LITERARY LANDMARKS: Imagine New York described as "low-studded, rectangular, cursed with a universal chocolate-coloured coating of the most hideous stone ever quarried . . . a town without towers, porticoes or fountains". Edith Wharton felt no particular warmth for the city in the 1870s after returning from a childhood spent touring the capitals of Europe.
Born Edith Newbold Jones into a life of privilege in the New York City of 1862, her family were descended from the first settlers who made their fortunes in Manhattan real estate. Like the Astors, they were what "keeping up with the Joneses" was all about. When American currency depreciated after the Civil War, her father took the family off to Europe for a few years to economise.
In her autobiography, A Backward Glance, she says she never imagined that 1870s New York would, "fifty years later be as much a vanished city as Atlantis".
The young Edith spent most of her time in her father's library in "intellectual isolation", yet by the end of her second winter in New York, she was married to Teddy Wharton, 13 years her senior.
They had little in common and the marriage was not a successful one. Feeling trapped in the role of wife and society matron, writing became her outlet. She travelled frequently over the next few years in England and the Continent and cultivated friendships with other writers, most notably Henry James. Her work shares similarities with James as her most famous books are set among old New York society. It was to Europe both writers fled to find the traces of this "old America" and in which, ultimately, both felt most at home.
In 1907, just after The House of Mirth became a bestseller, Edith Wharton moved to rue de Varenne, beside the Invalides, in Paris. "There I remained till 1920, so that my thirteen years of Paris life were spent entirely in the rue de Varenne; and all those years rise up to meet me whenever I turn the corner of the street. Rich years, crowded and happy years." These years saw the publication of one impressive novel or novella after another: The Custom of the Country, Madame de Treymes, Ethan Frome, Summer. It was in this house, beside les Invalides, that she participated in the pre-war society of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, with its classic institution for good conversation, the salon.
During this time she was purported to have found true love, at the age of 46, with the journalist Morton Fullerton. After the affair, she continued her writing and touring, using Paris as her base.
When the heavy fighting of the first World War began, from the rue de Varenne she began organising shelter for orphans and refugees. She was there on a November day in 1918 when she heard the familiar bell of Sainte Clotilde ring at an unusual hour. She went to the balcony and heard, one by one, the bells of Paris chime - the war was over. For her unceasing fund-raising and war work she received awards from the French and Belgian Governments.
But the Great War brought tremendous personal and social upheaval to her entire generation. It destroyed the vestiges of the old world and heralded the modern one. The effects of observing the suffering at close hand and the subsequent death of Henry James in 1916 left her emotionally devastated. She writes "Before I could deal objectively with the stored up emotions of those years, I had to get away from the present altogether . . . I found a momentary escape in going back to my childish memories of a long-vanished America." The result was The Age of Innocence, which won her a Pulitzer Prize in Literature, the first ever awarded to a woman.
Edith herself was perhaps reflected in the character of Countess Ellen Olenska, with her failed marriage and no children. Both sought a divorce in the conservative society of old New York where liberal European ways were viewed with suspicion. Unspoken codes and strict rules of conduct in this society performed the work of surveillance and punishment. These rules force Ellen into exile and her lover, Newland, to remain in New York. Back in Europe, Ellen lives in Paris, on an avenue beside the Invalides .
Edith Wharton died at the age of 75. She is buried in Versailles.