Edith Wharton

Edith Newbold Wharton (born Jones; January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American author and designer. Because she belonged to New York’s elite, she used that insider perspective to write realistic accounts of Gilded Age society and its moral codes. Her novel *The Age of Innocence* won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921, making her the first woman to receive that honor. The National Women’s Hall of Fame inducted her in 1996. Among her most famous works are *The House of Mirth*, the short novel *Ethan Frome*, and a number of well-regarded ghost stories.

She came into the world as Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, at her family’s brownstone on West 23rd Street in Manhattan. Her parents were George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander. Friends and relatives called her “Pussy Jones.” She had two older brothers, Frederic Rhinelander and Henry Edward. Frederic later married Mary Cadwalader Rawle, and their daughter became the landscape architect Beatrix Farrand. Edith was baptized on Easter Sunday, April 20, 1862, at Grace Church.

The Joneses were a wealthy, socially prominent family whose fortune came from real estate. The phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” supposedly refers to her father’s side of the family. She was also connected to the Rensselaers, one of the most prestigious old patroon families, who had received land grants from the former Dutch government of New York and New Jersey. Her father’s first cousin was Caroline Schermerhorn Astor. Fort Stevens in New York was named for her maternal great-grandfather, Ebenezer Stevens, a general and hero of the Revolutionary War.

Although Wharton was born during the Civil War, her own accounts of family life never mention the conflict except to note that their travels to Europe after the war were prompted by the drop in value of American currency. From 1866 to 1872, the Jones family toured France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. During these trips, young Edith became fluent in French, German, and Italian. At age nine, while the family stayed at a spa in the Black Forest, she caught typhoid fever and nearly died. After returning to the United States in 1872, they spent winters in New York City and summers in Newport, Rhode Island. In Europe, tutors and governesses handled her education. She rejected the fashionable standards and etiquette expected of girls at the time—rules designed to help women marry well and be displayed at parties and balls. She saw these customs as shallow and oppressive. Wanting more learning than she received, she read from her father’s library and from the libraries of his friends. Her mother forbade her to read novels until she married, and Edith obeyed.

From a very early age, Wharton wrote and told stories. When her family moved to Europe and she was only four or five, she began what she called “making up.” She invented tales for her family and would walk around holding an open book, turning pages as if reading while actually improvising a story. As a young girl she wrote poetry and fiction, and at eleven she tried to write her first novel. Her mother’s criticism stopped that ambition, so she turned to poetry. At fifteen, her first published work appeared: a translation of a German poem, “Was die Steine Erzählen” (“What the Stones Tell”) by Heinrich Karl Brugsch, for which she was paid $50. Her family did not want her name in print, since writing was not considered proper for a society woman of her era. So the poem was published under the name of a friend’s father, E. A. Washburn, a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson who supported women’s education. In 1877, at fifteen, she secretly wrote a novella called *Fast and Loose*. The next year, her father arranged for a private printing of a collection of two dozen original poems and five translations, titled *Verses*. In 1879 she published a poem under a pseudonym in the *New York World*. In 1880, five of her poems appeared anonymously in the *Atlantic Monthly*, a major literary magazine. Despite these early successes, neither her family nor her social circle encouraged her, and she published nothing more until her poem “The Last Giustiniani” came out in *Scribner’s Magazine* in October 1889.

Between 1880 and 1890, Wharton set aside her writing to take part in the social rituals of New York’s upper class. She paid close attention to the social changes around her, observations she later used in her work. She officially came out as a debutante in 1879. At a December dance hosted by society matron Anna Morton, she was allowed to bare her shoulders and wear her hair up for the first time. She began a courtship with Henry Leyden Stevens, son of Paran Stevens, a wealthy hotelier and real estate investor from rural New Hampshire. (His sister Minnie married Arthur Paget.) The Jones family did not approve of Stevens.

In the middle of her debutante season, the Jones family returned to Europe in 1881 because of her father’s health. George Frederic Jones died of a stroke in Cannes in 1882. Stevens was with the family in Europe at that time. After returning to the United States with her mother, Wharton continued seeing Stevens, and they announced their engagement in August 1882. The month they were supposed to marry, the engagement fell apart. Her mother, Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, moved to Paris in 1883 and lived there until her death in 1901.

On April 29, 1885, at age 23, Wharton married Edward Robbins (Teddy) Wharton at the Trinity Chapel Complex in Manhattan. He was twelve years older, came from a well-established Boston family, was a sportsman and gentleman of the same social class, and shared her love of travel.