Biography
Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862 to George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander at their brownstone at 14 West 23rd Street in New York City.
Wharton's paternal family, the Joneses, were a wealthy, socially prominent family, having made their money in real estate. The saying "keeping up with the Joneses" is said to refer to her father's family.
She was related to the Rensselaers, the most prestigious of the old patroon families, who had received land grants from the former Dutch government of New York and New Jersey. Her father's first cousin was Caroline Schermerhorn Astor.
Biography
Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray, realistically, the lives and morals of the Gilded Age.
In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, for her novel, The Age of Innocence.
Her other well-known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories.
Wharton was born during the Civil War, although in describing her family life, she does not mention the war, except that their travels to Europe, after the war, were due to the depreciation of American currency.
Biography
From 1866 to 1872, the Jones family visited France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. During her travels, the young Edith became fluent in French, German, and Italian. While in Europe, she was educated by tutors and governesses.
At age nine, she suffered from typhoid fever, which nearly killed her, while the family was at a spa in the Black Forest. After the family returned to the US in 1872, they spent their winters in New York City and their summers in Newport, Rhode Island.
She rejected the standards of fashion and etiquette expected of young girls at the time, expected to put women on display at balls and parties, all so they could marry well. She considered these fashions superficial and oppressive.
Edith wanted more education than she received, so she read from her father's library and from the libraries of her father's friends. Her mother forbade her to read novels, until she was married, and Wharton obeyed this command. [novels were too "realistic" for young female minds.]
Biography
Wharton wrote and told stories from an early age. When she was just four or five, and her family had moved to Europe, she started what she called "making up." She invented stories for her family and walked with an open book, turning the pages, as if reading while improvising a story.
As a young girl, Wharton began writing poetry and fiction, and attempted her first novel at age 11. But her mother's criticism squashed her ambition, and she turned to poetry.
At 15, her first published work appeared, a translation of a German poem "Was die Steine Erzählen" ("What the Stones Tell") by Heinrich Karl Brugsch, for which she was paid $50. Her family did not want her name to appear in print—writing was not considered a proper occupation for a society woman of her time. Consequently, the poem was published under the name of a friend's father, E. A. Washburn, a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who did support women's education.
Biography
In 1877, at age 15, Wharton secretly wrote a novella, Fast and Loose.
In 1878, her father arranged for a collection of two dozen original poems and five translations, Verses, to be privately published.
In 1879, Wharton published a poem under a pseudonym in the New York World.
And in 1880, she had five poems published, anonymously, in the Atlantic Monthly, an important literary magazine.
Despite these early successes, she was not encouraged by her family or her social circle; though she continued to write, she did not publish anything more until her poem "The Last Giustiniani" was published in Scribner's Magazine in October 1889.
Biography
The "debutante" years
Between 1880 and 1890, Wharton put her writing aside to participate in the social rituals of the New York upper classes. She keenly observed the social changes happening around her, which she later used in her writing. In 1879, she officially came out as a debutante. She was allowed to bare her shoulders and wear her hair up, for the first time, at a December dance given by a society matron, Anna Morton.
Wharton began a courtship with Henry Leyden Stevens, son of Paran Stevens, a wealthy hotelier and real estate investor from rural New Hampshire, although her family did not approve of Stevens.
In the middle of her debutante season, the Jones family returned to Europe, in 1881, for her father's health. In spite of this, he died of a stroke at Cannes, in 1882. Stevens was with the Jones family in Europe, during this time.
After returning to the US with her mother, Wharton continued her courtship with Stevens, announcing their engagement in August 1882. The month the two were to marry, the engagement ended.
Wharton's mother, Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, moved back to Paris in 1883 and lived there until her death in 1901.
Biography
At age 23, on April 29, 1885, Wharton married Edward Robbins (Teddy) Wharton, 12 years her senior, at the Trinity Chapel Complex in Manhattan. He was from a well-established Boston family, a sportsman, and a gentleman of the same social class who shared her love of travel. They set up house at Pencraig Cottage in Newport.
In 1893, they bought a house named Land's End on the other side of Newport. Wharton decorated it with the help of designer Ogden Codman.
Biography
In 1897, the Whartons purchased their New York home, 884 Park Avenue. Between 1886 and 1897, they traveled overseas, between February and June, mostly visiting Italy but also Paris and England. From her marriage onwards, three interests came to dominate Wharton's life: American houses, writing, and Italy.
From the late 1880s until 1902, Teddy Wharton suffered from chronic depression and the couple ceased their extensive travel. At that time, his depression became more debilitating, after which they lived almost exclusively at their estate, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts. During those same years, Wharton herself was said to suffer from asthma and periods of depression.
Biography
In 1908, Teddy Wharton's mental condition was determined to be incurable. In that year, Wharton began an affair with Morton Fullerton, an author, and foreign correspondent for The Times of London, in whom she found an intellectual partner.
She divorced Edward Wharton, in 1913, after 28 years of marriage. Around the same time, she was beset with harsh literary criticism from the naturalist school of writers.
In addition to novels, Wharton wrote at least 85 short stories. She was also a garden designer, an interior designer, and a taste-maker of her time. She wrote several design books, including her first major published work, The Decoration of Houses (1897), co-authored by Ogden Codman. Another of her "home and garden" books is the generously illustrated Italian Villas and Their Gardens of 1904, illustrated by Maxfield Parrish.
Biography
Over the course of her life, she crossed the Atlantic 60 times. In Europe, her primary destinations were Italy, France, and England. She also went to Morocco. She wrote many books about her travels, including Italian Backgrounds and A Motor-Flight through France.
Her husband, Edward Wharton, shared her love of travel and for many years, they spent at least four months of each year abroad, mainly in Italy. Their friend, Egerton Winthrop, accompanied them on many journeys there. In 1888, the Whartons and their friend, James Van Alen, took a cruise through the Aegean islands. Wharton was 26. The trip cost the Whartons $10,000 and lasted four months. She kept a travel journal, during this trip, that was thought to be lost but was later published as The Cruise of the Vanadis, now considered her earliest known travel writing.
In 1897, Edith Wharton purchased Land's End in Newport, Rhode Island, from Robert Livingston Beeckman, a former U.S. Open Tennis Championship runner-up who became governor of Rhode Island. At the time, Wharton described the main house as "incurably ugly.” Wharton agreed to pay $80,000 for the property, and she spent thousands more to alter the home's facade, decorate the interior, and landscape the grounds.
Biography
In 1902, Wharton designed The Mount, her estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, which survives today as an example of her design principles. She wrote several of her novels there, including The House of Mirth (1905), the first of many chronicles of life in old New York.
At The Mount, she entertained the cream of American literary society, including her close friend, novelist Henry James, who described the estate as "a delicate French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond."
Although she spent many months traveling in Europe nearly every year, with her friend, Egerton Winthrop (a descendant of John Winthrop), The Mount was her primary residence until 1911.
When her marriage deteriorated, she decided to move permanently to France, living first at 53 Rue de Varenne, Paris, an apartment that belonged to George Washington Vanderbilt II.
Biography
Wharton was preparing to vacation for the summer when World War I broke out. Though many fled Paris, she moved back to her Paris apartment and for four years, she was a tireless and ardent supporter of the French war effort. One of her first causes, in August 1914, was opening a workroom for unemployed women who were fed and paid one franc a day. What began as 30 women soon doubled to 60, and their sewing business began to thrive.
When the Germans invaded Belgium in the fall of 1914 and Paris was flooded with Belgian refugees, she helped to set up the American Hostels for Refugees, which managed to get them shelter, meals, and clothes, and eventually created an employment agency to help them find work. She collected more than $100,000 on their behalf. In early 1915, she organized the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee, which gave shelter to nearly 900 Belgian refugees who had fled when their homes were bombed by Germany.
Aided by her influential connections in the French government, she and her long-time friend, Walter Berry, were among the few foreigners allowed to travel to the front lines. She and Berry made five journeys, between February and August 1915, which Wharton described in a series of articles first published in Scribner's Magazine and later as Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort, which became an American bestseller. Travelling by car, Wharton and Berry drove through the war zone, viewing one devastated French village after another. She visited the trenches and was within earshot of artillery fire.
Biography
She wrote, "We woke to a noise of guns closer and more incessant, and when we went out into the streets, it seemed as if, overnight, a new army had sprung out of the ground."
Throughout the war, she worked in charitable efforts for refugees, the injured, the unemployed, and the displaced. She was a "heroic worker on behalf of her adopted country." On April 18, 1916, Raymond Poincaré, the then-President of France, appointed her Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, the country's highest award, in recognition of her dedication to the war effort.
Her relief work included setting up workrooms for unemployed French women, organizing concerts to provide work for musicians, raising tens of thousands of dollars for the war effort, and opening tuberculosis hospitals.
In 1915, Wharton edited a charity benefit volume, The Book of the Homeless, which included essays, art, poetry, and musical scores by many major contemporary European and American artists. Wharton proposed the book to her publisher, Scribner's, handled the business arrangements, lined up contributors, and translated the French entries into English. Theodore Roosevelt wrote a two-page introduction, in which he praised Wharton's effort and urged Americans to support the war. She also kept up her own work, continuing to write novels, short stories, and poems, as well as reporting for The New York Times and keeping up her enormous correspondence.
Biography
Wharton urged Americans to support the war effort and encouraged America to enter the war. She wrote the popular romantic novel, Summer in 1917, the war novella, The Marne, in 1918, and A Son at the Front, in 1919 (published 1923).
When the war ended, she watched the Victory Parade from the Champs Elysees' balcony of a friend's apartment. After four years of intense effort, she decided to leave Paris for the quiet of the countryside. Wharton settled north of Paris, buying an 18th-century house on seven acres of land that she called Pavillon Colombe. She lived there, in summer and autumn, for the rest of her life, spending winters and springs on the French Riviera.
During the post-war years, she divided her time between Hyères and Provence, where she finished The Age of Innocence, in 1920. She returned to the US only once after the war to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale in 1923.
Biography—later years
The Age of Innocence (1920) won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the award. The three fiction judges voted to give the prize to Sinclair Lewis for his satire Main Street, but Columbia University's advisory board, led by conservative university president Nicholas Murray Butler, overturned their decision and awarded the prize to The Age of Innocence.
Wharton was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928, and 1930.
She was friend and confidante to many prominent intellectuals of her time: Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide were all her guests, at one time or another. Theodore Roosevelt, Bernard Berenson, and Kenneth Clark were valued friends as well. Particularly notable was her meeting with F. Scott Fitzgerald, described by the editors of her letters as "one of the better known failed encounters in the American literary annals.”
In 1934, Wharton's autobiography, A Backward Glance, was published. In the view of Judith E. Funston, writing on Edith Wharton in American National Biography:
"What is most notable about A Backward Glance, however, is what it does not tell: her criticism of Lucretia Jones [her mother], her difficulties with Teddy, and her affair with Morton Fullerton, which did not come to light until her papers, deposited in Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, were opened in 1968."
Biography—death
On June 1, 1937, Wharton was at her French country home (shared with architect and interior decorator Ogden Codman), where she was at work on a revised edition of The Decoration of Houses, when she suffered a heart attack and collapsed.
She died of a stroke on August 11, 1937, at her 18th-century house on Rue de Montmorency. She died at 5:30 p.m., but her death was not known in Paris. At her bedside was her friend, Mrs. Royall Tyler.
Wharton was buried in the American Protestant section of the Cimetière des Gonards in Versailles, "with all the honors owed a war hero and a chevalier of the Legion of Honor . . . a group of some one hundred friends sang a verse of the hymn 'O Paradise'."
Biography
Despite not publishing her first novel until she was 40, Wharton became an extraordinarily productive writer. In addition to her 15 novels, seven novellas, and eighty-five short stories, she published poetry, books on design, travel, literary and cultural criticism, and a memoir.
In 1873, Wharton wrote a short story and gave it to her mother to read. Stinging from her mother's critique, Wharton decided to write only poetry. While she constantly sought her mother's approval and love, she rarely received either, and their relationship was troubled. Before she was 15, Wharton wrote Fast and Loose (1877). In her youth, she wrote about society. Her central themes came from her experiences with her parents. She was very critical of her work and wrote public reviews criticizing it. She also wrote about her own experiences with life. "Intense Love's Utterance" is a poem written about Henry Stevens.
In 1889, she sent three poems for publication, to Scribner's, Harper's and Century. Edward L. Burlingame published "The Last Giustiniani" for Scribner's. It was not until Wharton was 29 that her first short story was published: "Mrs. Manstey's View" had very little success, and it took her more than a year to publish another story.
Biography
She completed "The Fullness of Life,” following her annual European trip with Teddy. Burlingame was critical of this story, but Wharton did not want to make edits to it. This story, along with many others, speaks about her marriage. She sent Bunner Sisters to Scribner's in 1892. Burlingame wrote that it was too long for Scribner's to publish. This story is believed to be based on an experience she had as a child. It did not see publication until 1916, and is included in the collection called Xingu.
After a visit with her friend, Paul Bourget, she wrote "The Good May Come" and "The Lamp of Psyche.” "The Lamp of Psyche" was a comical story, with verbal wit and sorrow. After "Something Exquisite" was rejected by Burlingame, she lost confidence in herself. She started travel writing in 1894.
In 1901, Wharton wrote a two-act play called Man of Genius about an English man having an affair with his secretary. The play was rehearsed but never produced.
Another 1901 play, The Shadow of a Doubt, also came close to being staged but fell through, was thought to be lost, until discovered in 2017. It had a radio adaptation broadcast on BBC Radio 3, in 2018. It wouldn't be until 2023, over a century later, that the world stage premiere took place in Canada at the Shaw Festival.
Many of Wharton's novels are characterized by subtle use of dramatic irony. Having grown up in upper-class, late-19th-century society, Wharton became one of its most astute critics, in such works as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.
Cast of characters
Lily Bart
Julia Peniston
Lawrence Selden
Gerty Farish
Judy Trenor
Gus Trenor
Bertha Dorset
Ned Silverton
George Dorset
Percy Gryce
Simon Rosedale
Carry Fisher
Nettie Struther
Jack Stepney
Grace Stepney
Mrs. Haffen
Cast of characters—Lily Bart
The novel's 29-year-old protagonist, Lily distinguishes herself from other members of New York’s high society with her beauty, charm, intelligence, and ultimately moral compass. Although Lily desperately needs to marry to attain a stable position of wealth and power, and can use her charm, or favors to the wealthy, to achieve her goals, she is ultimately unwilling to sacrifice her moral principles. Instead, she commits to repaying her debts, especially to Gus Trenor, and refuses to blackmail Bertha Dorset, although Bertha has made her the sacrificial lamb to maintain her own reputation and condemns Lily to poverty and social isolation. Lily undergoes a moral transformation over the course of the novel, as she realizes that money does not necessarily bring happiness and that poverty is not synonymous with moral degradation (Mrs. Struther). She also comes to realize that love, particularly her relationship with Lawrence Selden, is what has encouraged her to be a good person.
Cast of characters—Lily Bart
Lily Bart’s mother dies when Lily is in her early twenties. Mrs. Bart has a strong influence on Lily’s attitude toward life, as she convinces her daughter that she will succeed in becoming rich by using her beauty to find a rich husband.
Mrs. Bart’s ideology and spending habits instill in Lily a conviction that she belongs to no other class than the upper class, that money brings happiness and moral worth, and that it is also an inherently unstable possession, meant to bring alternate feelings of elation and worry. However, Lily differs from her mother in her aversion to marrying a rich man for the sake of money alone.
Quotes
She knew that she hated dinginess as much as her mother had hated it, and to her last breath she meant to fight against it, dragging herself up again and again above its flood till she gained the bright pinnacles of success which presented such a slippery surface to her clutch. (Book 1, Chapter 3)
She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate. (Book 1, Chapter 1)
Cast of characters—Lily Bart
Lily Bart—Quotes
“From the beginning? . . . Dear Gerty, how little imagination you good people have! Why, the beginning was in my cradle, I suppose—in the way I was brought up, and the things I was taught to care for. Or no—I won’t blame anybody for my faults: I’ll say it was in my blood, that I got it from some wicked pleasure-loving ancestress!" (Book 2 Chapter 4)
There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive’s gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit quivered for flight. She could not herself have explained the sense of buoyancy which seemed to lift and swing her above the sun-suffused world at her feet. Was it love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination of happy thoughts and sensations? (Book 1, Chapter 6, after she and Lawrence Selden has taken a walk in the park.)
Cast of characters—Lily Bart
Lily Bart—Quotes
. . . as Miss Bart they knew her by heart. She knew herself by heart too, and was sick of the old story. There were moments when she longed blindly for anything different, anything strange, remote, and untried; but the utmost reach of her imagination did not go beyond picturing her usual life in a new setting. She could not figure herself as anywhere but in a drawing-room, diffusing elegance as a flower sheds perfume. (Book 1, Chapter 9)
“The whole truth?” Miss Bart laughed. “What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that’s easiest to believe. In this case it’s a great deal easier to believe Bertha Dorset’s story than mine, because she has a big house and an opera box, and it’s convenient to be on good terms with her.” (Book 2. Chapter 4)
Cast of characters—Lily Bart
Lily Bart—Quotes
She lay awake viewing her situation in the crude light which Rosedale’s visit had shed on it. In fending off the offer he was so plainly ready to renew, had she not sacrificed to one of those abstract notions of honor that might be called the conventionalities of the moral life? What debt did she owe to a social order which had condemned and banished her without trial? She had never been heard in her own defense; she was innocent of the charge on which she had been found guilty; and the irregularity of her conviction might seem to justify the use of methods as irregular in recovering her lost rights. (Book 2, Chapter 11)
Cast of characters—Lily Bart
Lily Bart—Quotes
“There is someone I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you—we are sure to see each other again—but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you—I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you—and she’ll be no trouble, she’ll take up no room.” (Book 2, Chapter 12, when she visits Selden on her way home the night she dies)
It was no longer, however, from the vision of material poverty that she turned with the greatest shrinking. She had a sense of deeper impoverishment—of an inner destitution compared to which outward conditions dwindled into insignificance. It was indeed miserable to be poor—to look forward to a shabby, anxious middle-age, leading by dreary degrees of economy and self-denial to gradual absorption in the dingy communal existence of the boarding-house. But there was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the headless current of the years. That was the feeling which possessed her now—the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spindrift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them. (Book 2, Chapter 13)
Cast of characters—Lily Bart
Lily Bart—Quotes
As she lay there she said to herself that there was something she must tell Selden, some word she had found that should make life clear between them. She tried to repeat the word, which lingered vague and luminous on the far edge of thought—she was afraid of not remembering it when she woke; and if she could only remember it and say it to him, she felt that everything would be well. (Book 2, Chapter 13)
It was this moment of love, this fleeting victory over themselves, which had kept them from atrophy and extinction; which, in her, had reached out to him in every struggle against the influence of her surroundings, and in him, had kept alive the faith that now drew him penitent and reconciled to her side.
He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear. (Book 2, Chapter 14)
Cast of characters—Julia Peniston
Lily’s aunt, Mrs. Peniston is a rich social recluse who adheres to society's conservative values despite the family connection with Lily. Although she showed some degree of compassion in taking Lily in after Mrs. Bart’s death, she is not involved in Lily’s personal life. She is however fastidious about the cleanliness and appearance of her house and furnishings.
She is less interested in helping her niece than scolding her on a moral level, blaming Lily for the rumors that exist about her. She later proves particularly cruel in choosing to disinherit Lily, thus leaving the young woman in abject poverty, perhaps as a fit punishment.
Cast of characters—Lawrence Selden
A young man who comes from an impoverished yet respectable family, Lawrence Selden impresses Lily Bart with his capacity to take part in some aspects of high society while keeping from becoming a prisoner to its rules and norms.
Despite criticizing Lily for her interest in materialistic things, Lawrence is in love with her, admires her intelligence and social shrewdness, and believes that there is a deeper part of her personality that does not come across in social settings. This attitude reveals his aversion to cynicism and his willingness to believe in elevated, spiritual ideals. He also proves reliable in trying to help Lily and protecting her from her harmful environment as best he can.
Quote:
He was aware that the qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her sex were chiefly external: as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay. Yet the analogy left him unsatisfied, for a coarse texture will not take a high finish; and was it not possible that the material was fine, but that circumstance had fashioned it into a futile shape? (Book 1, Chapter 1)
Cast of characters—Lawrence Selden
Quotes
He was aware that the qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her sex were chiefly external: as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay. Yet the analogy left him unsatisfied, for a coarse texture will not take a high finish; and was it not possible that the material was fine, but that circumstance had fashioned it into a futile shape? (Book 1, Chapter 1)
“My idea of success,” he said, “is personal freedom.”
“Freedom? Freedom from worries?”
“From everything—from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents. To keep a kind of republic of the spirit—that’s what I call success.”
She blushed a little under his gaze. "You think me horribly sordid, don't you? But perhaps it's rather that I never had any choice. There was no one, I mean, to tell me about the republic of the spirit."
"There never is—it's a country one has to find the way to one's self." (Book 1, Chapter 6)
Cast of characters—Lawrence Selden
He had meant to keep free from permanent ties, not from any poverty of feeling, but because, in a different way, he was, as much as Lily, the victim of his environment. There had been a germ of truth in his declaration to Gerty Farish that he had never wanted to marry a "nice" girl: the adjective connoting, in his cousin's vocabulary, certain utilitarian qualities which are apt to preclude the luxury of charm.
Now it had been Selden's fate to have a charming mother: her graceful portrait, all smiles and Cashmere, still emitted a faded scent of the undefinable quality. His father was the kind of man who delights in a charming woman: who quotes her, stimulates her, and keeps her perennially charming.
Neither one of the couple cared for money, but their disdain of it took the form of always spending a little more than was prudent. If their house was shabby, it was exquisitely kept; if there were good books on the shelves there were also good dishes on the table.
Selden senior had an eye for a picture, his wife an understanding of old lace; and both were so conscious of restraint and discrimination in buying that they never quite knew how it was that the bills mounted up. (Book 1, chapter 14)
Cast of characters—Lawrence Selden
Though many of Selden's friends would have called his parents poor, he had grown up in an atmosphere where restricted means were felt only as a check on aimless profusion: where the few possessions were so good that their rarity gave them a merited relief, and abstinence was combined with elegance in a way exemplified by Mrs. Selden's knack of wearing her old velvet as if it were new.
A man has the advantage of being delivered early from the home point of view, and before Selden left college he had learned that there are as many different ways of going without money as of spending it. Unfortunately, he found no way as agreeable as that practiced at home; and his views of womankind in especial were tinged by the remembrance of the one woman who had given him his sense of "values." It was from her that he inherited his detachment from the sumptuary side of life: the stoic's carelessness of material things, combined with the Epicurean's pleasure in them.
Life shorn of either feeling appeared to him a diminished thing; and nowhere was the blending of the two ingredients so essential as in the character of a pretty woman. It had always seemed to Selden that experience offered a great deal besides the sentimental adventure, yet he could vividly conceive of a love which should broaden and deepen till it became the central fact of life.
What he could not accept, in his own case, was the makeshift alternative of a relation that should be less than this: that should leave some portions of his nature unsatisfied, while it put an undue strain on others. (Book 1, chapter 14)
Cast of characters—Gerty Farish
Lawrence Selden’s cousin, Gerty Farish is Lily Bart’s most devoted friend. Living in a working-class apartment on her own, Gerty demonstrates both a strong capacity for independence and a rejection of materialistic values.
Despite having feelings for Selden, Gerty distinguishes herself through her self-sacrifice and compassion when she agrees to help Lily, although she initially blamed Lily for taking Selden away from her. Ultimately, she discovers that their love for Lily is what connects her with her cousin.
Gerty also proves devoted to charitable causes and naively believes in other people’s goodness, sometimes to the point of not noticing their selfish motives.
Cast of characters—Judy Trenor
Characterized by a sincere enjoyment of her duties as a hostess and a concern for people to enjoy themselves at her parties, Judy Trenor initially appears to be one of Lily Bart’s most reliable friends, as she actively helps Lily in her effort to seduce Percy Gryce.
However, Judy is also highly sensitive to financial matters, such as women borrowing money from her husband Gus, and later punishes Lily for doing so by rejecting her from her social circle.
Judy is also a keen social observer, and admits that she only accepts Bertha Dorset’s friendship because she knows it is better to keep potentially dangerous people on one’s side instead of antagonizing them.
Cast of characters—Gus Trenor
An unsophisticated, unattractive man, and Judy Trenor’s husband, Gus falls in love with Lily Bart after agreeing to help her invest her money on the stock market.
Despite his traditional social upbringing, Gus proves socially incompetent, unable to grasp Lily’s subtle verbal cues and often giving way to aggressive excitement instead of self-restraint.
A manipulative, violent, and vengeful aspect of his personality comes to light when he tries to force Lily to give him sexual favors in exchange for money.
Cast of characters—Bertha Dorset
A woman universally known for her manipulation and cruelty, Bertha Dorset feels threatened by Lily Bart and experiences no remorse at taking revenge on her, ultimately condemning her to poverty and social exclusion.
Bertha’s lack of morals also comes to light through her various adulterous relationships, which demonstrate a complete lack of regard for her husband, George, whom she manipulates at will. Ned
However, Bertha’s utter lack of feeling or morality does not keep her from becoming one of the most powerful members of society, as her impressive wealth is sufficient to make everyone want to be on her side.
Cast of characters—Ned Silverton
A young, naïve man who enjoys writing poetry and is addicted to gambling, Ned Silverton falls in love with Carry Fisher and Bertha Dorset, although he fails to understand how calculating these high-society women can be.
Cast of characters—George Dorset
Bertha Dorset’s husband George is weak and easy to manipulate. Although he shows sincere affection and interest in Lily Bart, he ultimately proves extremely cowardly, failing to defend Lily from his wife’s lies.
His self-obsession and lack of courage later become even more obvious when he begs Lily to marry him, proving that he lacks even the boldness to divorce Bertha on his own.
He is also characterized by physical weakness, as he constantly suffers from indigestion, which he claims is the result of jealousy about his wife’s adulterous affairs.
Cast of characters—Percy Gryce
An extremely rich man of conservative, puritan values, Percy Gryce is universally known to be boring. Although initially fascinated by Lily Bart and considers marrying her, he later demonstrates his utter fear of socially unacceptable behavior when he flees Bellomont after hearing a rumor that Lily has borrowed money from a man.
Cast of characters—Simon Rosedale
A very rich man from extraordinary success on the stock market, Simon Rosedale is initially not welcomed into high society. However, his financial savvy and his fierce determination to succeed at social climbing ultimately bear fruit, as he becomes increasingly accepted in upper-class circles.
In love with Lily Bart, he often surprises her with his refreshing straightforwardness, which is at odds with the conventions of New York’s high society.
At the same time, he shows little regard for moral principles when he tries to convince Lily to use Bertha Dorset’s letters to regain social clout, highlighting society’s cruelty and hypocrisy as justification for unethical behavior such as blackmail.
Although Lily is initially repulsed by him, she comes to admire his sincerity and loyalty, as he proves committed to helping her even when she is living a working-class life. He is legitimately disturbed by Lily's fallen state at the end of the novel, and wants to help her, but the class consciousness of both prevent them from offering or accepting his help.
Cast of characters—Carry Fisher
A twice-divorced woman who is adept at making the men around her give her money, Carry Fisher is in charge of organizing other people’s parties and integrating them in high society, which she does for Mr. and Mrs. Wellington Bry as well as Mr. and Mrs. Gormer.
Despite initially following the other upper-class women in rejecting Lily Bart after the young woman’s separation from Bertha Dorset, Carry later proves that she is in fact a loyal friend to Lily. She repents for her actions and actively helps Lily with both emotional and job-related support, proving that she is both honest and reliable.
She first arranges a job for Lily as social secretary to Mrs. Norma Hatch at the Emporium Hotel, and later a position in Madame Regina's millinery shop.
However, Carry’s loyalty ultimately proves limited, as she distances herself from Lily when she fears becoming involved in a social scandal, proving that her desire to remain part of high society is stronger than her friendship.
Cast of characters—Nettie Struther
Young woman Lily helps when she goes with Gerty Farish on her charitable work. Lily gave the girl money, (Gus Trenor's) to go to a sanatorium in the mountains to cure her health.
Quotes
She had known Nettie Crane as one of the discouraged victims of over-work and anemic parentage: one of the superfluous fragments of life destined to be swept prematurely into that social refuse-heap of which Lily had so lately expressed her dread. But Nettie Struther's frail envelope was now alive with hope and energy: whatever fate the future reserved for her, she would not be cast into the refuse-heap without a struggle.
. . . the last spell nearly finished me. When you sent me off that time I never thought I'd come back alive, and I didn't much care if I did. You see I didn't know about George and the baby then."
Cast of characters—Nettie Struther
Quotes
"You see I wasn't only just SICK that time you sent me off—I was dreadfully unhappy too. I'd known a gentleman where I was employed—I don't know as you remember I did type-writing in a big importing firm—and—well—I thought we were to be married: he'd gone steady with me six months and given me his mother's wedding ring. But I presume he was too stylish for me—he travelled for the firm, and had seen a great deal of society. Work girls aren't looked after the way you are, and they don't always know how to look after themselves. I didn't . . . and it pretty near killed me when he went away . . . "It was then I came down sick—I thought it was the end of everything. I guess it would have been if you hadn't sent me off. (Book 2, Chapter 13)
Cast of characters—Jack Stepney
Lily’s cousin, Jack Stepney proves a shrewd social observer and just as capable of social calculation as Lily when he foresees that Simon Rosedale will become an important member of high society.
When Lily sees him with his future wife Gwen Van Osburgh, she realizes that he is in a similar situation to hers, since he is marrying for money and is bound to live a life that will bore him.
Cast of characters—Grace Stepney
Mrs. Peniston’s niece and Lily Bart’s cousin, Miss Grace Stepney proves resentful and unforgiving. After blaming Lily for excluding her from a fancy dinner at Mrs. Peniston’s house, Grace nurtures a grudge against Lily and refuses to help her when Lily finds herself penniless. Morality and social convention are her excuses for revenge on Lily and she convinces Mrs. Peniston of Lily’s immoral behavior and degraded life.
Because of this resentment, Grace tells Mrs. Peniston about the rumors—that Gus Trenor is in love with Lily, that they might be romantically involved, that he is paying Lily's bills, including her gambling debts.
At the mention of gambling, Mrs. Peniston is shocked and furious, but does not directly confront Lily about these rumors. Grace's unjust action is blatant, since Lily never meant Grace harm, yet Grace feels no compassion. Grace further mentions that Lily has also accepted attentions from George Dorset, but Mrs. Peniston, unwilling to believe these accusations, defends her niece and refuses to pursue the conversation. Reluctant to make a scene, Mrs. Peniston refuses to talk about these rumors with Lily, but does conclude that a girl is responsible even for the unfounded rumors circulated about her.
Cast of characters—Ned Van Alstyne
A member of the long-established, wealthy Van Alstyne family, Lily Bart’s father’s cousin tries to protect Lily’s reputation by telling Lawrence Selden to keep quiet about seeing her with Gus Trenor.
At the same time, his crude comments about Lily’s physical qualities shock Selden, who considers him a typical example of the intellectually unrefined circle Lily wants to be a part of.
Cast of characters—Mrs. Haffen
The cleaning woman at the Benedick, where Lawrence Selden lives, and which Simon Rosedale owns.
She initially adopts a defiant attitude toward Lily Bart when she sees her leaving the Benedick, seemingly assuming that Lily is one of Selden’s lovers.
She later extorts money from Lily by offering to sell Bertha Dorset's letters. Lily does buy them, if only to protect Selden, but refuses to use them to regain her social status, although Simon Rosedale encourages her to do so, and says he will marry her if she does.
On the night she dies, when visiting Selden, she tosses the letters into his fireplace.
Questions for discussion
As is true of a number of great novels, the first chapter is important for setting the scene, introducing major themes, creating a tone, and providing basic character descriptions that will be developed as the novel progresses. The first chapter of this novel does just that.
Briefly, Lily has just gotten off the train at Grand Central from a visit to the country, but has missed the connecting train. She's at a loss about what to do. Lawrence Selden discovers her, they take a walk for some fresh air, pass the house where he lives, and he invites her to tea in his rooms. They converse.
When she leaves, Selden offers to take her to the train but she insists on going by herself, passing a cleaning woman on the stairs, and running into Simon Rosedale as she exits, explaining that she had been visiting her dress maker.
Why is all this important?
Questions for discussion
Wharton took the title for her novel from a verse in Ecclesiastics—"The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in The House of Mirth."
Does Lily Bart's allegiance to the follies and superficialities of society mean that she has the "heart of a fool" or is she trapped by the dictates of her upbringing and the expectations of the times?
Questions for discussion
Did your opinion of the men in Lily's life change over the course of the novel—Gus Dorset, Simon Rosedale, Lawrence Selden?
Questions for discussion
This is very much a novel of manners, society during the Gilded Age, in the same way that Jane Austen's books (Pride and Prejudice) are novels of manners during the late 18th century, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is a novel of 1920s American society.
Do you see similarities among these novels?
A society governed by adherence to such rules is necessarily constructed, artificial. It is a façade, much like the tableau vivant Lily appears in—to her great advantage. For example, people don't marry for love, they marry for money and/or social position.
But the need to belong is a strong, very strong, human motivation. It's one of the things that give stories such power.
Questions for discussion
We know that in a novel of manners there are elaborate rules of conduct. Who sets these rules? What are the major infractions?
Do these same social rules apply to men as well? Or are men similarly bound by another set of rules?
Breakout room question
Was Lily's death from chloral hydrate an accident or suicide? Was it inevitable, destined?
Questions for discussion
Edith Wharton wrote "A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implications lie in its power of debasing people and ideas."
Do you think The House of Mirth is primarily a portrait of the frivolous and corrupt social world of New York or is it the story of Lily Bart's personal tragedy?
In other words, is this just the story of an unfortunate young woman or is it larger than that?
Questions for discussion
Even early in the novel, Wharton offers hints that foreshadow Lily's public humiliation by the Trenors and the Dorsets, her abandonment by Carry Fisher, and her aunt's decision to disinherit her. What events alert you to the true nature of the other character's feelings and attitudes toward her?
Is Lily too naive to grasp the significance of these events? Does she genuinely misunderstand her financial arrangement with Gus Trenor or simply choose to ignore its "obvious" implications?
When she agrees to accompany the Dorsets on the cruise, is she unaware of her role as a mask for Bertha's affair with Ned Silverton?
Questions for discussion
Lily rejects both Simon Rosedale, a fabulously rich man of "unacceptable" lineage, and Selden, a man she clearly admires who cannot support her in style. Do these rejections represent an unrealistic, perhaps inflated, view of her own worth and potential?
Why does Lily refuse their offers?
Are her motives purely selfish or do they reflect some underlying sense of morality on Lily's part?
Questions for discussion
Both Lily's cousin, Grace Stepney, and Selden's cousin, Gerty Farish, live in genteel poverty on the margins of society. How are their attitudes about their positions reflected in the way they treat Lily?
How important are family relationships?
Is there true friendship in any of the characters?
Questions for discussion
What troubled you, or gave you problems, with this novel?
Questions for discussion
Ultimately, this novel is about how women cope in a hostile environment, in a society that defines their lives rather than giving them choice. For this reason, it has affinities with many other novels about women—Kate Quinn's books, Salt Creek and Secret River in Aussie lit, and of course Kristin Hannah.
The Four Winds tells the story of Elsa Wolcott, a young woman born and raised in Texas during the boom years of the 1920s. Elsa is 25, and her parents, wealthy members of the local social scene, consider her too old and too plain for marriage, relegating her to the status of spinster. When Elsa is swept off her feet by Rafe Martinelli, an 18-year-old son of a local farmer, their romantic affair leaves Elsa pregnant. Disowned by her parents for casting shame upon the family, Elsa marries Rafe and is taken in by Tony and Rose Martinelli, Rafe’s parents. When Elsa gives birth to Loreda, Tony and Rose love their grandchild immediately and eventually accept Elsa as the daughter they never had.
Questions for discussion
One of the themes for this course is storytelling. What's the role of "stories" in this novel?
Next Week:
Background on Marjorie Merriweather Post