Life is always either a tight-rope or a feather-bed.
Give me the tight-rope.

— Edith Wharton

She was a shy, modest woman who became a world-class author. An astute businesswoman who made millions selling books.

She was a gifted storyteller, weaving the world around her into eloquent fictional masterpieces. Her best-sellers about America's rich and famous captivated audiences worldwide.

She was a prolific writer, penning novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and psychological thrillers that rival the best of Poe's tales.

The tales she told were as complex as the life she led. Born into a world of privilege, she lived much of her life in intellectual poverty. The only daughter of a wealthy family, she was primed to marry well and become a woman of society.

But Edith Wharton wanted to become a writer. She had known it was her destiny since she was a little girl, pulling books from the shelves of her father's library and opening them to her favorite pages. In them, she envisioned a vibrant cast of characters all her own.

There was in me a secret retreat where I wished no one to intrude...Words and cadences haunted it like song-birds in a magic wood, and I wanted to be able to steal away and listen when they called.

"Old New York," a magnificent city in a Gilded Age, had been her home since birth. She called it "incurably ugly," but she found it endlessly fascinating.

When I was young it used to seem to me that the group in which I grew up was like an empty vessel into which no new wine would ever again be poured. Now I see that one of its uses lay in preserving a few drops of an old vintage too rare to be savoured by a youthful palate.

Edith Wharton became a woman of society, and a brilliant intellectual. Outwardly reserved, yet inwardly passionate, she was a traditionalist, and a visionary.

Friends loved her, critics admired her, family snubbed her, rivals disliked her. Edith Wharton accepted it all with humor and grace.

None of my relations ever spoke to me of my books, either to praise or blame—they simply ignored them...At first, I had felt this indifference acutely; but now I no longer cared, for my recognition as a writer had transformed my life.

Successful in matters of the mind, she struggled in affairs of the heart. She endured an arranged marriage to a man she did not love. She had an affair with a man she loved, but could never marry. She maintained a lifelong, platonic friendship with a man she called her "soulmate."

Thoughtful, mercurial, at times outspoken, she loved a challenge, and a debate. Shy and aloof with acquaintances, she was warm and affectionate with close personal friends.

She can be rather heavy-handed at times,
but when you get to know her, it becomes
rather endearing. I think she is a very good
friend to her friends.

— Mary Berenson

A multifaceted genius, she was a landscape architect, an interior designer, an architectural historian, and an advocate for animal rights. A lifelong learner and inveterate traveler, she was intrigued by the world and its people.

In an era when women's voices were struggling to be heard— in politics, in professions, in poetry and prose—Edith Wharton's voice rose above them all, a modern woman who defined the modern era.

The world is a welter, and has always been one; but...here and there a saint or a genius suddenly sends a little ray through the fog, and helps humanity to stumble on, and perhaps up.

Spanning the tumultuous era of the Gilded Age, through the renaissance of the twenties and thirties, this film will explore the contributions of one of the greatest women writers in America, and the social and cultural world in which she thrived.

The film will draw on Edith Wharton's autobiography, letters, fiction, and nonfiction to provide a central narrative voice through which Edith Wharton will tell her own life story.

It is not a story of "rags to riches," but of "riches, to richness," of a woman who defied the conventions of her time to pursue her deepest passion, and to learn that the greatest wealth of all is in the mind, and in the heart.

One can remain alive...if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.

— Edith Wharton