Edith Wharton (1862–1937,) née Edith Newbold Jones, was the most distinguished woman writer America produced before 1940. She is recognized for her stories and novels about the upper-class society into which she was born.
Born into a prosperous and aristocratic family in New York City, Wharton was educated at home and in Europe. In 1885, she married Edward Wharton, a friend of the family, and they traveled widely before settling in Paris in 1907. Edward was mentally unbalanced, and they were divorced in 1913.
Wharton was a lifelong friend of Henry James, who did much to encourage and influence her work. The Greater Inclination (1899,) her first collection of short stories, was followed by a novella, The Touchstone (1900.)
The House of Mirth (1905) established Wharton as a major novelist. It is a tragedy about a beautiful and sensitive girl who is destroyed by the very New York society her upbringing has designed her to meet. Her second major success came with Ethan Frome (1911,) a bleak story of passion, envy, and revenge set on a New England farm.
Wharton wrote almost 50 other works—including travel books and volumes of verse. However, she was principally a novelist of manners, a keen observer of fashionable society, witty and satirical. Notable later works are The Age of Innocence (1920; Pulitzer,) The Mother’s Recompense (1925,) The Children (1928,) and (1929.)
Wharton discussed her literary approach in The Writing of Fiction (1925.) A Backwards Glance (1934) is her enlightening autobiography.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Edith Wharton
If only we’d stop trying to be happy, we’d have a pretty good time.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Happiness
The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies, and the fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to the young man to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done.
—Edith Wharton
Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Habit
I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Marriage
When people ask for time, it’s always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn’t take half as long to say.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Decisions
Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
—Edith Wharton
The only thing to do is to hug one’s friends tight and do one’s job.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Friendship, Work
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Giving, Knowledge, Service, Helping, Charity
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
Susan Sontag American Writer, Philosopher
Zora Neale Hurston American Novelist
Flannery O’Connor American Novelist
Emily Post American Writer, Socialite
Dorothy Canfield Fisher American Novelist
Amy Tan Chinese-American Novelist
Lisa Alther American Novelist
Lydia Davis American Author
Carol Shields Canadian Author, Academic