Ask a Teacher

Search



What was Edith Wharton's contribution to English language?

Edith Wharton
(1862-1937)

    Edith Newbold Jones was the third child and only daughter in an elite, conservative, old New York family. Tracing their lineage to pre-Revolutionary settlers, her parents, George Frederic and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, belonged to a class that prided itself on its avoidance of ostentation, intellectualism, publicity, and, according to the author as a grown woman, emotion. That Wharton was to become a famous, brilliantly accomplished author in no way fulfilled her family’s program for her.

    The publication of The House of Mirth in 1905 launched Wharton as America’s most acclaimed twentieth-century fiction writer in the decades preceding the 1920s. During her major period, the years from 1905 to 1920, she published novels prolifically: The House of Mirth, Madame de Treymes, Ethan Frome, The Reef, The Custom of the Country, Summer, and The Age of Innocence. Her work is distinguished by her brilliance as a stylist, her urbane intelligence, and her acuity as a social observer and critic, particularly of the leisure class.

    Wharton wrote about the rapaciousness and vulgarity of the nouveaux riches, the timidity and repression of the upper class, the contrast between European and American customs and values, and the inequality and repression of women, which often showed up in patriarchal culture—by design, of course—in hostility and rivalry among women. As both “The Valley of Childish Things” and “Roman Fever” show, issues of female sexual freedom, frustrated artistic ambition, and severely limited status in the public realm interested her. Poverty also arrested her imagination and stimulated some of her best work, such as Ethan Frome and Summer. Not surprisingly, given her personal experience, she also focused on marriage, which she usually portrayed as incarcerating, especially for women. At the same time, as “Souls Belated” illustrates, she was keenly aware of how psychologically important the conventional relationship of marriage and its attendant responsibility could be. The private love diary she wrote during her affair with Morton Fullerton, “The Life Apart,” which was never published during her lifetime, shows yet another side of Wharton—anxious, at times insecure, bold, sensual.

    The contribution of Edith Wharton to American literature is major. Often compared with Henry James, a close friend, she is recognized along with other women writers at the turn into the twentieth century—Kate Chopin, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather—for moving nineteenth-century women’s literary tradition into a new phase of artistic ambitiousness and excellence. In her lifetime she published nineteen novels and novellas, eleven volumes of short stories, a number of book-length discursive works, some poetry, and many essays, reviews, and articles. Perceived in her own time as an extraordinary writer, she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 and in 1923 was the first woman to be honored by Yale University with the degree of doctor of letters. Wharton died of a stroke at the age of seventy-five and is buried in France, where she made her home for the last twenty-five years of her life. Her grave is in the Cimetière des Gonards at Versailles.

Texts

        In the Heath Anthology
        The Valley of Childish Things (1896)
        Souls Belated (1899)
        The Other Two (1904)
        The Life Apart (1907 - 1908)
        The Eyes (1910)
        Roman Fever (1936)


    Other Works

        The House of Mirth (1905)
        Madame de Treymes (1907)
        Ethan Frome (1911)
        The Reef (1912)
        The Custom of the Country (1913)
        Summer (1917)
        The Age of Innocence (1920)
        Old New York (1924)
        The Mother's Recompense (1925)
        A Backward Glance (memoir) (1934)


comments powered by Disqus