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
How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be “American” before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Patriotism
There is too much sour grapes for my taste in the present American attitude. The time to denounce the bankers was when we were all feeding off their gold plate; not now! At present they have not only my sympathy but my preference. They are the last representatives of our native industries.
—Edith Wharton
The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
—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
Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Living
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Light, Helping, Service, Knowledge, Giving, Charity
There’s no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Aging, Age
After all, one knows one’s weak points so well, that it’s rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Criticism, Critics
They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Happiness
An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Sweedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Language
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Originality
My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our “gross public” to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One’s friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don’t think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Exile
Almost everybody in the neighborhood had “troubles,” frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had “complications.” To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years wit
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Problems
The moment my eyes fell on him, I was content.
—Edith Wharton
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Art
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
Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Culture
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
Topics: Explanation
I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author’s political views.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Books, Literature
There is 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.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Friendship
A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Divorce
Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Life, Success
Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
—Edith Wharton
If only we’d stop trying to be happy, we’d have a pretty good time.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Happiness
There are two ways to spread happiness; either be the light who shines it or be the mirror who reflects it.
—Edith Wharton
My little dog – a heartbeat at my feet.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Dogs
In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive log past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Living
I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: America
The only thing to do is to hug one’s friends tight and do one’s job.
—Edith Wharton
Topics: Work, Friendship
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