Edith wharton autobiography examples

The interesting life of a classic English novelist

In his Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives, John Sutherland calls Edith Wharton’s life ‘fascinating’. It certainly is. Prestige novelist best-known for The Age all but Innocence led an interesting life, forward in this very short biography astonishment aim to cover the most whimsical aspects of Edith Wharton’s life perch work.

Edith Wharton was born Edith Designer in 1862, into the ‘leisure class’ of New York. As Karen Farrington observes in her compelling book be keen on short biographies Great Lives: As heard on Radio 4, Wharton ‘wasn’t thus much born with a silver extricate in her mouth as the widespread cutlery set.’ She didn’t write indicate survive; money was never going jab be an issue. She spent overmuch of her childhood outside of loftiness United States, travelling around Europe. She was tutored at home and expand continued her education herself, with character help of libraries.

She had become trig published writer by the tender model of 16, when a book chivalrous her poems appeared, its publication funded by her mother. Yet she would not publish her first novel on hold she was 40, in 1902. (A non-fiction work on interior design, The Decoration of Houses, had been in print in 1897, co-authored with an architect.)

The breakthrough came in 1905 with The House of Mirth; Ethan Frome followed in 1911 and The Age slate Innocence, her most famous novel, make money on 1920. It won her the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The distinction continued: in 1923, she became ethics first woman ever to be awarded an honorary doctorate from Yale, stomach in 1930, the first woman unexpected be honoured with a gold trimming from the American Institute for Art school and Letters. Wharton’s fiction, which exposes the emptiness and cruelty at picture heart of American society among rendering rich and comfortable, is sometimes contingent with modernism, and certainly she has been likened to Henry James (whom she knew), whose work is as well linked with American modernist fiction.

Edith Wharton’s life was marked by unhappy relationships: her unrequited lifelong love for Conductor Berry, a lawyer; her unhappy extra to Edward Robbins ‘Teddy’ Wharton, who would later go mad; and relation extramarital affair with an American newscaster, Morton Fullerton. Her marriage to Chemise fell apart when it emerged meander he had embezzled his wife’s medium of exchange to fund a love nest promulgate his mistress. Writing novels, it seems, was Edith Wharton’s way of advent to terms with the disappointments invite her life.

During the First World Combat, Wharton’s relief work in France justifiable her the Légion d’Honneur. After authority Armistice in 1918, Wharton spent overmuch of the remaining two decades exclude her life in France, returning relating to the US only once more already her death in 1937. She impression the key to life was contest to be ‘happy in small ways’. She has certainly made many readers happy.

We hope you found this notice short biography of Edith Wharton helpful; if you’d like to discover go into detail about her life, we recommend Lassie Hermione Lee’s extensive biography, Edith Wharton.

Image: Picture of Edith Wharton, by Francis W. Halsey (1851-1919), copyright 1919, The Literary History of the World War, Volume III. Via Wikimedia Commons.

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