If you were a young woman in the late 1800s, the only thing you were supposed to achieve in your life was a good marriage.
That was a real problem for Edith Newbold Jones. She was a born storyteller and just wanted to write. That was a real problem for her mother, who just wanted Edith to marry well and be a “proper” society lady. A lady’s name should appear in print three times, her mother told her. Birth, marriage and death.
When people talk about keeping up with the Joneses?
Yeah. That was her parents.
Edith’s parents, George and Lucretia Jones, were descendants of colonists who’d made fortunes in shipping, banking, and real estate. They belonged to the small and most fashionable society of New York who lived on inherited wealth.
She wasn’t allowed to read, so she wrote…
Like most little girls in the late 1800’s, Edith wasn’t sent to school. School was for boys. Her parents hired a governess.
Between the governess and her daddy’s library, Edith discovered a love of words. Drove her mother so batty she disallowed Edith to read. No more novels. No stories. Only textbooks to learn from. So Edith shrugged and wrote instead.
When Edith was sixteen, she wrote a book of poetry and published it under the name of a male relative. She earned $50, which is equivalent to about $1500 today. She was over the moon. She got paid for her writing!
Her mother was so mad she arranged for Edith to have her coming out party a year early. At 17, not 18. Time to get that girl married off and stop the writing nonsense.
Edith wasn’t having any part of it. She spurned every suitor until she was 22 and fast approaching spinsterhood. At 23, she was married off to Edward “Teddy” Wharton, a 35 year old Harvard graduate who didn’t work and still lived with his mother.
The marriage was miserable from the start. Their sex life ended less than a month into the marriage and they moved into separate rooms. Later, she’d write about it. The good part was that she was finally out from under her mother’s thumb.
Her husband wasn’t interested in writing, books, or any of the literary pursuits that filled her with such joy, but he didn’t care if she wrote.
Her first book, The Decoration of Houses, lampooned the gaudy decorating style of the Victorian era as “wobbly velvet-covered tables littered with gewgaws, and festoons of lace on mantelpieces and dressing tables.” She proposed that simple, classical design was so much more comforting to the eye. Cheaper, too. The book was an instant hit.
Despite her miserable marriage, she was finally writing.
And her writing was about to get serious.
“Not a footstep sounded, not a leaf rustled, not a breath of air drew under the arches. And suddenly, through the dumb night, the sound of the cannon began…”
When World War I started, Edith Wharton was in France. Instead of running back home to New York, she rolled up her sleeves. Founded hostels and schools to serve refugees and their children from German-occupied areas of France and Belgium.
She went right to the front lines of the conflict, writing reports for American newspapers urging America to enter the war.
Her words painted the horrors of war and people grew to know her name.
“We passed through streets and streets of murdered houses, through town after town spread out in its last writhings. And before the black holes that were homes, along the edge of the chasms that were streets, everywhere we have seen flowers and vegetables springing up in freshly raked and watered gardens.” — Edith Wharton, May 13, 1915
After the war, she would be awarded the French Légion D’honneur (Legion of Honor) award for her exemplary service during the war.
But while she was writing from the front lines and helping refugees…?
Her husband was back home embezzling from her trust fund to buy his mistress a fancy Boston apartment. When she confronted him, he signed himself into a sanatorium to get help for his depression. She filed for divorce.
After the divorce, when he left the sanatorium, he moved back in with his mother. She went back to Europe and kept writing. She did eventually find love, but she never married again.
Despite her family, she earned her own wealth…
In researching this story, I read a commentary in a large media publication saying it’s hard to laud the efforts of a woman born with a silver spoon in her mouth.
Except, no. She was the third child and the only girl. The bulk of family money went to her two older brothers. That’s how it worked in 1885 when she was married off. Her husband was supposed to provide for her. Family wealth went to the sons that carried on the family name.
But when Edith Wharton started to write, she became a media darling. The woman who dared to speak out about New York society.
And write, she did. Countless essays, poetry, journalism and over 40 books. Bestseller after bestseller.
She earned her own wealth long after the silver spoon was yanked from her mouth and traded for a wedding band.
She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer and ended up apologizing to the man who lost…
Her novel, The Age of Innocence was the story of a young man torn between his innocent young fiancée and her wild and sophisticated cousin. It was published in 1920 and won the Pulitzer in 1921.
She was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
After her win was announced, the men of the Pulitzer jury wrote a public letter to declare that they had not chosen her as winner. They’d chosen "Main Street," by Sinclair Lewis. The Pulitzer board intervened and overturned their choice.
They just wanted everyone to know that her book wasn’t their official choice.
The person behind the switch was most likely the president of Columbia University. The official statement of the Pulitzer board was that her book was the stronger choice. Hers was the one that would endure, they said.
When the whole mess went public, she wrote an apology to the man who “should have” won. She is filled with despair, her letter said. She was 59 years old.
The Pulitzer board was not wrong about which would endure.
In 1993, The Age of Innocence became an Academy Award winning movie starring Daniel Day‑Lewis, Winona Ryder and Michelle Pfeiffer.
72 years after she won the Pulitzer. Endure, indeed.
In 1996, she was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame for her “unflinching portrayal of the societal norms of her time.”
“Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.”
Edith Wharton
Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses
This is so fascinating, Linda! And I love the way you wrote it :)
I really enjoy these pieces, but it's surprising at how slow the progress of women has been to achieve parity with the other 50% of the population. I've been reading "Proving Ground" by Kathy Kleiman, which tells the story of the first computer programmers, all women, who never even got their names credited on photos.