Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was an American writer who is little read today but perhaps deserves to be remembered for breaking new ground in the history of literature, and for her charitable work during World War One. However, the fact that she spent the last years of her life in France, only once returning to the United States, might have been a factor in the relative neglect of her works in her native country.
She was brought up in an aristocratic environment in New
York, and was a product of the “Gilded Age” of advancement in terms of
technology and culture, not to mention the growing wealth of her section of
society.
However, she learned to see through the facades that high
society built around it, and the obstacles that it placed in the way of those who
questioned its moralities. In her first novel, “The House of Mirth” (1905) the
heroine is torn between a desire to be self-sufficient and the convention that
demanded that she “marry well”.
Edith Wharton spent the war years in France, where she was active
in relief work to help people whose lives had been devastated by the war. She set up workrooms to provide employment
for women, opened hostels for Belgian refugees, organised concerts and opened
hospitals. She was made a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur in recognition of
her efforts.
However, her best-known literary work, “The Age of
Innocence”, published in 1920, returned to the theme of how 19th
century New York high society alienated those who did not fit in. It features a
man who is forced to continue to live a lie in a loveless marriage because
society demands that he does so, whatever his personal feelings might be.
Edith Wharton’s powerful message won her the Pulitzer Prize
for Literature in 1921, making her the first female winner.
Her descriptions of the customs of the social tribe to which
she belonged, but from which she escaped by emigrating, broke new literary
ground by introducing concepts that can be described as anthropological. In one
sense she mourned the passing of an age that was doomed by the liberalism of
the coming 20th century, but in another she welcomed it.
It is interesting to compare the writings of Edith Wharton
(she wrote many short stories as well as novels) with those being written at
about the same time in England by E M Forster, who was also concerned with the
effects on enlightened, free-thinking people of the stultifying conformity that
Victorian and Edwardian society tried to impose. However, once that world was
no more, protests against its influence ceased to be so meaningful, which is
possibly why both Wharton and Forster are less read today than in the past.
© John Welford
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