Life & Background
Edith Newbold Jones was born in 1862 into the closed upper class of old New York that she spent her career anatomising; the phrase keeping up with the Joneses is said to derive from her family. She was educated by governesses, read in her father's library, and published a volume of verse privately at sixteen. Her marriage to Teddy Wharton was long and unhappy, ending in divorce in 1913 after his breakdown and embezzlement of her funds. She settled permanently in France, where during the First World War she organised relief for refugees and was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. She was a close friend of Henry James, though she disliked being described as his disciple. She wrote more than forty books and died near Paris in 1937.
The Age of Innocence
In 1870s New York, Newland Archer is engaged to May Welland, a young woman of impeccable and carefully cultivated blankness. May's cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, returns from Europe having left a brutal husband, and the family closes ranks to manage the scandal. Archer, retained to advise her against divorce, falls in love with her precisely because she does not observe the rules he has never questioned. He and Ellen come repeatedly to the edge of acting and are stopped, each time, by the tribe's silent machinery. May announces a pregnancy — before she is certain — and Ellen leaves for Paris. Thirty years later, a widower, Archer travels to Paris with his son, sits on a bench beneath Ellen's window, and does not go up.
The novel is set fifty years before it was written, and the irony of the title works in two directions: Archer's world is not innocent but ruthlessly organised, and Wharton's postwar readers, looking back from 1920, could see how thoroughly it had been swept away. Her method is anthropological — she describes the rituals of dinners, boxes at the opera, and calling cards as a fieldworker describes a tribe — and the violence is entirely procedural, carried out by people who never say what they are doing. The final scene is her most quietly devastating: Archer chooses the memory over the woman, which is the choice his upbringing trained him for.
Why Wharton Matters
Wharton is the major American novelist of class and social constraint, and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The House of Mirth's destruction of Lily Bart is the standard American text on a woman's economic dependence, and Ethan Frome, short and grim, is among the most taught American novellas. She is essential to questions on realism, naturalism, and the American novel of manners, and her relationship to James is a recurring comparison.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- The House of Mirth1905
- Ethan Frome1911
- The Custom of the Country1913
- The Age of Innocence1920
- The Writing of Fiction1925
- A Backward Glance1934