FREE ESSAY ON WHARTON'S LIFE AND HISTORY

WHARTON'S LIFE AND HISTORY

Edith Wharton: A brief personal history and overview of literary achievements The cultural
advancement of the 1920's has many important literary figures associated with it. Names
such as T.S. Elliot, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald are some of the
better-known names. Edith Wharton is one of the less known of the period, but is still a
formidable writer. This paper will explore Ms. Wharton's life and history and give a
brief background surrounding some of her more popular novels. Ms. Wharton was born Edith
Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, in her parents' mansion and West Twenty-Third Street
in New York City. Her mother, Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander, connected with wealthy Dutch
landowners and merchants of the early nineteenth century, was the granddaughter of an
outstanding American Revolutionary War patriot, General Ebenezer Stevens. After the war,
General Stevens became a very successful East-India merchant. Edith Wharton's father, a
man of considerable, private, inherited wealth, did not follow a career in business.
Rather, he lived a life of leisure, punctuated by his hobbies of sea fishing, boat
racing, and wildfowl shooting (activities typical of wealthy men of the day). During her
first few years, Edith Wharton's family alternated between New York City in the winter
and Newport, Rhode Island, in the summer. At the time, Newport was a very fashionable
place where New York City families of wealth might enjoy ocean breezes and participate in
a ro! und of tea and inner parties, the leaving of calling cards, and constant
preparations for entertaining or being entertained. When she was four years old, her
parents took her on a tour of Europe, concentrating on Italy and France. She became as
familiar with Rome and Paris as most children are with their hometowns. It was here that
the small, red-headed child played her favorite game. Not yet able to read, she carried
around with her a large volume of Washington Irving's stories of old Spain, The Alhambra.
Holding the Book carefully, often upside down, she proceeded to turn the pages and to
read aloud make up stories as she went along. Whereas most children of her age would be
told the familiar old folk and fairy tales of Anderson, Perrault, and the Brothers Grimm,
she listened with great delight to tales of the domestic dramas of the great Greek and
Roman gods of mythology. The young child rapidly learned to read, speak, and write
German, French, and Italian, as a result of the efforts of governess and the extended
family tours of France and Italy. Returning to America after an absence of sex years in
picturesque Europe, the ten-year-old Edith viewed New York City with mixed feelings. She
missed the glamour of Europe; she was distressed with the busy commercial air of much of
her home city; she was delighted to join her relatives and friends on a rambling family
estate at Newport. Here she continued her study of modern languages and proper manners.
However, she had to return to her father's in New York, where she spent her time perusing
his library and immersing herself in the likes of Roman Plutarch and the English
Macaulay, the English Pepys and Evelyn and the French Madame de Sevigne; the poets,
Milton, Burns and Byron, as well as Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Elizabeth
Barrat Browning. With these writers as her models and inspiration, young Edith Wharton
began to cover huge sheets of wrapping paper with her own prose and verse. Edith's family
and the families of most of her friends were not in business: they lived on their incomes
and investments, living leisurely lives of dining out or dinner going with much emphasis
on good cooking, and sparkling conversation. Once in a while, they attended the theatre;
the opera, seldom. When she was seventeen, Edith's parents decided the time had arrived
for her coming out. The series of social activities that indicated to the world that she
was adult enough to be invited to social entertainment without her parents as chaperones.
Soon, she joined her father and mother to another trip to Europe - this time for her
father's health. He died in France, when Edith was nineteen years old, and the
grief-stricken mother and daughter returned to New York City. There they moved into a
newly purchased house on West Twenty-Fifth Street. For several years, Edith enjoyed the
social life of an average young woman of her wealth and social background; then her
girlhood came ! to an end in 1885 with her marriage to Edward Wharton of Boston. Thirteen
years her senior, her husband was a banker from Boston. Although Mr. Wharton did not
share his wife's literary tastes, he did, however, enjoy some of her interests, such as
animals, outdoor life and travel. They often times went on European holidays. On holiday
was spent on an excursion through the hills of northern Italy, which was later to form
the background of Ms. Wharton's first novel, The Valley of Decision (1902), a historical
romance of eighteenth-century Italy. The Whartons bought a house at Newport called Land's
End. There, Mrs. Whartons carried out some of her own original ideas about interior
decoration - a project which later blossomed out into a book written in collaboration
with the decorator-architect, Ogden Codman. This book, The Decoration of Houses (1897)
was based upon Wharton's own experimental ideas concerning the decoration of houses, and
featured the then new ideas of emphasis o! n simplicity of detail, right proportion,
balance of door and window spacing, and unconfused lines. For the next twenty years, Ms.
Wharton traveled often to Europe and also began publishing many of her poems and novels.
Soon she began to be regarded as actually having a personality of her own, no longer was
she just her husband's possession, nor was she merely one of the idle, cultured rich, she
was an acknowledged individual., all on her own, and in print. From 1907, Ms. Wharton
spent most of her time near Paris, where she entertained fashionable and literary society
and a few visiting Americans (such as T. Roosevelt during his 1909-1910 world tour). She
began the composition of Ethan Frome in Paris in French to have practice in keeping up to
date with French idioms. She also engaged in many leisure time activities such as
attending the ballet, visiting the Paris Opera and spent many hours reading. Back in
France, during the early days of World War I, Ms. Wharton saw the suffering of the sick
and the homeless. Almost immediately, she began to do Red Cross work; she even provided a
place for women who could sew clothing for the needy. To excite American interest in the
plight of the French, she made six trips to the battle lines and then wrote an account of
the hospital needs of the wounded. A woman with a tender heart for the sufferings of
others, Mrs. Wharton and her many helpers cared for thousands of war refugees and several
large groups of the young and the aged, as well as maintaining four sanatoriums for women
and children were victims of tuberculosis. Her heroic was efforts were recognized by
France in 1915 when she was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor. Belgium, in 1916,
made her Chevalier (knight)of the Order of Leopold. To help obtain money for war relief
work, Mrs. Wharton put together The Book of the Homeless, made up of original poems,
articles, and ! drawings donated by some of the leading members of the literary and
artistic world in Europe and America. In addition to all of her other demanding duties at
the time, Ms. Wharton translated into English the great majority of the Italian and
French contributions to the book. Her great understanding and sympathy for France and the
French people are seen in the works written during the years centering around World War
I: Fighting France (1915), The Marne (1918), and French Ways and Their Meaning (1919).
When World War I was over, Edith Wharton busied herself with the writing of what turned
out to be one of her greatest novels, The Age of Innocence. She alternated between her
two homes in France. After a 1926 yacht trip in the Mediterranean Sea, she lived quietly
in France for the remainder of her days. She wrote constantly, but her later work never
achieved the sharp and sensitive flavor of her earlier, popular novels. She died in St.
Brice, France, August 11, 1937, and was buried at Versailles in the Protestant cemetery.
Edith Wharton's works have ranged over considerable literary ground. She has published
literary works in ten categories: a study of interior decoration; short stories; poetry;
a historical romance; novels; novelettes; travel books; a book of war impressions;
literary criticism; and autobiography. Although she has been highly commended for all of
her published works, her greatest achievement is undoubtedly in the area of the novel,
featuring such literary masterworks as The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and the Age of
Innocence. Edith Wharton made a great impression on the literary scene of the 1900's and
her presence is still felt today.