Edith Wharton

Old New York, and the way out of it

She was born on 24 January 1862 into a family so settled in the Manhattan of brownstone houses and calling cards — the engraved cards a visitor left at the door on a formal afternoon call — that the phrase 'keeping up with the Joneses' is often said to refer to her father's relations. Girls of that world were educated at home, married early, and did not publish. She read her way through her father's library, spent long stretches of childhood in Italy, France and Germany, and in 1885 married Edward Robbins Wharton, called Teddy, a good-tempered Bostonian thirteen years older with no interests beyond horses and dogs.

Her first books were not fiction. The Decoration of Houses (1897), written with the architect Ogden Codman Jr., argued that rooms should be planned like buildings rather than upholstered like cushions, and it made her a household authority before she was a novelist. She built The Mount, her house at Lenox in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts, in 1902, to demonstrate the theory. Then in 1905 came The House of Mirth — the story of Lily Bart, a beautiful woman with no money manoeuvring through New York society until it discards her — which sold enormously and made her the most successful American novelist of her generation.

53 rue de Varenne

From 1907 the Whartons wintered in Paris, at first in an apartment lent by American friends at 58 rue de Varenne, and from 1910 in one of her own at number 53, where she stayed until 1920. The street is in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the quarter of the 7th arrondissement that had been the address of the French aristocracy since the eighteenth century: eighteenth-century mansions set behind gates and courtyards, closed to outsiders and almost impossible for a foreigner to enter socially. Wharton entered it. She spoke fluent French, knew the literature better than most of her hosts, and became a fixture of a world of drawing rooms that admitted very few Americans and almost no American women.

The friendship that mattered most was with the novelist Henry James, the older American writer of The Portrait of a Lady, who called her the Angel of Devastation for the speed at which she swept him around Europe by motor car. Her marriage, meanwhile, was ending: Teddy Wharton suffered breakdowns, embezzled from her trust to keep a mistress, and the couple divorced in 1913. She was fifty-one, permanently resident in France, and free. Her writing did not slow — Ethan Frome (1911) and The Custom of the Country (1913) both belong to the rue de Varenne years.

The novelist who ran a relief network

Germany declared war on France in August 1914 while she was in Paris, and within weeks the German army was advancing on the city. Most foreigners left. Wharton stayed and began, within weeks, to build charities. She opened a workroom that paid unemployed Paris seamstresses to sew; in November 1914 she founded the American Hostels for Refugees, which found lodging, meals, clothing, medical care and work for Belgian and French civilians who had fled the German advance; and in 1915 the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee, which took in children evacuated from the occupied Belgian border and housed them in requisitioned buildings. She raised the money herself, largely from Americans, and ran the accounts.

She also went to look. With passes obtained through the French Red Cross — rarely given to civilians and almost never to women — she made a series of drives to the front lines in 1914 and 1915, and wrote what she saw: Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort, published in 1915, is a war correspondent's book by a novelist, describing bombarded towns and field hospitals within earshot of the guns. The title names the two ends of the French front, the Channel port of Dunkerque in the north and the fortress town of Belfort near the Swiss border. Its purpose was partly to argue the French case to an America that was still neutral in the war and would not enter it until 1917.

Her most Parisian piece of fundraising was a book. The Book of the Homeless (1916) is an anthology she assembled by writing to nearly everyone she knew and everyone she did not: poems, essays, drawings and scores donated outright, with the proceeds going to her refugee charities. Its contributors included the novelists Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, her friend Henry James, the composer Igor Stravinsky, the sculptor Auguste Rodin — whose studio stood a few hundred metres from her flat, in the Hôtel Biron at 77 rue de Varenne, an eighteenth-century mansion that is now the Musée Rodin — and the painter Claude Monet, along with some sixty others. In 1916 the French government made her a Chevalier, the first rank, of the Légion d'honneur, the order Napoleon Bonaparte founded in 1802 to reward outstanding service to the nation. Very few foreign civilians of either sex had been given it.

The Age of Innocence, written from France

The war left her exhausted and looking backwards. The Age of Innocence, written in 1919 and published in 1920, returns to the New York of the 1870s — the world of her own childhood, which the war had just finished destroying — and follows Newland Archer, a young lawyer engaged to the entirely correct May Welland, as he falls in love with her cousin Ellen Olenska, who has left a European husband and does not behave as that society expects. The two of them never act on it: no elopement, no affair, no scandal — and the cost of that nothing is the rest of both their lives. The novel is at once an indictment of a society that punishes any departure from its rules and an elegy for it, written by a woman who had removed herself to another continent.

It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 — the annual American award for letters, then given for the Novel and now for Fiction — and Wharton became the first woman to receive it. The award had a small scandal behind it: the jury of judges had voted for Main Street, the small-town satire by the American novelist Sinclair Lewis, and the prize's trustees at Columbia University, which administers it, overruled them. She was fifty-nine, had published for a quarter of a century, and learned of the prize in France. In 1923 she crossed the Atlantic for the last time, to accept an honorary doctorate from Yale — the first the university had ever given a woman.

Pavillon Colombe, and the gardens

In 1918 she bought a small eighteenth-century house at Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, a village about sixteen kilometres north of Paris, and left the city for good in 1920. The house was called the Pavillon Colombe after two eighteenth-century Venetian sisters who had lived there; Wharton restored it and made its garden, over nearly twenty years, into the thing visitors remembered longest. She wintered on the Riviera, the Mediterranean coast of south-eastern France, at Sainte-Claire, a former convent on the hill above the town of Hyères, where she made a second, subtropical garden, and she moved between the two houses for the rest of her life.

She kept writing to the end — novels, stories, the memoir A Backward Glance (1934), and The Writing of Fiction, a book on how fiction works — and kept an enormous correspondence with the French and English writers who came to lunch. She died at the Pavillon Colombe on 11 August 1937, at seventy-five, and is buried in the cimetière des Gonards, the cemetery at Versailles outside Paris. She had lived in France for thirty years, and had asked to be buried there rather than taken home.