Born in 1862 into an affluent and socially prominent New York family, Edith Wharton did not seem destined for a career as a best-selling author.

Her parents, George Frederic and Lucretia Jones, lived comfortably on the profits of numerous real estate ventures. The Joneses divided their time between a New York brownstone off fashionable Fifth Avenue; a waterfront home in Newport, Rhode Island; and summer rentals in Europe. Historians attribute the phrase "Keeping up with the Joneses" to Edith Wharton's well-traveled family.

Caroline Astor, first cousin of George Frederic Jones, presided over New York society. The Mrs. Astor, as she liked to be called, and her friend, Samuel Ward McAllister, created "the Four Hundred" social list to restrict the number of people in their social circle.

In "Old New York," as Wharton called it, one was either on or off The Mrs. Astor's social list. At times, over dinner, with furtive glances and shakes of the head, the members of the Four Hundred remarked on a wayward friend or relative who had stepped out of their insular world in search of a more enriching life.

The insular world of Old New York became the genesis of Wharton's work. It was a world that she would leave as well, but would recreate with precision in her novels.

Precocious Child
The Joneses had three children: Frederic, Henry, and Edith, the youngest by twelve years. From the start, Edith was a precocious child who loved creating stories. In her autobiography, A Backward Glance, she recalled spending afternoons cocooned in her father's library, "dragging out book after book in a secret ecstasy of communion." With a book in hand, Wharton paced the room, reciting her own stories while pretending to read aloud.

Eventually, her library recitations became written stories. In 1877, 15-year-old Edith completed her first novel, Fast and Loose. The next year, she persuaded her mother to arrange a Newport printer to publish Verses, her first book of poetry. William Dean Howells, impressed with the young woman's talent, published one of her poems in the Atlantic Monthly.

Lucretia Jones was not quite sure what to make of her daughter's talent. Concluding that the best cure for an intelligent woman was to find a suitable husband, she arranged for Edith to make her social debut a year early. Wharton recalled hovering close to her mother all night in "a long cold agony of shyness."

Over the next few years, eligible bachelors came and went. Harry Stevens proposed to Wharton, but his parents would not consent to the match. In Bar Harbor, Wharton met Walter Berry, but at summer's end, they parted ways, becoming lifelong friends.

In 1885, to her mother's relief, Edith married Teddy Wharton, an older man from Boston who was a friend of her brother Henry. The couple moved into a New York townhouse at 882-884 Park Avenue and spent their summers at Pencraig Cottage in Newport.

Look at that waist! No one would ever guess that she had written a line of poetry in her life.

A Woman of Society
Edith Wharton settled in to a life of writing and domesticity. She sat in bed each morning, her inkpot teetering precariously on her knee, and wrote until it was time to rise and prepare for a day of social activities as Mrs. Edward Robbins Wharton.

Teddy proved an amiable companion in the early years of their marriage. By then, Edith had grown into an attractive young woman, with red hair elegantly coiffed, and a slim figure accentuated by the newest gowns from Paris.

Teddy admired his wife's ability to look pretty and be smart. On a walk one day, he pointed to Edith and exclaimed to a friend: "Look at that waist! No one would ever guess that she had written a line of poetry in her life."

Edith Wharton had inquisitive eyes that saw, and observed, and recorded every detail of every transaction before her. It was a characteristic that served her well, making her writing rich with detail. But it unnerved many who knew her.

"She looks at me as if I were a worm!" exclaimed one. Said another, who noticed Wharton staring at her, "What have I done to be looked at so disapprovingly?" Lost in a haze of creative thoughts, Wharton distractedly responded, "Oh...I was just thinking...that I like your hat."

Those closest to Edith knew the real reason for her affected behavior in public. Her friend Lily Norton observed, "Her natural shyness unconsciously impressed her intellectual superiority among people, and she lived remotely."

Among Wharton's lifelong passions were architecture, interior design, and gardening. With the help of architect Ogden Codman Jr., she decorated her New York townhouse and her two Newport homes, Pencraig Cottage, and later, Land's End.

Wharton and Codman disliked the cluttered rooms, dark color schemes, and mammoth furnishings of many Victorian homes. In their book, The Decoration of Houses, they advocated the use of brighter colors, minimal furnishings, and a return to more classically inspired designs.

In 1902, the Whartons left Newport for the crisp mountain air of western Massachusetts. Wharton worked with architect Francis Hoppin to design a classical villa on a hill overlooking lush gardens that she designed with her niece, landscape architect Beatrix Jones Farrand.

The Mount became a gathering place for Wharton and her friends, including author Henry James. Wharton left the cares of New York society behind to write and to grow carnations, lilies, and hollyhocks, for which she won prizes at local flower shows.

Successful Author
Edith Wharton traveled frequently to Europe, where she developed friendships with writers, artists, and other intellectuals, including Henry James, Paul Bourget, and Vernon Lee.

In 1905, Edith Wharton published her first best-selling novel, The House of Mirth. The story, about a young woman named Lily Bart who struggled to escape the pressures of New York society, echoed Wharton's own life. Her editor, William C. Brownell, remarked that The House of Mirth had "the most rapid sale of any book ever published by Scribner."

As Wharton established herself as a financially successful author, her husband's mental health declined. Diagnosed with manic depression, Teddy Wharton's behavior became increasingly erratic. Wharton's friend, Mary Berenson, remarked: "Mr. Wharton's mania leads him to buy houses and motors for music-hall actresses, to engage huge suites in hotels and get drunk and break all the furniture and to circulate horrible tales about his wife."

Wharton spent the next few years alternately traveling, writing, and taking care of her husband. She might have remained in the troubled marriage had she not met, and fallen in love with, a handsome journalist named Morton Fullerton.

Henry James introduced Wharton to Fullerton during a visit to The Mount in 1907. The shy author shed her reserve and began a passionate affair with Fullerton, who was known throughout Paris for his liaisons.

Their relationship existed, off and on, for three years, ending in 1911. "My life was better before I knew you," Wharton concluded, and requested her letters back. Fullerton kept them, boasting later, "Edith Wharton in love...displayed the reckless ardor of a George Sand."

Every one of you
won the war,
You and you and you.

— Edith Wharton

Humanitarian
Wharton's affair with Fullerton gave her the courage to divorce her husband in 1913. Settling permanently in France, she shifted her energies to fundraising for relief efforts during World War I.

In 1914, she founded the American Hostels for Refugees to provide meals, clothing, and medical services to more than 10,000 French and Belgian refugees. She also founded the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee to care for children displaced from bombarded towns. For her work, the French Government awarded her the Legion of Honor.

In 1915, Wharton became a foreign war correspondent, visiting troops on the front lines in order to report back to America about the war. Her articles, written over six months of travel, were published as Fighting France, From Dunkerque to Belfort. Wharton recalled her wartime memories in her novel, A Son at the Front.

In 1920, Edith Wharton resumed her two-house tradition, alternating winters at Ste. Claire Chateau, a villa in Hyeres, on the French Riviera, with summers at Pavillon Colombe, her home in the village of St.-Brice-Sous-Foret, north of Paris. She again took up gardening, finding solace from the memories of war in the rich soil of the Seine Valley.

Europhile
Despite her relocation to France, Edith remained interested in the world of her youth. In 1921, she published her Pulitzer-Prize winner, The Age of Innocence, a recollection of her life in Gilded Age New York.

Like her heroine, Ellen Olenska, Edith Wharton was an independent woman who had left New York for the allures of Europe. She never returned to the old world, but she recalled it with a nostalgic fondness that only distance, time, and middle age could bring.

Wharton returned one last time to America to accept an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University. On June 20, 1923, dressed in cap and gown, she joined fifteen other honorary degree recipients on the New Haven campus. In awarding the degree, Professor William Lyon Phelps noted: "She holds a universally recognized place in the front rank of the world's living novelists. She has elevated the level of American literature."

Wharton spent the remainder of her life traveling throughout Europe, visiting friends, mentoring young writers, and writing books. In 1935, she suffered a stroke, which impaired the vision in her right eye. Still, she kept writing, nearly completing The Buccaneers before she died in 1937.

Throughout her career, Edith Wharton kept a low profile. "I am not a public figure," she insisted. When a reporter from the New York Herald asked why she rarely spoke to the press, she replied with characteristic candor, "Talking about myself in public was one experience I willingly renounced. I felt my books should stand or fall on their own merits, not on my preferences in tooth paste or my ideas about cold baths."