Edith Wharton
3 books analyzed
Biography
Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was born Edith Newbold Jones in New York City into one of the oldest and wealthiest families in America — the family so prominent that the phrase 'keeping up with the Joneses' is attributed to them. She married Edward ('Teddy') Wharton in 1885; the marriage was a disaster from nearly the beginning. Teddy suffered from mental illness and depression; Edith found intellectual companionship and eventually romantic love elsewhere, primarily with the journalist Morton Fullerton. She divorced Teddy in 1913, two years after Ethan Frome was published — an unusual and socially costly act for a woman of her class. She wrote Ethan Frome from the comfortable distance of her Lenox, Massachusetts estate (The Mount) and later from Paris, where she had largely relocated. The irony is precise and uncomfortable: Wharton, one of the wealthiest women in America, wrote the definitive portrait of rural poverty and marital entrapment while herself engineering an escape her characters could never afford.
Edith Wharton at a glance
Works
Ethan Frome
1911 · 195 pages · ★★★☆☆ Challenging
A tale of desire buried under ice and duty — written by a woman trapped in her own marriage, about a man who couldn't escape his.
The Age of Innocence
1920 · 305 pages · ★★★☆☆ Challenging
The most devastating love story ever written about a man who does exactly what society tells him — and spends the rest of his life wondering what he lost.
The House of Mirth
1905 · 329 pages · ★★★☆☆ Challenging
A woman too smart to play the game and too beautiful to be forgiven for failing — Wharton's masterpiece is a cold autopsy of a society that destroys what it cannot own.