In 1905, all of New York was riveted by the story of Lily Bart, a stunning young woman hoping to claim her place in society through marriage to a wealthy man. She has to rely entirely on her looks, which are great, and her wits. And she’s trying to find a rich husband. She’s 29 years old she’s beautiful but she isn’t married, and 29 is quite late not to be married at this point in a young woman’s life in that era.

As her prospects for marriage unraveled, Lily Bart’s life spiraled downward. No longer the toast of New York society, she ended up in a rooming house. And there, alone and penniless, after drinking an overdose of sleeping medication, she died. One woman sent her friend a telegram saying, “Lily Bart is dead.”

But this tragic figure whose story so captivated New York was not real. She was a character in a novel, called, “The House of Mirth.” The writer who exposed the dark side of High Society was herself a member of it. Edith Wharton was in a unique position to chronicle and critique the upper class. And she did — mercilessly. But her literary success came at a price.

Edith Wharton lived in a society that looked askance at people who cared about things too passionately. They certainly looked askance at people who were writers or artists. And so writing was something that she did in secret. Edith Wharton burst onto the literary scene in 1905 when “The House of Mirth” was serialized in Scribner’s magazine and was read by thousands. It was stupendously successful.

Everybody read “The House of Mirth,” not least because they thought that it was about people they knew in New York, you know. There was a kind of scandalous ingredient to its success. She felt both the excitement and the exposure of having been published and recognized at this level. One of the things she hated was the dust jacket that she had them remove immediately, that said she had exposed New York society.

And there was always the idea that she was writing as an insider, a member of the closest thing to an aristocracy that the United States had ever had. She was born Edith Jones, into one of Old New York’s most established families. The same family, it was said, who inspired the phrase, “keeping up with the Joneses.”

In spite of her privileged upbringing, from the time she was a young child growing up in the 1870’s, Edith Jones felt as if she didn’t fit in. She’s says that she’s a very shy person. And a lot of times people sort of mistook this shyness for haughtiness or pride or arrogance. In all of the pictures, she holds herself very still or stiff as though she were protected by a kind of armor.

She was extremely bookish and really wanted to spend her whole time reading the books in her father’s library, and doing what she called making up, which was to walk up and down from a very early age before she could read with a book, making up stories out loud. And this was a sort of compulsion. Edith Jones lived in a private universe of language and stories.

Her vivid imagination conjured up much more interesting worlds than the one that she actually lived in. By the time she was a teenager, Edith Jones’ compulsive need to make up stories resulted in her first novel. At the age of 14, finishing it at the age of 15, she wrote this 30,000 word novella. She kept it secret, a novella called, “Fast and Loose,” that was set in the present time of the 1870’s.

It was about failed marriages of daughters trying to marry into aristocracy, the unhappy marriages that then came about from all of that. The book went unpublished. But Edith Jones had a growing awareness of herself as a writer. Wharton’s consciousness of herself as an author included writing devastating reviews of her own work.

These imaginary reviews captured her worst fears about what critics might say. “In short, it is false charity to reader and writer to mince matters… Every character is a failure, the plot a vacuum, the style a fiasco!” Edith Jones was fascinated with the marriages of high society. But she was unmoved by her parents’ fears about her own marriage prospects.

They worried that their intellectual daughter with her passionate interest in reading and learning would have a hard time finding a husband. Because of these worries, in part, the family has her coming out party a year early, when she’s about 17, to put her on the marriage market before she can develop too much intellectually and therefore scare men off.

That early debut was not a success. “The evening was a long, cold agony of shyness. All my brother’s friends asked me to dance, but I was too much frightened to accept, and cowered beside my mother in speechless misery.” The expectations in the society in which Edith Jones grew up were very much that you would go to Newport in the summers and you would go the South of France and you would get married well.

And you would do all the things that people of that class did and then you would be simply fitted into that tribal structure. Fitting in was not Edith Jones’ strong suit. Throughout her life, she would struggle with the expectations that came with her social class. But as a young debutante, she tried to fulfill the role dictated by society and at age twenty she became engaged.

Only two months later it ended in public humiliation when the Newport newspapers reported that the engagement had been postponed indefinitely. “The only reason assigned for the breaking of the engagement hitherto existing between Harry Stevens and Miss Edith Jones is an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride. Miss Jones is an ambitious authoress, and it is said that, in the eyes of Mr. Stevens, ambition is a grievous fault.”

Just when it seemed as though Edith Jones might face the same sorry fate that years later would doom her fictional heroine Lily Bart, a handsome society gentleman and friend of her brother’s came along. His name was Teddy Wharton.

This engagement was just one month. The two were married in 1885. But they were completely mismatched. This is a woman of fantastic intellect. By the time she was in her ‘20s, she spoke Italian and French and German and read them very fluently.

She’s a very intelligent woman, and here is this by all accounts rather blundering, well meaning, kindly chap who’s interested in sports and motorcars and dogs. I mean, that was fine, ‘cause she was very fond of dogs, too. But it was wrong. It was just a misfit. It’s likely that Edith Wharton and Teddy Wharton never consummated their marriage and that the awkwardness went on for the first three weeks and they didn’t try after that.

What they had was a companionable marriage. Although there would be no children, for the next 14 years Edith Wharton dutifully fulfilled the obligations of her social class – calling on friends, hosting dinners and attending the opera. She found it boring and unfulfilling. Edith Wharton’s only relief came from writing, and she regularly published short stories in magazines.

People began to take notice In 1899, when her first collection of short stories was published in a volume entitled, “The Greater Inclination.” She tells a story about going to London and going into a bookstore to buy some books, and being handed her own volume and having the book seller say, “This is what everyone in London is reading and talking about right now.” And this is a great thing for her to receive this kind of validation from people who aren’t in her family and have not that kind of connection, and don’t even know her.

Her success as a writer would blossom in 1905 when Edith Wharton finally reached a mass audience and became a household name. She was 43 years old and had been married for two decades when Scribner’s Magazine serialized her novel, “The House of Mirth.”

Each installment left readers wanting more. There was a kind of suspense element. People would say, “Oh, what’s going to happen next to Lily Bart?” It also was about New York society at the time. She’s writing it in 1904, and it’s set between 1901 and 1902. And it’s about the high society of her day.

And it’s extremely satirical and revealing about that high society. One of Wharton’s most piercing revelations was the ruthlessness of the upper class when it came to marriage. In this society, women like the character of Lily Bart were seen as marriageable commodities. And even one of Lily’s closest confidantes, Mr. Lawrence Selden, can’t help but see her that way.

“Selden was conscious of taking a luxurious pleasure in her nearness, in the modeling of her little ear, the crisp upward wave of her hair, was it ever so slightly brightened by art and the thick planting of her straight black lashes. Everything about her was at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine. He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must in some mysterious way have been sacrificed to produce her.”

Selden treats her as if she’s a pot, you know, it’s as if he’s talking about her as if she’s a kind of jug or a pot that he’s gonna put her on, shall I put her on my shelf or not, is she fine enough to be put on my shelf, you know, whereas in fact she’s a human being. As marriage eludes Lily Bart and she is unable to fulfill the one role society has assigned her, she spirals downward. Ultimately, Lily dies penniless and alone, a victim of the society that created her.

There was a general outcry of great grief and dismay and shock and distress the end of the House of Mirth and it really, I mean it did wonders for Edith Wharton’s bank balance, you know, this tragic story, cause everybody actually adored it.

“The House of Mirth” was not only a turning point in Edith Wharton’s popular renown; it also marked her transformation from a talented hobbyist to a professional writer. This is the book that she says “taught me the discipline of the daily task.” This is the one that turned her into a writer, partly because the serialization started in Scribner’s magazine in 1905, before she had finished the novel. And so she had to write a certain amount every day.

She would write in bed every morning. That writing was not visible to people, so that there was a secret life that she had, so that people would not know what had happened to their hostess until she came down dressed and ready for the rest of the day.

In spite of her late start as a professional writer, once Edith Wharton began writing in earnest, she did not stop. Between 1905 and the year she died, which was 1937, Edith Wharton wrote at least one book a year and very often more. I mean, in total she wrote, I think, 48 titles. Many of those books explore themes that Wharton came back to again and again.

If you look through her works, it’s very rare to find a happy marriage or a happy relationship. Most of her lovers exist at cross purposes, most of her marriages seem to have this emptiness, or there’s something lacking. I think she’s best known for the entrapment of individuals within the society they have to belong to.

In 1907, Edith Wharton herself became trapped in a situation that could have come from the pages of one of her own novels. Edith and Teddy Wharton were living in Paris and Edith befriended a circle of intellectuals, artists – and philanderers. Edith fell into Parisian life with great delight and pleasure and part of that delight and pleasure was a secret affair in her mid-40’s by now with a very appealing, charming, and profoundly untrustworthy, and utterly unreliable character called Morton Fullerton. And Morton played a very important part in her life.

Morton Fullerton was referred to as an Adonis figure in letters. He enjoyed men as well as women. He had a very strong relationship with the woman that he thought was his sister, but turned out to be his cousin, and there was a time that they were to be married. This is obviously against the image of Wharton as being sort of staid, but one of the things that Wharton might have been attracted to in Fullerton was his sexual history.

You have to imagine Edith Wharton in her forties, really having an intimate relationship with a man, if not for the first time, for the first time that counted. Edith Wharton’s secret love affair with Morton Fullerton unlocked deep feelings within her. She began to write more poetry.

One unpublished poem that was found years after her death revealed a passionate side of Wharton that was completely hidden from public view. She sent the poem to Fullerton to commemorate a night they spent together in London in 1909.

“Wonderful was the long secret night you gave me, my lover, palm to palm, breast to breast in the gloom, the faint red lamp flushing with magical shadows, kindled the mystic flame in the heart of the swinging mirror, the glass that has seen faces innumerous and vague faces indifferent or weary, smiles, if such there were ever like your smile and mine when they met here in the selfsame glass while you helped me to loosen my dress.”

For three years, Wharton was caught up in the ecstasy and anguish of her secret affair. During that time, Fullerton had other lovers too and Wharton’s letters reveal her agonized state of mind.

“I seem not to exist for you. I don’t understand… I don’t know what you want or what I am. You write to me like a lover. You treat me like a casual acquaintance. Which are you? What am I? My life was better before I knew you.”

The affair ended in 1910, but not before it dealt a serious blow to her already troubled marriage. On top of that, Teddy Wharton was beginning to show signs of mental illness.

He suffers from melancholia. He’s depressed. He’s very low in spirits and self worth and very sort of combative. He’s becoming very angry and difficult to deal with which is one of the traits of his illness. He embezzled $50,000 from her estate which he did pay back. He started traveling with other women who traveled under the name of Mrs. Wharton.

He was obviously a man in great emotional distress. In the midst of this turmoil, Edith Wharton turned again to her writing. The drama of her own life inspired the characters for a new novel that became an instant classic. Ethan Frome was published in 1911 and tells the story of a poor New England farmer trapped in a loveless marriage.

Ethan’s constantly complaining and sickly wife Zeena has become a burden to him. Her attractive young cousin, Mattie Silver, has come to live with them and take care of Zeena and Ethan starts to fall in love with her. It’s in a place called Starkfield. It’s set in the dead of winter. It’s freezing. It’s cold. It’s snowy.

And this is telling you something about the emotional landscape of Edith Wharton at this time as well. Ethan Frome is depicted as a once-strong man whose love for a woman who is not his wife has left him crippled and trapped.

“Even then, he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was not so much his great height that marked him, It was the careless, powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than 52.”

As it often does in Edith Wharton’s novels, the story of this ill-fated love triangle ends badly when Zeena becomes jealous of her cousin Mattie Silver and decides to send her away. As Ethan drives Mattie to the train, the two realize that the only way to escape their situation is by committing suicide.

So at the very last they decide to take a sleigh ride together, sled ride down the hill, smash into a tree and end it all. As Ethan and Mattie fly down the hill on their sled, the sight of Zena’s face rises up before him and he swerves just a little bit. They hit the tree but not as intensely as he’d intended. They wake up. Ethan has been smashed up and of course has damaged his leg.

Mattie has been crippled for life. At the end of the novel, Ethan, Mattie, and Zeena have been living together – often in the same small room for the past 24 years. Ethan’s life is a death in life and that’s how it’s very clearly seen. In writing Ethan Frome, Wharton drew upon her own fears of being trapped in her unhappy marriage.

To avoid that death in life it was necessary for her to be divorced so that she would not essentially recapitulate Ethan’s experience of another 50 years of essentially being dead while still alive. In 1913, after 28 years of marriage, Edith Wharton reluctantly divorced her husband Teddy. Edith Wharton didn’t like the idea of divorce, she didn’t want to get divorced, it was a very restless period for her.

She really didn’t know what to do with herself and then the war broke out. When Germany declared war on France in August of 1914, Edith Wharton was living permanently in Paris. She remained there throughout the war, determined to help in any way she could. She buckled down, she did a lot of work for Belgian refugees.

There was a tuberculosis epidemic during the war, she opened some sanatoriums she traveled around the war zone and wrote reports all in order to try and persuade America to come into the war. Her entire attention was focused on persuading the States to join in this European conflict. Her tireless efforts on behalf of war refugees earned her the Legion of Honor from the French government in 1916.

She becomes a chevalier. She gets the highest honor awarded to foreigners by the French government for service to the French people. During these years Wharton had less time for her writing, and except for one short novella, everything she wrote during that period was about the war. But on the eve of the armistice as the world around her lay in ruins, she began to write what would become one of her best-known masterpieces: The Age of Innocence.

The Age of Innocence takes her 50 years back in time to the world she was growing up in which now seems utterly lost and gone and it’s terribly important I think to read it as a post-war novel looking back over this unbelievable change in the world’s history. So, The Age of Innocence is set in the little village of old New York in the 1870s where everybody knows each other’s business and everyone is watching each other and women have to behave in a certain way and social hierarchy is very minutely structured and you must never kind of fall out of line and the hero is very much part of that whole world.

The Age of Innocence tells the story of Newland Archer, a man torn between his engagement to the socially acceptable and naïve May Welland and his unexpected passion for her worldly cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, who is escaping an unhappy European marriage. Ellen really speaks for Edith Wharton in many ways.

She’s a Europeanized American, she’s had a complicated past, she wants to get divorced, she’s seen as artistic and bohemian and not a proper New Yorker so in many ways she’s a bit like Edith Wharton. Edith Wharton is a complex figure. She’s not only writing about herself as Ellen Olenska.

She’s also Newland Archer, Newland Archer is Edith Wharton without the divorce. As Ellen Olenska starts to rediscover for herself the value of the world she left behind, and Newland Archer sees its limitations and yearns for the world that Ellen Olenska just left, the two of them fall in love and think about fleeing.

There’s a heartbreaking scene it’s a sort of climatic scene in the novel, really, where Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska are alone in a carriage together in wintry New York. And he’s saying come on, this is intolerable, let’s break free, let’s go away together. And she says, “Is it your idea then that I should live with you as your mistress since I can’t be your wife?” The crudeness of the question startled him.

The word was one that women of his class felt shy of even when their talk flitted closest about the topic. He noticed that Madam Olenska pronounced it as if it had a recognized place in her vocabulary. And he wondered if it had been used familiarly in her presence in the horrible life she had fled from. Her question pulled him up with a jerk and he floundered.

“I want, I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that, categories like that won’t exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other, and nothing else on earth will matter.” She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh.

“Oh my dear, where is that country? Have you ever been there?” she asked. And as he remained solemnly dumb she went on. “I know so many who’ve tried to find it and believe me they all got out by mistake at wayside stations, at places like Boulogne or Pisa or Monte Carlo and it wasn’t at all different from the old world they’d left but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous.”

I love the fact in that scene that Archer is shocked by the woman he’s in love with. He’s just asked her to go away with him and then he’s shocked by the fact that she seems to be familiar with the word “mistress.” Archer realizes that his fate is sealed. He gives up the Countess and lives out his days as May’s dutiful husband.

Years later, after his wife has died and his children have grown, Archer travels to Paris and has the opportunity to meet the Countess Olenska again, It’s a sort of late afternoon in Paris and it’s getting dark and he sees the house and he looks at the house and he imagines going in there and seeing again, this woman who was the one great love of his life and he sits on this bench in this little Parisian square and he sees the lights coming on in the apartment. He thinks about going up and then the the servant comes and closes the shutters of the windows a wonderful sort of final gesture, and he goes back to his hotel alone.

In writing the Age of Innocence, Wharton came to terms with the life she chose and her decision to live as a writer outside the narrow world of New York society. The Age of Innocence was her greatest triumph. In 1921 it earned her the Pulitzer Prize.

She was the first woman ever to earn that distinction for writing a novel. It was the crowning achievement of a long and productive career that placed Edith Wharton among the greatest American writers. Her words are beautiful, she has a sense of language that’s beautiful, she has a playful sense of plot. She just tells a good story.

And when you start to read her, she has a voice unlike any other writer, and you’re instantly in that world. She is so stylish, she is so brilliant in her use of the language. She is so wonderfully controlled in her structure and her tone. She goes so deep into the human heart and yet she stays so perfectly in control of her materials and in that sense I do think she is a genius.