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Edith Wharton: A brief personal history and overview of literary achievements The cultural advancement of the 1920's has many important literary figures associated with it. Names such as T.S. Elliot, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald are some of the better-known names. Edith Wharton is one of the less known of the period, but is still a formidable writer. This paper will explore Ms. Wharton's life and history and give a brief background surrounding some of her more popular novels. Ms. Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, in her parents' mansion and West Twenty-Third Street in New York City. Her mother, Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander, connected with wealthy Dutch landowners and merchants of the early nineteenth century, was the granddaughter of an outstanding American Revolutionary War patriot, General Ebenezer Stevens. After the war, General Stevens became a very successful East-India merchant. Edith Wharton's father, a man of considerable, private, inherited wealth, did not follow a career in business. Rather, he lived a life of leisure, punctuated by his hobbies of sea fishing, boat racing, and wildfowl shooting (activities typical of wealthy men of the day). During her first few years, Edith Wharton'
Whereas most children of her age would be told the familiar old folk and fairy tales of Anderson, Perrault, and the Brothers Grimm, she listened with great delight to tales of the "domestic dramas" of the great Greek and Roman gods of mythology. Wharton translated into English the great majority of the Italian and French contributions to the book. Not yet able to read, she carried around with her a large volume of Washington Irving's stories of old Spain, The Alhambra. Almost immediately, she began to do Red Cross work; she even provided a place for women who could sew clothing for the needy. Wharton's first novel, The Valley of Decision (1902), a historical romance of eighteenth-century Italy. To help obtain money for war relief work, Mrs. Her heroic was efforts were recognized by France in 1915 when she was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor. Edith Wharton made a great impression on the literary scene of the 1900's and her presence is still felt today. However, she had to return to her father's in New York, where she spent her time perusing his library and immersing herself in the likes of Roman Plutarch and the English Macaulay, the English Pepys and Evelyn and the French Madame de Sevigne; the poets, Milton, Burns and Byron, as well as Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Elizabeth Barrat Browning. To excite American interest in the plight of the French, she made six trips to the battle lines and then wrote an account of the hospital needs of the wounded. Whartons carried out some of her own original ideas about interior decoration - a project which later blossomed out into a book written in collaboration with the decorator-architect, Ogden Codman. They often times went on European holidays. " The series of social activities that indicated to the world that she was adult enough to be invited to social entertainment without her parents as chaperones. She began the composition of Ethan Frome in Paris in French to have practice in keeping up to date with French idioms.
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