Edith Newbold Wharton (; née Jones; January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American writer and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of upper-class New York society to portray, realistically, the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. Her other well-known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories.
Edith Newbold Jones was born on January 24, 1862, to George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander, at their brownstone at 14 West 23rd Street in Manhattan, New York City. To her friends and family, she was known as "Pussy Jones". She had two elder brothers, Frederic Rhinelander and Henry Edward. Frederic married Mary Cadwalader Rawle; their daughter was landscape architect Beatrix Farrand. Edith was baptized April 20, 1862, Easter Sunday, at Grace Church.
Wharton's paternal family, the Joneses, were a very wealthy and socially prominent family, having made their money in real estate. The saying "keeping up with the Joneses" is said to refer to her father's family. She was related to the Rensselaers, the most prestigious of the old patroon families, who had received land grants from the former Dutch government of New York and New Jersey. Her father's first cousin was Caroline Schermerhorn Astor. Fort Stevens, in New York, was named for Wharton's maternal great-grandfather, Ebenezer Stevens, a Revolutionary War hero and general.
Wharton was born during the Civil War. However, in describing her family life, Wharton does not mention the war, except that their travels to Europe after the war were due to the depreciation of American currency. From 1866 to 1872, the Jones family visited France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. During her travels, the young Edith became fluent in French, German, and Italian. At the age of nine, she suffered from typhoid fever, which nearly killed her, while the family was at a spa in the Black Forest. After the family returned to the United States in 1872, they spent their winters in New York City and their summers in Newport, Rhode Island. While in Europe, she was educated by tutors and governesses. She rejected the standards of fashion and etiquette that were expected of young girls at the time, which were intended to allow women to marry well and to be put on display at balls and parties. She considered these fashions superficial and oppressive. Edith wanted more education than she received, so she read from her father's library and from the libraries of her father's friends. Her mother forbade her to read "novels" until she was married, and Edith obeyed this command.
Wharton wrote and told stories from an early age. When her family moved to Europe and she was just four or five, she started what she called "making up." She invented stories for her family and walked with an open book, turning the pages as if reading while improvising a story. Wharton began writing poetry and fiction as a young girl, and she attempted to write her first novel at the age of 11. Her mother's criticism quashed her ambition, however, and she turned to poetry. She was 15 years old when her first published work appeared, a translation of a German poem "Was die Steine Erzählen" ("What the Stones Tell") by Heinrich Karl Brugsch, for which she was paid $50. Her family did not want her name to appear in print, since writing was not considered a proper occupation for a society woman of her time. Consequently, the poem was published under the name of a friend's father, E. A. Washburn, a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who supported women's education. In 1877, at the age of 15, she secretly wrote a novella, Fast and Loose. In 1878, her father arranged for a collection of two dozen original poems and five translations, Verses, to be privately published. Wharton published a poem under a pseudonym in the New York World, in 1879. In 1880, she had five poems published anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly, an important literary magazine. Despite these early successes, she was not encouraged by her family or her social circle, and though she continued to write, she did not publish anything more until her poem "The Last Giustiniani" was published in Scribner's Magazine in October 1889.
Between 1880 and 1890, Wharton put her writing aside to participate in the social rituals of the New York upper classes. She keenly observed the social changes happening around her, which she later used in her writing. Wharton officially came out as a debutante to society in 1879. She was allowed to bare her shoulders and wear her hair up for the first time at a December dance, which was given by a Society matron, Anna Morton. Wharton began a courtship with Henry Leyden Stevens, the son of Paran Stevens, a wealthy hotelier and real estate investor from rural New Hampshire. His sister, Minnie, married Arthur Paget. The Jones family did not approve of Stevens.
In the middle of her debutante season, the Jones family returned to Europe in 1881 for her father's health. Still, her father, George Frederic Jones, died of a stroke in Cannes in 1882. Stevens was with the Jones family in Europe during this time. After returning to the United States with her mother, Wharton continued her courtship with Stevens, announcing their engagement in August 1882. The month the two were to marry, the engagement ended.
Wharton's mother, Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, moved back to Paris in 1883, and she lived there until her death in 1901.
On April 29, 1885, at the age of 23, Wharton married Edward Robbins (Teddy) Wharton, who was 12 years her senior, at the Trinity Chapel Complex in Manhattan. From a well-established Boston family, he was a sportsman and a gentleman of the same social class and shared her love of travel. The Whartons set up house at Pencraig Cottage in Newport, Rhode Island. In 1893, they bought a house named Land's End, on the other side of Newport, for $80,000, and moved into it. Wharton decorated Land's End, with the help of designer Ogden Codman. In 1897, the Whartons purchased their New York home, 884 Park Avenue. Between 1886 and 1897, they traveled overseas, in the period from February to June, mostly visiting Italy but also Paris and England. From her marriage onwards, three interests came to dominate Wharton's life: American houses, writing, and Italy.
From the late 1880s until 1902, Teddy Wharton suffered from chronic depression, and due to this the couple ceased their extensive travel. At that time, his depression became more debilitating, after which they lived almost exclusively at their estate, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts. During those same years, Wharton, herself, was said to suffer from asthma and periods of depression.
In 1908, Teddy Wharton's mental condition was determined to be incurable. In that year, Wharton began an affair with Morton Fullerton, an author, and foreign correspondent for The Times of London, in whom she found an intellectual partner. She divorced Edward Wharton, in 1913, after 28 years of marriage. Around the same time, she was beset with harsh literary criticism from the naturalist school of writers.
In addition to novels, Wharton wrote at least 85 short stories. She was also a garden designer, an interior designer, and a taste-maker of her time. She wrote several design books, including her first major published work, The Decoration of Houses (1897), co-authored by Ogden Codman. Another of her "home and garden" books is the generously illustrated Italian Villas and Their Gardens of 1904, illustrated by Maxfield Parrish.
Over the course of her life, she crossed the Atlantic 60 times. In Europe, her primary destinations were Italy, France, and England. She also went to Morocco. She wrote many books about her travels, including Italian Backgrounds and A Motor-Flight through France.
Her husband, Edward Wharton, shared her love of travel and for many years, they spent at least four months of each year abroad, mainly in Italy. Their friend, Egerton Winthrop, accompanied them on many journeys there. In 1888, the Whartons and their friend, James Van Alen, took a cruise through the Aegean islands. Wharton was 26. The trip cost the Whartons $10,000 and lasted four months. She kept a travel journal during this trip that was thought to be lost, but was later published as The Cruise of the Vanadis, now considered her earliest known travel writing.