A Gilded Age insider took fiction’s first women’s Pulitzer
Edith Wharton grew up among the New York Joneses—so rich that “keeping up with the Joneses” is said to name them—and turned that world into novels. In 1921 The Age of Innocence made her the earliest woman awarded the Pulitzer for Fiction.
Born Edith Newbold Jones on 24 January 1862 at 14 West 23rd Street in Manhattan, she was baptized at Grace Church and nicknamed Pussy Jones. Childhood years in Europe left her fluent in French, German, and Italian; typhoid in the Black Forest nearly killed her at nine. She invented oral “making up” stories as a small child and tried a novel at eleven before her mother’s criticism pushed her toward poetry. Her relatives included the Rensselaers, grandest of the old Dutch patroon families, and Caroline Schermerhorn Astor was a first cousin of her father; Fort Stevens honours her great-grandfather, a Revolutionary War general. The family's European years, 1866 to 1872, were prompted by a weak postwar dollar. Barred by her mother from reading novels before marriage, she raided her father's library instead. Her first publication came at fifteen, a paid translation of a German poem that appeared under a family friend's name because print was thought unladylike.
After a debutante season and a broken engagement, she married Edward “Teddy” Wharton in 1885. They lived in Newport and later at The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts. Teddy’s deepening depression curtailed travel; Wharton herself wrestled with asthma and low moods. She began an affair with journalist Morton Fullerton in 1908 and divorced in 1913 after twenty-eight years.
Beyond The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome, she wrote at least eighty-five short stories and design books such as The Decoration of Houses (1897) with Ogden Codman. Insider knowledge of Gilded Age manners powered her fiction’s social precision. She died in 1937 and entered the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1996.
Source: Edith Wharton
