were deeply concerned for Wharton's own well-being and the devastating impact Teddy's illness was having on her. In May 1911 doctors finally diagnosed her high blood pressure, which had been giving her problems for some time and which was ultimately to lead to a series of heart attacks.¹² Her own physician advised that Teddy should not return directly home from the Swiss clinic, and so Wharton paid for Teddy to undertake a world tour with a family friend. In the summer of 1911 Wharton finally decided that the time had come to separate from her husband—James was among those who urged her to do so. And so she sold The Mount and permanently relocated to France.

Teddy's ill health had dominated Wharton's life for the past three years and had made it extremely difficult for her to focus on her writing. The years prior to Teddy's decline had been extraordinarily productive and the critical and financial success of The House of Mirth had firmly established her as a writer of note. She could command one thousand dollars for a short story, and, from 1912 onwards, at least fifteen-thousand dollars for a novel.¹³ However, sales for both Ethan Frome and The Reef, written during this stressful period, were disappointing and neither novel earned critical acclaim at the time. Still plagued by Teddy's instability, the final straw came when she learned from her close friends of his exploits with chorus girls. His antics also attracted the attention of the press. Wharton was forced to file for divorce and fled both Paris and the press. We can glimpse from her novel, The Custom of the Country, which she finally managed to complete in 1913 after working on it sporadically since 1907, how old New York felt about divorce as represented by the family of Ralph Marvell:

In their vocabulary the word “divorce” was wrapped in such a dark veil of innuendo as no ladylike hand would care to lift. They had not reached the point of differentiating divorces but classed them indistinctively as disgraceful incidents, in which the woman was always to blame, but the man, though her innocent victim, was yet inevitably contaminated. The time involved in the “proceedings” was viewed as a penitential season during which it behoved the family of the persons concerned to behave as if they were dead; yet any open allusion to the reason for adopting such an attitude would have been regarded as the height of indelicacy.¹⁴

It was during these trouble-filled years that Wharton began a lifelong friendship with the art connoisseur, Bernard Berenson and his wife, Mary Costelloe, sister of the poet Logan Pearsall Smith. Neither Bernard nor Mary had been initially taken with Wharton whose shyness which they mistook for hauteur they found off-putting. But the ice was broken after a dinner organized by historian Henry Adams in Paris in 1909 and, thereafter, Wharton and the Berenson became close friends. In 1913 Wharton and Bernard took off on a motor-trip of Germany, where they spent eight days in Berlin visiting museums and going to the opera and the theatre. They briefly met the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose poetry Wharton greatly admired but was too shy to tell him. It was in 1911 that Wharton made her first “pilgrimage,” as she called it, to the Berensons' home outside Florence, the Villa I Tatti. She particularly enjoyed being able to follow her normal daily routine there of writing in the mornings and going for walks or tours in the Tuscan countryside in the afternoons.

Wharton's love affair with France had begun with her earliest automobile tour in 1904 and thereafter France became her primary destination when visiting Europe. After January 1907, when she rented George Vanderbilt's Paris apartment, the rue de Varenne became her home until 1920. She remembered these times as “busy happy Parisian years,” despite her personal troubles. The rue de Varenne was a street of imposing eighteenth-century hôtels whose stony façades masked their luxurious aristocratic interiors. It was also in the heart of the most socially exclusive quartier in Paris, the Faubourg de St. Germain. In 1907/08 The House of Mirth appeared in translation in the Revue de Paris enabling that journal to enjoy, in Wharton's words, “a wild, fantastic, unprecedented success,” and there was considerable demand in France for translations of her short stories.¹⁵ Paul Bourget, who was himself lionized by the Parisian salons, had helped to introduce Wharton to French literary circles—“smoothing” her “social path.” She was particularly grateful to Bourget for introducing her to the Comtesse de Fitz-James, at whose home Wharton became a regular guest. She regarded Madame de Fitz-James's salon as the most distinguished in pre-war Paris and fondly remembered the hours spent there in the company of Paul Bourget, Henry James, the Abbé Mugnier, the novelist Abel Bonnard, and various poets and biographers:

The war broke up that company of friendly people; death followed on war, and now the whole scene seems as remote as if it had belonged to a past century, and I linger with a kind of piety over the picture of that pleasant gray-panelled room, with its pictures and soft lights, and arm-chairs of faded tapestry.

Things would never be the same after the First World War. The pre-war years were filled “with every charm and pleasure” and it was with a deep sense of loss that she recalled the “smiling suburbs unmarred by hideous advertisements, the unravaged cornfields of Millet and Monet, … the Champs-Elysées in their last expiring elegance, and the great buildings, statues and fountains withdrawn at dusk into silence and secrecy, instead of being torn from their mystery by the vulgar intrusion of flood-lighting”¹⁶

Wharton arrived back in Paris on 30 July 1914, after motoring around Spain with her old friend, Walter Berry. On 28 July Austro-Hungary had declared war on Serbia and, the next day, Germany had declared war on Russia. “Everything,” she wrote in her memoirs, “seemed strange, ominous and unreal, like the yellow glare which precedes a storm. There were moments when I felt as if I had died, and waked up in an unknown world. And so I had. Two day later war was declared.”¹⁷ France rapidly mobilized itself for war. From inside a restaurant on Saturday, 3 August, Wharton and Berry looked on as a huge wave of conscripts and their families walked to the railway stations. Outside the crowds sang war songs, inside the restaurant the patrons sang the Marseillaise and the British and Russian national anthems. Paris was rapidly deserted: motor cars, taxis, vans, and trains were requisitioned for transporting troops to the front. Most shops, restaurants and hotels were closed; some hotels were transformed rapidly into makeshift hospitals. “In a night, as it seemed” Wharton wrote, “the whole city was hung with Red Crosses.”¹⁸

Wharton made arrangements to go to England, anticipating at that stage that it would be over in six weeks. Before she left, however, the Comtesse d'Haussonville, one of the branch presidents of the French Red Cross, asked if she would set up a work-room for unemployed women. She quickly raised funds from the Americans she knew still in Paris, obtained an empty flat in her neighborhood, and employed about 90 women making fashionable lingerie for one franc (20 cents) a day and a hot meal. Wharton obtained orders from her friends in Paris and later organized orders from the United States in order to provide these women with a livelihood during the war years. Within a couple of weeks of setting up her ouvroir, she obtained her visa for England and took the ferry from Calais to Folkestone, where she was met by Henry James. It had been part of her original plans for the summer to lease the home of the English writer, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, and, back in July, she had sent her servants ahead. Once ensconced in the English countryside at Stocks, Wharton was chomping at the bit for news of the war. With no radio then, disrupted deliveries of London newspapers, and no telephone at Stocks, she was eager to return to Paris, but civilian travel was heavily restricted as the Allied Powers geared up for a major battle north of Paris. Thousands of additional French and British troops were rushed to the front to stop the German advance on Paris. The Battle of the Marne began on 6 September and during the course of the next six days the Allied forces managed to repulse the Germans, with both sides sustaining heavy casualties. Paris was saved but both armies now engaged in protracted trench warfare for the next four years. During this time neither side made any significant territorial gain but 8 million men died.

On 24 September Wharton recrossed the Channel and quickly reopened her ouvroir which had been in disarray since the days of the German advance on Paris. The huge numbers of refugees displaced by the fighting were a humanitarian crisis taxing the resources of the beleaguered city. Wharton worked with Charles de Bos, the translator of The House of Mirth, writer André Gide, and her close friends, Geoffrey Scott and Percy Lubbock, to meet the needs of the refugees for food, shelter, clothing and medical care. She established the “American Hostels for Refugees,” starting with three houses, one of which was used as a restaurant to feed 550 people a day. The work soon expanded to include classes for the children, English language classes for the adults, and an employment agency to help the refugees start their lives anew. From this point on, Wharton committed her prodigious energy to alleviating the plight of refugees, the homeless and the unemployed. It was also at this time that Wharton renewed her acquaintance with Royall and Elisina Tyler, who offered their help and who worked closely with her, especially Elisina, in organizing various charities and raising funds.

The Battle of Ypres in October 1914 led to another flood of Belgian refugees. Wharton made concerted efforts to raise money in the United States, writing articles for New York newspapers. She enlisted the help of her sister-in-law, Minnie Jones, who set up a string of fund-raising committees in New York, Boston, Baltimore and Washington, D. C. During the first half of 1915 Wharton made several trips to the battle front. In February, she and Walter Berry, then President of the American Chamber of Commerce, drove to Verdun in Wharton's Mercedes with food and medical supplies. The French Red Cross asked her to report on the needs of military frontline hospitals, and, after visiting the fever-hospital at Châlon-sur-Marne and finding shockingly primitive facilities, she was inspired by the need to recount her experiences in magazine articles so that she could raise more funds in the United States for relief work.¹⁹ She and Berry obtained permission from the French authorities to visit the front from Dunkerque to Belfort. They were accorded VIP treatment as they both had a strong reputation as advocates of U. S. entry into the war. Her articles, which appeared in Scribner's, were based on six expeditions and were later collated into the volume Fighting France, a best-seller in the United States. Wharton noted in her memoirs that writing up her impressions of the war zone had roused in her “an intense longing to write.” She had had no time for fiction given all of the charitable work which preoccupied her every waking hour, but was nevertheless “tormented with a fever of creation.”²⁰

In April 1915 the Belgian Government approached Wharton for emergency help with 200 children. The Germans were bombarding Flanders and spraying the fields and villages with nerve gas making thousands homeless. The 200 quickly grew to 800 and the Belgians asked if she would also assist 100 nuns. In response, Wharton and Elisina Tyler set up the “Children of Flanders Rescue Committee,” rented several houses in or near Paris, and established a lace-making school for the girls and an industrial school for the boys. This additional strain on financial resources prompted Wharton to call upon well-known poets, novelists, artists and musicians to contribute to a volume, entitled The Book of the Homeless, in order to raise funds. It helped enormously to publicise her war work and raise funds.

In the realization that there was to be no speedy end to the war, Wharton reorganized her work schedule in 1916 so that she could take some time for getting back to her fiction-writing. She and Elisina Tyler took it in turns, in spells of six to eight weeks, to have overall responsibility for the three charities they were then running. That summer, the Battle of the Somme, with its horrifically high casualty rate, imposed yet more demands on Wharton's relief work. By the autumn tuberculosis had reached epidemic proportions because of the unsanitary conditions in the trenches. The French government provided neither financial assistance nor medical care for the victims of tuberculosis and infected troops spread the disease to their families. To try and alleviate the situation, Wharton set up the “Maisons Américaines de Convalescence” for consumptives.

In the spring of 1916, Wharton had taken a break and gone to the Riviera to start work on her new novel, Summer, and on another collection of short stories. Apart from satisfying her creative desires, she also needed to re-establish a steady income. Committing to an end-of-year deadline for her novel put considerable strain on Wharton and she collapsed in November 1916. A couple of months later, she contracted influenza and suffered complications ending up with pneumonia and anemia. This seriously damaged her heart. 1916 had been a particularly hard year for Wharton. Henry James died on 28 February after a stroke. Wharton had managed to get special permission to cross the Channel to visit him the previous October when his health went into a serious decline. In April, her old friend and mentor, Egerton Winthrop, died just after cabling her congratulations on her receipt from the French Government of the Chevalier of the French Legion for her war work. Also that month, her old governess, Anna Bahlmann, passed away.

After a particularly harsh winter, in 1917, Wharton was invited by General Hubert Lyautey, Resident General of Morocco, to visit his annual industrial exhibition in Rabat and to go on a three-week motor tour through Morocco. As she wrote in her memoirs, “The brief enchantment of this journey through a country still completely untouched by foreign travel, and almost destitute of roads and hotels, was like a burst of sunlight between storm-clouds.”²¹ Wharton had visited North Africa once before, in 1914, with Percy Lubbock and Gaillard Lapsley. She wrote up her travels in a series of articles for Scribner's, which appeared in 1919 and which were later collected into what was to be her last travel book, In Morocco. She anticipated that after the war Morocco would be inundated with tourists and offered a view of the country prior to what she deemed as its inevitable destruction by mass tourism. She praised her French host, General Lyautey, for his work in restoring ancient Moroccan buildings and preventing Europeans from erecting their own tasteless buildings in the ancient cities of the French colony.

1918 brought more losses. Her brother Frederic died in June in Paris. Later that summer Wharton was devastated by the news that Ronald Simmons, an American artist who had done relief work among the sufferers of tuberculosis and had enlisted in the American Intelligence Corps, had died from complications of Spanish influenza. She had regarded him as a younger brother. A few weeks later came news that the plane of her youngest cousin, Newbold Rhinelander, had been shot down behind enemy lines; it took nearly three months to learn that he had died. Wharton's health suffered a serious setback with two heart attacks, one in May and another in July. But she proceeded apace with writing her war novel, The Marne, and articles based on her visits to the frontline. On 11 November, an “unwonted sound” summoned her to the balcony of her rue de Varenne apartment: it was the sound of church bells sounding the armistice. She stood with her household staff, at first hesitant as to the meaning of the bells, and then, as they realized the fighting was over, their hearts “swelled to bursting.”²²

With the restoration of peace, Wharton yearned to leave Paris. She wrote to Bernard Berenson: “Paris is simply awful—a kind of continuous earthquake of motor busses, trams, lorries, taxis & other howling & swooping & colliding engines, with hundreds of thousands of U. S. citizens rushing about in them & tumbling out of them at one's door—&, through it all, the same people placidly telephoning one to come to tea.”²³ She had come across an old 18th-century house with extensive gardens in the northern suburbs of the city, an area deserted by its occupants at the time of the German advance. She purchased the house, Pavillon Colombe, at St. Brice-sous-Fôret, in 1918 and, after renovating it, took up residence there in 1919. Berry took over her expensive rue de Varenne apartment. Saint-Brice was to be her summer home for the rest of her life. She also began leasing at this time a property at Hyères in the South of France as her winter home. This was a convent, built within the ruins of a château. It too needed renovation, and its extensive grounds provided Wharton with an opportunity to create a Mediterranean garden which was to be her pride and joy. Hyères itself had been a fashionable Riviera resort, but was now overshadowed by the popular Cannes, Nice and Monte Carlo. Wharton had first come upon it during a motor-trip with Robert Norton in November 1918 and fell in love with the landscape, the history and peacefulness of the area. Her two new homes and their gardens provided her with the tranquility she needed for resuming her writing as well as comfortable settings for her boundless hospitality. Among her frequent guests were Gaillard Lapsley, the former British diplomat Robert Norton, John Hugh-Smith, Bernard and Mary Berenson and their assistant, Nicky Mariano, and the Bourgets who had a winter home at Costebelle nearby. The Berensons and Wharton exchanged visits on an annual basis at their respective homes during the 1920s. Wharton's visits to the Villa I Tatti, outside Florence, usually coincided with her journey between Ste.-Claire and St.-Brice. During the 1920s it was Walter Berry was frequently by her side, accompanying her on motor-trips and advising her on her writing—as he had done since The Decoration of Houses. For Wharton, Berry was the “one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.”²⁴ But, towards the end of 1926, Walter's health began to fail. Wharton was with him in Paris during his final days and, grief-stricken, told her friend John Hugh-Smith that she dreaded the solitude that now lay before her without Walter. There had been speculation from time to time that they would marry, especially after Wharton's divorce, but it was not to be. They enjoyed instead a deep and close friendship that lasted more than 40 years.

Resuming her writing after the war was not so easy. The war had created an immeasurable gulf in her life and in the lives of others. She wrote to Charles Scribner:

In the first relief from war anxieties I thought it might be possible to shake off the question which is tormenting all novelists at present: “Did the adventures related in this book happen before the war or did they happen since?” with the resulting difficulty that, if they happened before the war, I seem to have forgotten how people felt and what their point of view was. I should feel ashamed of these hesitations if I did not find that all novelists I know are in much the same predicament. Perhaps it will not last much longer & we shall be able to get back some sort of perspective; but at present, between the objection of the public to so called war-stories and the difficulty of the author to send his imagination backward, the situation is a bewildering one.²⁵

She resolved her dilemma by writing an historical novel, one set in the New York of her youth: The Age of Innocence. The New York society Wharton captures is hide-bound by social convention. It is the society of Aunt Peniston, Lily Bart's aunt in The House of Mirth, in which deviations from polite norms are not tolerated. As such, it formed a stark contrast to post-war society and highlighted the immense change that had taken place in Wharton's own lifetime. The novel received rave reviews and the Pulitzer Prize for literature. There was some controversy over the award as it had been anticipated that Sinclair Lewis's novel, Main Street, would be the likely winner. Wharton continued to work the rich vein of old New York still further with four novellas, each representing a decade: “False Dawn” (1840s), “The Old Maid” (1850s), “The Spark” (1860s), and “New Year's Day” (1870s). The Ladies Home Journal rejected “The Old Maid,” finding a story about a child born out of wedlock unsuitable for their readership, but Red Book snapped it up and paid Wharton a generous sum for the serial rights. The magazine also purchased the rights to “New Year's Day” in 1922.

Wharton's attempts to set novels in contemporary America were not so successful—at least as far as the critics were concerned. The Glimpses of the Moon, published in 1922, was a best-seller largely due to Appleton's vigorous advertising, but it received a lukewarm response from critics, especially those of the younger generation who found her work lifeless. Nevertheless, in 1923, Yale University bestowed upon Wharton a honorary doctor of letters and she made her last trip to the United States in order to receive it in person. During this trip, she met F. Scott Fitzgerald in the New York office of Charles Scribner. He was in the early years of his literary career but could nevertheless command the same fee as Wharton for a short story. While working on The Great Gatsby in 1924, Fitzgerald lived on the Riviera, at a time when the exchange rate was exceedingly favorable to the American dollar. He even spent a few weeks at a hotel in Hyères. In July 1925 he visited Wharton at Pavillon Colombe but it was an awkward meeting with Fitzgerald feeling uncomfortable with Wharton's formality and she unimpressed with his risqué stories and strange behaviour. Gaillard Lapsley claimed Fitzgerald was inebriated. They exchanged works: Wharton sent him The Mother's Recompense and he sent her The Great Gatsby. Both novels were at the top of the best-seller list in 1925.

Wharton enjoyed considerable financial success from her post-war fiction but at the same time she drove hard bargains on the serial rights to her two novels, Twilight Sleep and The Children. She was able to purchase Sainte-Claire, the property she had been leasing in Hyères, and two new cars. Her enhanced income at this point in time also enabled her to charter a yacht, the Osprey, in 1925 for a ten-week cruise of the Aegean. She had long yearned to retrace her 1888 voyage on the Vanadis and invited along her close friends Robert Norton and Daisy Chanler, the poet Logan Pearsall Smith, and Harry Lawrence, director of the Medici Society in London. She stocked the yacht's library with classical works of history and literature, art, travel writings and works of European literature, some of which Robert Norton read aloud in the evenings to the select company. Wharton gave thought to every material comfort of her fellow voyagers as well as to the enhancement of their appreciation of the ancient sites that they visited. As always, she did things in style.

Wharton Wharton was at the peak of her career in 1928. Her novel, The Children, was adopted by the Book-of-the-Month Club for September, and despite lukewarm reviews, earned her more money than any other of her novels. Wharton was distressed by “the uncomprehending drivel” of the critics who, she felt, had no real understanding of the novel. She wrote to art critic, Royal Cortissoz, that she had been “plunged” into “the deepest literary discouragement” she had ever known.²⁶ In 1929 Wharton had planned to return to the United States to receive in person a Litt. D. from Columbia University but the trip had to be cancelled when she caught a severe chill which affected her heart. Her illness had been partly brought on by the distress she experienced when her gardens at Hyères were ravaged by winter storms. Over the next six years she maintained her usual prolific rate of output, producing two more novels, three collections of short stories and her autobiography. However, she experienced numerous frustrations from magazine publishers in particular who rejected her work as unsuitable because of its content and from The Delineator who placed her under unacceptable pressure to complete Hudson River Bracketed by commencing serialization ahead of schedule. She expressed extreme disappointment in 1934 with the failure of Appleton to promote her books adequately and wanted to terminate her arrangement with them. This drew a hurt response from the chairman of Appleton's board who pointed out that her first three books with their house had not earned their advance and that she had received in total from them well more than half a million dollars, including their unpaid services as agents for the negotiation of serial, movie and dramatic rights.²⁷

The last years of her life were marred by a serious deterioration in her health, the loss of close friends, and ominous signs of impending conflict in Europe with the rise of Fascism, especially in Spain, Germany and Italy. She managed to weather the worst effects of the economic depression in the 1930s, as the decline in her income from serial rights from publishers was offset by the sale of film rights and the financial success of dramatic adaptations of her work. She was forced to economize but was opposed to lowering her standards and producing “pot-boilers,” as she told her editor at Appletons.²⁸ She did, however, enjoy the company of several new friends, including the British writer, Aldous Huxley of Brave New World fame whose work she described as “a masterpiece of tragic indictment of our ghastly age of Fordian culture.”²⁹ She met the anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, at the Huxleys', who was then a professor at the London School of Economics. She was particularly struck by his work, The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia, published in 1929, and called him “a charming & highly civilized example of Anglo-Polish culture.”³⁰ She became particularly close at this time to the young art historian, Kenneth Clark, and his wife, Jane. She met the Clarks at the Berensons' villa, I Tatti, in 1930, when he was employed as the keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. In 1933 Clark, at the age of 30, was elevated to the position of director of the National Gallery in London and it was to him that she left her personal library. Wharton died on 11 August 1937 after suffering a stroke while traveling from her Riviera home to Pavillon Colombe. She had left precise instructions for her funeral and burial and had arranged to be laid to rest in a grave in the Cimitière des Gonards, Versailles, close to her lifelong friend, Walter Berry.

AWARDS AND RECOGNITION

1905: The House of Mirth becomes Wharton's first best-selling novel. Wharton is a guest of Theodore Roosevelt at a dinner in the White House and is greeted by the President crying out: “At last I can quote ‘The Hunting of the Snark’!” [1015]

1915: The Government of Belgium ask Wharton to assist with child refugees displaced by the German bombardment of neutral Belgium.

1916: Wharton is awarded the Legion of Honour by the French government for charitable work during the First World War.

1918: Metro Studios release a silent film version of The House of Mirth.

1919: Wharton is named a Chevalier of the Order of Leopold by King Albert of Belgium for her work for Belgian refugees in Paris.

1920: The Age of Innocence is a best-seller.

Notes

1. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance, in Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings (New York: Appleton, 1934; reprint, New York: The Library of America, 1990): 804.

2. Ibid., 78.

3. Edith Wharton, “Life and I,” in Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1990), 1088.

4. Shari Benstock, No Gifts From Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton (New York: Charles Scribners, 1994): 99.

5. Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Guide to the Life and Work (New York: Facts on Files, 1998): 36.

6. Wharton, A Backward Glance, 887.

7. Ibid., 898.

8. Ibid., 976.

9. Quoted in Benstock, 180.

10. Quoted in Benstock, 219-20.

11. Ibid., 231.

12. Ibid., 252.

13. Ibid., 261.

14. Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1913; reprint, New York: The Library of America, 1985): 842-3.

15. Edith Wharton to Charles Scribner, 18 December 1907, quoted in Benstock, 177; Wharton, A Backward Glance, 997.

16. Wharton, A Backward Glance, 980, 981, 993, 1021.

17. Ibid., 1033.

18. Edith Wharton, Fighting France (New York: Scribners, 1919): 23.

19. Wharton, A Backward Glance, 1043.

20. Ibid., 1045.

21. Ibid., 1047.

22. Ibid., 1048.

23. Edith Wharton to Bernard Berenson, 23 May 1920, in The Letters of Edith Wharton, eds. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (New York: Scribners, 1988): 432.

24. Wharton, A Backward Glance, 870.

25. Letters, Edith Wharton to Charles Scribners, 12 September 1919, 425.

26. Ibid., Edith Wharton to Royal Cortissoz, 11 October 1928, 518.

27. Ibid., J. W. Hiltman to EW, 25 July 1934, 581.

28. Ibid., Wharton to Rutger B. Jewett, 26 October 1933, 572.

29. Ibid., Wharton to Daisy Chanler, 25 March 1932, 547.

30. Ibid., 546.