Wharton, Edith Newbold

Wharton, Edith Newbold (1862-1937), American writer and Pulitzer Prize-winner, who depicted in her novels the many contradictions of a society caught up in the passionless atmosphere of the Victorian era.

She was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, in New York, and educated privately. In 1885 she married the banker Edward Wharton, from whom she was divorced in 1913. She wrote a number of short stories during the 1890s for Scribner's Magazine, and in 1902 she published a historical novel, The Valley of Decision. Her literary reputation was established by The House of Mirth (1905), peopled, like many of her subsequent novels and short stories, by figures from the closed and artificial social world into which she herself had been born.

In 1907 Wharton settled permanently in France. Her short novel Ethan Frome, a tragic love story of simple people in a bleak New England environment, was published in 1911. In the view of many critics, this book, because of its simplicity, has a universality lacking in her society novels. She subsequently produced a great number of novels, travel books, stories (including several memorable ghost stories), and poems. Her other important novels include The Custom of the Country (1913), The Age of Innocence (1920; Pulitzer Prize, 1921), and four short novels collected in Old New York (1924). Four of her novels were made into successful plays by other writers. In 1993 The Age of Innocence was made into a film, reawakening interest in Wharton's work. The Age of Innocence became a best-seller, many of her other books also gained new popularity, and publishers released two previously unpublished novels by Wharton: Fast and Loose, her first novel; and The Buccaneers, her last and unfinished work.

Wharton, who in 1924 became the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Yale University, viewed Victorian society with ironic detachment. Like her friend Henry James, the American novelist whose writings strongly influenced hers, she was concerned with the subtle interplay of emotions in a society that censured the free expression of passion. Her understanding of conflicting values in this artificial milieu often gives to her stories a tragic intensity.