Edith Wharton
Stories By Wharton
About Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was one of the most distinguished American novelists and short story writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, celebrated for her incisive portrayals of upper-class society and her subtle, ironic explorations of its hypocrisies. Born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, into a wealthy and socially prominent New York family, she grew up amid the rigid codes of Old New York, a milieu that would become the central subject of much of her fiction. The oft-cited phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” is thought to have originated with her family, whose prestige epitomized elite standing during the Gilded Age.
As a child, Wharton was educated privately and traveled extensively in Europe with her parents, experiences that broadened her cultural knowledge and gave her fluency in several languages. From an early age she demonstrated literary talent, writing poems and stories, though her mother discouraged such pursuits as unseemly for a young lady of her class. Nevertheless, Wharton persevered, and in 1878 she privately published Verses, her first collection of poetry.
In 1885 she married Edward (“Teddy”) Wharton, a Bostonian of suitable social standing but little intellectual affinity with her. Their marriage, marred by Teddy’s mental instability and their divergent interests, became increasingly strained and ended in divorce in 1913—a scandal for a woman of her background. Despite personal difficulties, Wharton’s literary career blossomed. Her early works included collections of short stories such as The Greater Inclination (1899) and Crucial Instances (1901), which gained her recognition for their polished prose and sharp psychological insight.
Her breakthrough came with The House of Mirth (1905), a tragic novel about Lily Bart, a beautiful socialite destroyed by the rigid codes and moral emptiness of New York high society. The novel established Wharton as a major voice in American literature. Later works, such as Ethan Frome (1911), demonstrated her versatility, offering a bleak portrait of rural New England life rather than the world of the drawing room. In 1920 she published The Age of Innocence, a novel set in the 1870s that masterfully examines the conflict between individual desire and social obligation. This work won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921, making Wharton the first woman to receive the honor.
Beyond her novels, Wharton was a prolific short story writer, essayist, and designer. She authored The Decoration of Houses (1897), an influential manual on interior design, co-written with architect Ogden Codman Jr., as well as volumes of travel writing and memoirs such as A Backward Glance (1934). During World War I, she lived in Paris and devoted herself to humanitarian work, establishing hostels and charities for refugees, for which she was later decorated by the French government. She continued writing until her death in France on August 11, 1937, at the age of seventy-five.
Edith Wharton’s literary achievement lies in her ability to combine the elegance of traditional nineteenth-century narrative with the psychological depth and social critique that came to define modern fiction. Her works reveal a profound understanding of the constraints—both visible and invisible—that shape human lives within hierarchical societies.
In her portrayals of New York’s elite, Wharton displayed a delicate balance of insider knowledge and satirical distance. As someone born into the very milieu she critiqued, she exposed its shallow rituals, material obsessions, and moral compromises with both precision and irony. The House of Mirth remains one of the finest studies of the destructive power of social convention, while The Age of Innocence tempers satire with nostalgia, revealing her ambivalence toward a world that was both suffocating and, in its orderliness, vanishing before her eyes.
Wharton also excelled at the novella and short story form. In Ethan Frome, she turned away from the drawing rooms of New York to depict the crushing isolation of rural poverty. The novella’s spare, tragic style and its exploration of frustrated desire showcase Wharton’s range and her ability to depict the universal human struggle between duty and passion, regardless of setting. Her ghost stories, including The Eyes and Afterward, display a mastery of atmosphere and psychological horror, situating her within the tradition of Henry James and Algernon Blackwood.
Stylistically, Wharton’s prose is notable for its clarity, elegance, and finely wrought irony. She avoided sentimentality, preferring understatement and carefully modulated tone. Like her friend and mentor Henry James, she explored the subtleties of consciousness and the moral dimensions of choice, but her fiction is often more accessible, grounded in tangible social realities.
Critics have long recognized her as both a chronicler and critic of the Gilded Age. While her work reflects the restrictions placed upon women, she never reduced her female characters to mere victims. Characters like Lily Bart, Ellen Olenska, and Undine Spragg are complex figures whose struggles illuminate the intersection of gender, class, and personal freedom. In this way, Wharton anticipated many concerns of later feminist criticism, even as she herself resisted easy categorization as a feminist writer.
Edith Wharton occupies a central place in the canon of American literature. Her novels, novellas, and stories continue to be studied for their artistry and for the light they shed on questions of desire, morality, and the price of social belonging. In blending incisive social critique with psychological nuance and stylistic grace, Wharton forged a body of work that bridges the traditions of the nineteenth century with the innovations of modernism, ensuring her lasting reputation as one of America’s greatest writers.