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.
