By Nancy C. Dallas
Special to THE DAILY

Edith Newbold Jones was born Jan. 24, 1862, at a “fashionable” Westside address in New York City, the third and youngest child of George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones. She started life unremarkably enough as a rather plain, shy, awkward child with glossy red hair as her best feature. Unlike her two older brothers, she never had any formal education, but was taught to read by her father and had the full benefit of his fairly extensive library. She liked to make up stories and dramas and was writing down her ideas on the brown paper parcels were wrapped in by the age of 10. Her first novel, “Fast and Loose,” was written between the ages of 14 and 15 for a girlhood friend. One of her parents arranged for a volume of her poetry, titled “Verses,” to be published when she was 16. Two years later more of her poems were published in The Atlantic Monthly (via an indirect but fortuitous connection with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), and another was published under a pseudonym in New York World.

Wharton did not begin to write professionally until she was in her mid-30s. In the years between her first literary attempts and professional success she became a young lady and “came out” to New York society. She met Edward “Teddy” Wharton (and entered into a disastrous marriage with him in April 1885), as well as Walter Berry, who was probably the love of her life, despite the fact that their relationship appears to have been platonic. She had been traveling and living for periods of time in Europe since childhood, due to family financial difficulties and her father’s health problems, and had become fluent in French, German and Italian. Following her marriage she once again pursued the intercontinental life, living in England, Italy and France, where she bought and restored several homes and spent most of her life.

Although in the opinions of some she may have “come late to the table,” in 40 years as a professional writer she produced some of the most exquisite and studied commentaries on American social class peculiarities and manners ever written. Every high school student has read the novella (or seen the film) “Ethan Frome,” and she is also responsible for “The Age of Innocence,” “The House of Mirth,” “The Custom of the Country” and other novels. She was able to brilliantly describe period household furnishings and décor, flowers and gardens, dinner parties, clothing styles, modes of transportation and popular entertainment. This ability owed largely to her mother’s insistence on having her family’s home decoration, attire, and way of living “just so,” as dictated by the rigid social customs of the times.

Wharton also wrote such non-fiction works as her autobiography, “A Backward Glance,” and “The Decoration of Houses,” travelogues such as “Italian Backgrounds and A Motor-Flight Through France,” three plays, and a multitude of poems and short stories.

She met and corresponded with the literary giants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and became a great friend and colleague of Henry James, among others, whom she depended on for his critiques of her work.

Wharton was independently wealthy because of inherited income as well as her earnings as a writer, which, for an era that included the Great Depression, were a great deal. She was most generous in support of charities in general and especially supportive of causes relating to the war effort, including the care and sheltering of refugees and tuberculosis patients, both here and abroad, during World War I. She felt a special connection to dogs, was involved with the New York SPCA, and surrounded herself with beloved and well cared for pets all her life. She also loved gardens and had one of the most beautiful examples of this at her estate Pavillon Colombe at Saint-Brice, France, which she opened for public visitation each year.

We bookworms and aspiring writers are tempted to think that such a life of wealth, privilege and philanthropy, spent traveling and living in fine European estates, meeting and being admired by our literary peers and other celebrities and crafting excellent and publicly acclaimed books, would be a kind of paradise. When one researches the lives of those one admires, however, sometimes information is uncovered which one feels she is better off not knowing.

Despite her many estimable qualities, Wharton suffered from her share of unhappiness, some of it self-created. Her marriage to the mentally unstable Teddy Wharton appears to have been sexless if not completely loveless (she divorced him finally in 1913, after 28 years). It is known that she had at least one prolonged extramarital affair with Morton Fullerton, a journalist. She had typhoid fever as a small child and was plagued for much of her life with headaches, colds, allergies, “flu,” asthma, periods of exhaustion, depression, and anxiety and other emotionally related ills.

Wharton was above all a social and literary snob. Despite her own success as a professional, independent, and finally, divorced woman, who scathingly described the societal limitations and oppression of women in her writings, she herself was antifeminist and did not support female suffrage or scholarships for women. She was unashamedly anti-Semitic and racist. She surrounded herself with, and delighted in the company of, homosexual male friends and colleagues, but despised lesbianism (and thus did not get on well with a number of her female writing contemporaries). She survived the personal and professional strictures of Victorianism into the modern era, but disdained modernism and change.

This exhaustively researched, scholarly biography describes Wharton’s life, relationships, and personality probably as thoroughly and accurately as is possible for someone who never actually met her (with the possible exception of R.W.B. Lewis’ “gold standard” Pulitzer prize winning work, “Edith Wharton: A Biography,” published in 1975). At over 800 pages it is not for the casual reader. Lee’s chapter of Wharton’s experiences and friendships in England alone is enough to make one’s head spin.

Nevertheless, as a longtime lover of Wharton’s fiction (and, more recently, the films made from her novels), I eagerly took on the challenge of reading this daunting work. I learned one of my favorite authors had disappointing frailties and failings like most of us, yet managed to produce unforgettable literature which still has lessons to teach us today about the limitations and unfortunate consequences of living one’s life, sheeplike, doing only the so-called “right” things.

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