City Beautiful BLOG

Edith Wharton was born into a life of privilege, which she turned into a life of a writer.

She was born Edith Jones in New York in 1862. While this last name may not tell much to contemporary readers, it was her father’s family that gave rise to the expression “Keeping up with the Joneses.” Edith Wharton spent most of her life abroad, but she was a New Yorker. Born and raised in Manhattan, baptized at Grace Church, she belonged to a very exclusive set of elites that could trace their ancestry to colonial times. Both her parents families, the Joneses and the Rhinelanders, possessed the pedigree that firmly secured a place in high society.

The family spent a lot of time traveling, and during a journey in Europe, Edith’s father died. Edith and her mother came back to New York and settled at 7 Washington Square North, a prestigious area called “The Row”. The year was 1882, and young Miss Jones was 20 years old. She was back in New York in time for her coming out into society and looking for a husband.

Belonging to the Old New York, she participated in the intricate social rituals of the Gilded Age. She knew this world inside out and later used it in her writing. She married Teddy Wharton, but the unhappy marriage ended in divorce 28 years later. To avoid a scandal, social anathema, and stifling rules of New York society, she moved to France and stayed there from 1913 to the end of her life in 1937.

In France, she continued writing, and in 1921, she published The Age of Innocence. Set in Gilded Age New York, the novel was a reflection of her own memories. Edith Wharton, née Jones of Old New York, was the first woman in the world to receive a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

Photos from left to right:

• The Row (Washington Square North)
• Edith Wharton collection/Beinecke 10061396. Edith Wharton as a young woman, ca. 1889 (Roseti, 297 Fifth Avenue, New York)
• Portrait of American author Edith Wharton (1862-1937) sitting with one arm propped on the back of a sofa, wearing a long necklace. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
• Book covers: The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence
• Photograph taken in Newport, Rhode Island, of author Edith Wharton, wearing hat with a feather, coat with fur trim, and a fur muff. Image courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.
• Cover photo: Detail from A Cup of Tea (1904), oil on canvas by American artist Walter Granville-Smith (1870–1938). (The Athenaeum)

She was a prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction, here are some of her most famous works:

• The House of Mirth, 1905
• The Age of Innocence, 1920 (Pulitzer Prize winner)
• The Buccaneers, 1938 (unfinished)
• Ethan Frome, 1911
• Old New York, 1924