Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones to the wealthy New York family often associated with the phrase "Keeping up with the Joneses". She combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous and incisive novels and short stories. As such, she was well-acquainted with many of her era's literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1885, at twenty-three years of age, she married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, who was twelve years her senior. From a well-established Boston family, he was a sportsman and a gentleman of Ms. Wharton's social class and shared her love of travel, although they had little in common intellectually. He began spending money on younger women and this began to take a toll on Wharton's mental health. They divorced in 1913, after he suffered a nervous breakdown and was confined to a hospital. Edith and Edward were married for twenty-eight years. Besides her writing, Wharton was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste-maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including her first published work,The Decoration of Houses and Italian Villas and Their Gardens.

Literary success

The Mount, 2006

In 1901 she built The Mount, her estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, which survives today as the supreme example of her design principles. The house and its gardens have been extensively restored and are open to the public from May through October although, as of the end of February, 2008, the house museum is threatened with foreclosure.^[2] There, Edith Wharton wrote several of her novels, including The House of Mirth (1905), the first of many chronicles of the true nature of old New York, and entertained the cream of American literary society, including her close friend, the novelist Henry James.

Although she spent many months traveling in Europe nearly every year, The Mount was her primary residence until 1911. When her marriage deteriorated, however, she decided to move permanently to France, living initially at 58 Rue de Varenne, Paris, in an apartment that belonged to George Washington Vanderbilt II. When World War I subsided in 1918 she abandoned the fashionable urban address for the delights of the country at the Pavillon Colombe in nearby Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt. She also purchsed Sainte-Claire le Château, a former convent, in the southern village of Hyères, where she lived during the winters and springs.

Helped by her influential connections to the French government, primarily her lover Walter Berry (then president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris), she was of the few foreigners in France who was allowed travel to the front lines. Wharton described those trips in the series of articles Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort.

Throughout the war she worked tirelessly in charitable efforts for refugees, and, in 1916, was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in recognition of her commitment to the displaced. The scope of her relief work included setting up work rooms for unemployed Frenchwomen, organizing concerts to provide work for musicians, opening tuberculosis hospitals, and founding the American Hostels for Belgian refugees. In 1916, Wharton edited The Book of the Homeless, comprised of writings, art, and musical scores by almost every major contemporary European artist. She returned to the U.S. only once after the war, to receive an honorary doctorate degree from Yale University in 1923.

Later life

Edith Wharton c. 1919

The Age of Innocence (1920), perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. She spoke flawless French and many of her books were published in both French and English.

Wharton was friend and confidante to many gifted intellectuals of her time: Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide were all guests of hers at one time or another. Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark were valued friends as well, and she was the godmother of Clark's second son, Colin (1932–2002), who wrote the book The Prince, the Showgirl and Me about his work as third assistant director of the film The Prince and the Showgirl. Her meeting with F. Scott Fitzgerald is described by the editors of her letters as "one of the better-known failed encounters in the American literary annals". She was also good friends with Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1934 Wharton's autobiography A Backward Glance was published. In the view of Judith E. Funston, in the entry she wrote for American National Biography about Wharton, "What is most notable about A Backward Glance, however, is what it does not tell: her criticism of Lucretia Jones [her mother], her difficulties with Teddy, and her affair with Morton Fullerton, which did not come to light until her papers, deposited in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, were opened in 1968." ^[3]

Wharton continued writing until her death on August 11, 1937, aged 75, in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France. She is buried in the Cimetière des Gonards in Versailles, France.

Wharton's last novel, The Buccaneers, was unfinished at the time of her death. Marion Mainwaring finished the story after carefully studying the notes and synopsis Wharton had previously written. The novel was published in 1938 (unfinished version) and 1993 (Mainwaring's completion).

Death

She died in 1937 at the domaine Le Pavillon Colombe, her lovely Eighteenth Century country house at rue Montmorency in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, Seine-et-Oise (95). The street is today called Rue-Edith-Warthon. ^{[1] [4]}

Characteristics of her writing

Many of Wharton's novels are characterized by a subtle use of dramatic irony. Having grown up in upper-class pre-World War I society, Wharton became one of its most astute critics. In such works as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence she employed both humor and profound empathy to describe the lives of New York's upper-class and the vanishing of their world in the early years of the 20th century.

Works

• Verses, 1878 (novel)
• Only a Child, 1879 (poem)
• The Decoration of Houses, 1897
• The Greater Inclination, 1899
• The Touchstone, 1900
• The Line of Least Resistance, 1900
• The Rembrandt, 1900
• April Showers, 1900
• Crucial Instances, 1901
• The Moving Finger, 1901
• The Recovery, 1901
• Margaret of Cortona, 1901 (poem)
• The Valley of Decision, 1902
• The Quicksand, 1902
• The Reckoning, 1902
• The Mission of Jane, 1902
• The Dilettante, 1903
• The Vice of Reading, 1903
• Italian Villas and Their Gardens, 1904
• The Last Asset, 1904
• The Letter, 1904
• The Other Two, 1904
• The Pot-Boiler, 1904
• The Best Man, 1905
• The House of Mirth, 1905
• Italian Backgrounds, 1905
• In Trust, 1906
• The Introducers, 1906
• The Fruit of the Tree, 1907
• Madame de Treymes, 1907
• A Motor-Flight Through France, 1908
• The Bolted Door, 1908
• Expiation, 1908
• Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses, 1909
• A Grave, 1909 (poem)
• Ogrin the Hermit, 1909
• The Comrade, 1910
• The Letters, 1910
• Other Times, Other Manners, 1911
• Ethan Frome, 1912
• The Reef (novel), 1912
• The Long Run, 1912
• The Custom of the Country, 1913
• Coming Home, 1915
• Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort, 1915
• The Great Blue Tent, 1915 (poem)
• The Book of the Homeless, 1916
• Xingu and Other Stories, 1916
• The Bunner Sisters, 1916
• Summer, 1917
• The Marne, 1918
• The Refugees, 1919
• French Ways and Their Meaning, 1919
• The Seed of the Faith, 1919
• Writing a War Story, 1919
• The Age of Innocence, 1920
• In Morocco, 1921
• In Provence and Lyrical Epigrams, 1920 (poem)
• The Glimpses of the Moon, 1922
• A Son at the Front, 1923
• Old New York, 1924 (novel)
• The Mother's Recompense, 1925
• The Writing of Fiction, 1925
• Here and Beyond, 1926
• Twelve Poems, 1926
• Twilight Sleep, 1927
• The Children, 1928
• Hudson River Bracketed, 1929
• The Gods Arrive, 1932
• Roman Fever, 1934
• A Backward Glance, 1934
• The Buccaneers, 1938