Formative Years
Born into a wealthy, aristocratic family, Edith Wharton grew up among the kind of people she wrote about in The Age of Innocence. After marrying, she divided her time between America and Europe, spending more and more of her time abroad. Her later years were spent in the company of fellow writers and she was recognized as the grande dame of American letters.
Born in New York City on January 24, 1862, Edith Newbold Jones was the daughter of George Frederic and Lucretia Rhinelander Jones. Her parents, descendants of Dutch and English colonists, were socially prominent with wealth from real estate, shipping, and banking. Edith’s mother did not encourage her daughter’s writing. Later, Edith saw her mother as cold and concerned with appearances; she saw her rarely in later life. Edith also had two much older brothers, Henry (b. 1850) and Frederic (b. 1846). Their lives were filled with servants, carriages, and social etiquette. From these happy childhood memories, the sensitive and intelligent Edith drew many ideas for her later writings about life among the leisure class.
Having suffered financial reverses, the family traveled through Spain, Italy, France, and Germany from 1866 to 1872 where the cost of living was lower. Edith learned German, Italian, and French before she was 10. In 1872, they returned to the United States, living on West 23rd Street in New York City with summers in Newport, Rhode Island. Edith was disappointed with America, finding New York City an ugly brown, and the architecture and interior decoration unsightly. She did not go to school but instead read from her father’s extensive library and was taught by governesses. In 1878, Wharton wrote a book of poetry, Verses, that was printed privately. The editor of The Atlantic Monthly, William Dean Howells, put one of her poems in his magazine that same year. Her early writing was generally about the poor and their imagined harsh lives. By the time Edith made her social debut in 1879, she had written many early pieces. In 1880, the family went back to Europe and her father died at Cannes in 1882.
Marriage and Depression
By 1883, Edith was 21 years old. In Bar Harbor she met Walter Berry, a Harvard graduate and lawyer who shared her literary interests and much of her life. She credits him with helping her writing style and in later years she burned their personal correspondence. Biographers allude to this relationship as hopeful on her part, yet Berry did not propose to her.
She reluctantly married Edward Robbins (“Teddy”) Wharton in 1885. He was from a similar social background, a Boston banker 12 years her senior who graduated from Harvard in 1873. He did not, however, share Edith’s literary or artistic interests. During this time, she observed the new rich—the Vanderbilts and Astors—garnering details for her later works about life among the wealthy. She and Teddy bought a home called Land’s End in Newport, lived in an apartment on Park Avenue in New York City, and traveled abroad. Throughout their marriage they would have no children. In fact, Edith went into marriage totally unprepared for the sexual side of being a wife; she did not find a passion that fulfilled her until much later in life. In 1894, she suffered the first of several nervous breakdowns, which biographers connect with her conflict between her social position and her writing ambitions. The unhappiness of her marriage was also a possible cause. Travel helped her depression and months in France and Italy not only gave her writing ideas, but also encouraged her love of Europe, a lifelong passion. In 1896, with architect and friend, Ogden Codman, she published her first book-length work, The Decoration of Houses, which encouraged a change from heavily decorated Victorian homes to simple classic designs that emphasized balance, symmetry, and proportion. By this time, she also had written more poems that were printed in Scribner’s magazine, as well as a short story collection called The Greater Inclination.
