I have to be honest with you. When I first saw
Edith Wharton on our schedule for this deep dive,
my brain immediately went to a very specific,
slightly dusty place. Let me guess. High school
English class. Exactly. I'm thinking intensely
uncomfortable corsets. I'm thinking of, you know,
tea sets and people sitting in drawing rooms,
not saying what they actually mean. That is the
popular perception, the grand dame of American
letters, the chronicler of the Gilded Age. It's
a very persistent image. Right. It feels very,
I don't know, beige, very polite. But then I
started digging into the research stack we have
here, the biographies, the letters, the war records.
And I realized that the high school English version
of Edith Wharton is basically a cover story.
A disguise. It's a total disguise. It is a very
effective disguise and it's one that... In some
ways, she actually helped construct. But you
are absolutely right. The popular image captures
maybe 10 % of who she actually was. And it misses
the most interesting 90%. Completely. That is
exactly what we are going to unpack today. Because
the woman I found in these files is not just
a society writer. She's a survivalist. She's
a war hero. She's a divorcee in an era when that
was, I mean, that was social suicide. Unthinkable
for a woman of her class. And this is the part
that really got me. She's the literal definition.
of the Joneses everyone is trying to keep up
with. That is a great place to start. It's one
of those details that sounds like a fun fact,
but it's actually central to her whole story.
The idiom itself. Yeah. The phrase, keeping up
with the Joneses, is so embedded in our culture
we don't even think about it. But in this case,
it is biographical. Edith was born Edith Newbold
Jones. Wow. And her father's family, the Joneses,
were so wealthy, so socially dominant in New
York, that they are the most likely source for
that idiom. So when we say she was an insider,
we don't just mean she had money. We mean she
was the standard. She was the finish line. She
was the absolute apex. I mean, you look at her
family tree. She was related to the Astors, the
Rensselaers. Her cousin was the Mrs. Astor, Caroline
Schermerhorn Astor. The woman who literally decided
who was in or out of New York society. So Edith
wasn't writing about the elite from the outside.
Pressing her nose against the glass? No, no.
She was inside the glass, she was the specimen
in the jar, and she was taking notes. And that
is the mission of this deep dive. We want to
move beyond the tea parties and look at the tension
between this insanely restrictive, ultra -wealthy
upbringing and the woman who eventually... just
savages that entire world in her writing. The
central contradiction of her life. Exactly. We
need to figure out how a girl who was forbidden,
literally forbidden from reading novels until
she got married, ended up becoming the first
woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
It's a massive contradiction. And to understand
it, we have to look at the Jones reality. We
have to go back to the beginning. Back to 1862.
1862, the height of the American Civil War. Edith
is born in New York. Now, usually when you read
a biography of someone born in 1862, The war
is the backdrop. It's everything. But in the
Jones family records we've got here, it's almost
like it wasn't happening. The silence is deafening,
isn't it? The Civil War was tearing the country
apart. But in Edith's old New York, it was treated
as something, you know, vulgar, something that
was happening elsewhere to other people. The
only way the war really impacted the Jones family
was economically. Which brings us to a detail
that I think perfectly encapsulates their privilege.
It's almost comical. The currency depreciation.
Right. So the war caused the American dollar
to depreciate against European currencies. So
for the Jones family, living in New York suddenly
became expensive relative to their assets. So
what's the solution? Do they tighten their belts?
Do they buy? Fewer carriages? Of course not.
They tack up the entire household servants, luggage,
the whole operation, and they move to Europe
for six years. It's the ultimate 1 % problem.
Oh dear, the dollar is down, so we simply must
spend the next half decade touring France, Italy,
Germany, and Spain. It's just wild. It sounds
absurd to us, but that decision was foundational
for Edith. Think about the timing. She is four
years old when they leave and 10 when they return.
Those are crucial developmental years. Absolutely.
So while other American children are dealing
with the aftermath of the Civil War, Edith is
walking through the ruins of the Roman Forum.
She's hearing French, German, and Italian spoken
around her every single day. She became fluent
in all of them, right? Completely fluent. She
just absorbed them. She was seeing art and architecture
that simply didn't exist in the America of that
time. It gave her this perspective that was so
much broader than the narrow strip of Manhattan
Island she came from. But, and here is the tension,
while she is getting this cosmopolitan exposure,
She's also being groomed. Constantly. The marriage
market grooming. So this wasn't an education
for her own enrichment. Not at all. Her education,
which was handled by tutors and governesses,
wasn't designed to make her a scholar or an intellectual.
It was designed to make her a catch. What does
that even mean in practical terms? It means the
goal was polish, not depth. She needed to know
how to enter a room correctly, how to make pleasant,
meaningless conversation, how to dress, how to
manage a household. Her mind was secondary. Her
appearance and her manners were primary. But
the sources imply she was fighting this right
from the start. Oh, she hated it. She found the
fashions of the time, the bustles, the layers,
the corsets, physically oppressive. She later
wrote about feeling suffocated by them. And the
etiquette. Superficial, pointless. Here she was,
this intellectually hungry child, and she was
being told that her only real value lay in being
decorative and agreeable. And this brings us
to that big restriction I mentioned in the intro.
I need to circle back to this because it sounds
fake, but the biographers are adamant about it.
Her mother, Lucretia Jones, forbade her from
reading novels. Until she was married, it was
a hard and fast rule. What was the logic there?
Was it a religious thing? I don't get it. It
wasn't religious so much as it was about social
morality. In that specific slice of upper crust
society, novels were viewed as dangerous for
unmarried young women. They dealt with emotions.
with passion, with messy human situations. The
fear was that a novel might give a young girl
ideas about romance or, you know, personal fulfillment
that didn't align with a strategic marriage alliance.
So Lucretia wanted a daughter who was compliant,
not one whose head was filled with romantic fantasies
from books. Precisely. She was trying to control
the narrative of Edith's life by controlling
the narratives she consumed. But this backfired
spectacularly. Because you can ban novels, but
you can't ban the library. And that is the great
irony of her childhood. She had access to her
father's library, which was extensive and full
of serious books. So she couldn't read the popular
fluff of the day. She couldn't read the romances.
Instead, she read. Instead, she read the quote
unquote safe books, which turned out to be the
classics, philosophy and science. Safe meaning
Darwin. Exactly. I mean, can you imagine she's
a teenager reading these legitimate intellectual
heavyweights? She's reading Plutarch, Dante,
Milton. But crucially, as you said, she is reading
the scientists and philosophers of the 19th century.
She is reading Charles Darwin. She is reading
Herbert Spencer. She's reading Nietzsche. I want
to pause on that because I think it explains
so much about her later writing. If you are a
teenage girl in a corset training to be a debutante,
but your brain is steeped in the origin of species,
how does that change how you see the world around
you? It changes everything. It's not just about
accumulating facts. It gives her a framework.
It introduces the concept of determinism and
naturalism. The idea that we're all just products
of our environment. Exactly. If you read Darwin,
you start to see human beings not as autonomous
heroes of their own stories, but as organisms
reacting to their environment. You see survival
of the fittest. You see that if an animal doesn't
adapt to its specific habitat, it dies. So when
she looks around a Gilded Age ballroom in New
York, she isn't seeing a party. No. She's seeing
an ecosystem. She is seeing a tribal ritual.
She's seeing predators and prey. She's observing
mating displays. This is why her later novels,
like The House of Mirth, feel so different from
other books of the time. They feel almost clinical.
Right. She dissects her characters like a scientist
pinning a butterfly to a board. She does. She
looks at Lily Bart, the protagonist of that novel,
and she asks, Does this organism have the specific
tools required to survive in this very specific,
very hostile environment? And the answer is a
brutal no. Oh, brutal no. That clinical detachment.
You're right. It comes from the library. It comes
directly from the fact that her mother forced
her to read science instead of romance. So the
restriction actually gave her the analytical
tools to dismantle the very society that restricted
her. It's a perfect tragic irony. But before
she could write those books, she had to deal
with this intense internal urge to tell. stories.
The research mentions a childhood ritual she
had called making up. Can we visualize that?
Because it sounds almost trance -like. It was
obsessive. We aren't just talking about a kid
playing pretend. This was something else. From
a very young age, before she could even properly
read, she would grab a book, often holding it
upside down. Upside down? Yeah. And she would
pace back and forth in her room, turning the
pages frantically while chanting a story out
loud at high speed. It was a torrent of words.
And her parents didn't think this was, you know...
Cute. They were disturbed by it. They would beg
her to stop. It was like she was leaving reality,
entering some other state. And in a way, she
was. She was building a mental fortress. That's
a great way to put it. She was creating a world
where she had control. Unlike the real world
where she was just Pussy Jones. The little girl
who had to sit still and look pretty. Ugh. Pussy
Jones. I can't believe that was her nickname.
It was. And she hated it. It infantilized her.
But the making up was her escape. The problem
was, as she got older and actually tried to write
these stories down, the suppression from her
family became much more active. She tried to
write a novel at 11, right? She did. A very ambitious
move for an 11 -year -old. And she made the critical
mistake of showing it to her mother. And Lucretia's
reaction was, what? It was just devastating.
The story goes that the novel began with the
character saying something like, oh, I'm so sorry,
I have nothing to say. And Lucretia looked at
it and said, coldly, that the book was absurd
because in polite society, one always has something
to say, even if it's meaningless small talk.
Wait, she critiqued the etiquette of the characters,
not the plot, not the writing. Exactly. It was
a complete dismissal of the entire creative act.
It was a slap in the face. It basically told
Edith, your world of fiction is invalid because
it doesn't follow my rules of social behavior.
Crushed is the word the biographers use. It crushed
her confidence in writing fiction for years.
She pivoted to poetry because poetry was seen
as slightly more elevated and abstract, less
dangerous. But even that was a problem for them.
A huge problem. In their circle, having your
name in print was considered vulgar. It was common.
It meant you were working for money, which was
something only the lower lasses did. A lady's
name should only appear in print three times.
When she's born, when she marries, and when she
dies. So she had to operate in stealth mode.
A secret writer. Completely. She published poems
anonymously. She used pseudonyms. At one point,
she even used the name of a friend's father,
E .A. Washburn, to translate a German poem. She
was hiding her talent like it was a shameful
secret. But she couldn't stop entirely. I love
the detail about Fast and Loose. She wrote a
novella at 15, in secret. In 1877, yes, it was
a secret project. And even at 15, she was already
satirizing her world. It was a mock society novel.
She was making fun of the very debutante ritual
she was being forced to participate in, but she
had to keep it locked away in a drawer. Because
now we are entering the real danger zone for
her. The debutante years. From 1880 to 1890,
the pressure was on. The clock is ticking. She
comes out in 1879. That's a formal presentation
to society. It meant she could finally put her
hair up and wear dresses that bared her shoulders.
It was a signal to the market. That's exactly
what it was. It said, this merchandise is now
available for inspection and purchase. And she
almost made a match early on. Henry Legden Stevens.
This is a pivotal and very painful moment. She
was 20. He was 23. The Stevens family was wealthy.
They were in the hotel business. But the Jones
family disapproved. Not old money enough. Exactly.
A lot of snobbery involved. But despite that,
they got engaged. The wedding was planned. And
then disaster. The engagement was broken off
the very month they were supposed to marry. Do
we know why? What happened? We don't have the
smoking gun letter, but the consensus among biographers
is that the families interfered, or perhaps Henry
himself got cold feet. Maybe he realized Edith
was simply too intellectual, too intense for
him. But the why matters less than the what,
I guess. I think so. In 1882, for a woman of
her class, a broken engagement was a massive
public humiliation. It suggested there was something
wrong with her. It damaged her market value.
It must have felt like she had failed the one
and only job she was raised to do. Precisely.
And many scholars believe this searing humiliation
is what fueled the darkness and the cynicism
in her writing about marriage. She knew firsthand
what it felt like to be inspected, approved,
and then suddenly rejected like faulty goods.
So she's back on the shelf, so to speak. Three
years pass. And then she marries Teddy. Edward
Robbins Wharton. Teddy Wharton. On paper, he
was a perfect solution. He was 12 years older.
He was a gentleman from a good Boston family,
same social class. It was a safe, respectable
match to stop the whispering and get her married
off. But in reality? In reality, it was a mismatch
of catastrophic proportions. And we need to sit
with this for a moment. This wasn't just a bad
marriage where they argued over finances or whatever.
This was a slow motion tragedy that lasted for
28 years. 28 years. That is a lifetime. It is.
Teddy was, by all accounts, a nice enough man
initially. He was a sportsman. He loved dogs.
He loved hunting and fishing. But he had zero
intellectual curiosity. Absolutely none. So you
have Edith, who is reading Misha and corresponding
with scholars. And she's married to a man whose
main topics of conversation are the weather,
his horses and his travel plans. There was just
a void, a complete lack of intellectual or emotional
connection. That sounds boring, but manageable.
People live with that. But it got. Much worse
than just boredom. So much worse. Teddy suffered
from severe mental health issues. Today, we would
likely diagnose him with bipolar disorder or
severe manic depression. As the years went on,
his condition deteriorated. How did that manifest?
He would spiral into deep catatonic depressions
where he couldn't function for weeks at a time.
Then he would have these wild manic episodes.
The notes mention embezzlement. That's more than
just a mood swing. Yes. In his manic phases,
he would spend money wildly, uncontrollably.
He embezzled a significant amount of money from
Edith's own trust funds to buy a house and set
up a mistress in an apartment in Boston. So he
wasn't just sick. He was destroying their financial
stability and publicly humiliating her. Exactly.
Exactly. So picture the situation. You are arguably
one of the most brilliant women of your generation.
You are trapped in a house with a man who is
mentally unraveling, stealing your money and
sleeping with other women. And because of the
laws and the social rules of the time, you cannot
leave. Divorce is unthinkable. Utterly unthinkable.
It creates this intense pressure cooker. And
we see it in her health. She was dealing with
chronic asthma, nausea, severe fatigue, all psychosis.
somatic symptoms of living in a trap. And this
is where we see her start to channel that frustrated,
trapped energy into the only thing she could
control. Her environment. Houses. Architecture,
absolutely. Most people know her as a novelist,
but she was a design pioneer first. Her first
major published book wasn't a novel at all. It
was The Decoration of Houses in 1897. And this
wasn't a book about, you know, how to arrange
throw pillows. It was a manifesto, a declaration
of war on the Gilded Age aesthetic. What did
she hate so much about it? the clutter the heavy
velvet drapes the dark wood the bric -a -brac
everywhere she felt it was visually and intellectually
stifling her book argued for classical principles
proportion logic symmetry light proportion is
the good breeding of architecture That's the
quote that stood out to me. It's a telling quote,
isn't it? She was trying to impose order and
good breeding on her physical environment because
her emotional environment with Teddy was pure
chaos. If she couldn't fix her marriage, by God,
she was going to fix the walls. And she took
this philosophy to its ultimate conclusion with
the mount. Her estate in Lenox, Massachusetts.
She designed it from the ground up in 1902. It's
a beautiful place, a classic French and Italian
style manor. But if you look at the floor plan,
it is a biography written in rooms. How so? It
is designed to separate her from Teddy. She created
a suite for herself that was essentially a fortress
within the house. It had her bedroom, her boudoir,
her library, her bath. And it was separated from
the rest of the house by a series of doors that
could be shut and locked. This is where she wrote.
This was her sanctuary. The famous images of
her writing are from this space. She would sit
up in bed in the morning, writing longhand on
page after page and just dropping them on the
floor for her secretary to come in and collect.
So the house wasn't just a home. It was a machine
for writing. It was a machine for survival. She
built a sanctuary where she could be Edith Wharton,
the writer, safely walled off from the misery
of being Mrs. Teddy Wharton, the wife of the
manic depressive. It's heartbreaking when you
frame it that way. She built a perfect house
to contain a broken life. And that tension between
the perfect, orderly facade of the house and
the misery inside it is the central engine of
her fiction. She lived it at the Mount for years
before she wrote it into books like The Age of
Innocence. So let's talk about that writing,
because she starts late. She doesn't publish
her first novel until she is 40 years old. which
is incredibly late for a debut author. But you
have to think she had been storing up all this
observation, all this analysis, all this frustration
for decades. So when she finally started, it
was like a dam breaking. The productivity was
amazing. Extraordinary. Over the next 35 years,
she wrote 15 novels, 7 novellas, and 85 short
stories. She was incredibly prolific. And she
hits big almost immediately with The House of
Mirth in 1905. That was the breakout. It became
a massive bestseller. It established her as the
definitive chronicler of New York society. But
it also proved she wasn't writing pleasant romances.
It's a tragedy. A brutal one. It's about a woman
who tries to play the social game and is destroyed
by it. Then you get Ethan Frum in 1911. The one
everyone reads in school. Right, the sledding
into the tree book. It's so grim. But it showed
her range. It proved she wasn't just a society
lady who could only write about what she knew.
She could write about poverty, isolation, and
rural despair with just as much authority. It
proved she was a serious artist. But the crown
jewel, at least in terms of public recognition,
is The Age of Innocence. She writes it in 1920.
She wins the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1921. And
she's the first woman to ever win it for fiction.
A historic moment. A huge achievement. But, and
we have to get into the weeds here, the story
behind that Pulitzer win is messy. And it is
a perfect example of how the male establishment
viewed her versus who she actually was. This
is the jury versus the board controversy. Exactly.
So the way the Pulitzer Prize worked then, and
still does, is you have a fiction jury that reads
the books and selects the winner. Then you have
an advisory board at Columbia University that
officially approves it. Okay. The jury that year
actually voted for Sinclair Lewis's book. Main
Street, which was a huge deal at the time, a
really biting satire of small town America. Very
modern, very cynical. The jury loved it. But
the advisory board at Columbia was led by this
very conservative, very stuffy president named
Nicholas Murray Butler. He hated Main Street.
He thought it was un -American and nasty. What
did he do? He wanted a book that upheld the wholesome
atmosphere of American life. So he strong armed
the board. They overturned the jury's decision
and they gave the prize to Edith Wharton. But
The Age of Innocence instead. Wait. They gave
it to her because they thought she was the wholesome
choice. They thought she was safe. They saw a
book about old New York, about good manners and
wealthy families. And they thought, ah, nostalgia.
This is a nice, respectable book. That is hilarious.
Because if you actually read The Age of Innocence,
it is not a nice book at all. It is a savage
critique of that. very society. It is a devastating
book. It's about a society that strangles human
emotion and individuality in the name of keeping
up appearances. It is about the quiet cruelty
of conformity. The board completely missed the
point. So they gave the award to the Grand Dame,
not realizing she was secretly holding a scalpel.
Precisely. They saw the corset, not the mind
behind it. This all connects back to her mother,
doesn't it? The way she critiques that world
that feels so personal. Oh, deeply personal.
The biographer Hermione Lee has this incredible
line. She calls Wharton's fiction one of the
most lethal acts of revenge ever taken by a writing
daughter. And it's true. Lucretia Jones Edith's
mother is everywhere in the fiction, but she's
disguised. She is the cold mother, the superficial
mother, the mother who cares more about what
the neighbors think than about her own child's
happiness. It's a recurring character type. But
in her autobiography, A Backward Glance, which
she wrote late in life, Edith doesn't mention
any of this. Not a single word of it. In the
autobiography, her mother is presented respectfully.
The difficulties of her marriage to Teddy are
glossed over. The passionate affair she had is
completely invisible. She maintained the public
Jones mask in her official life story while putting
the raw, bleeding truth into the novels. Okay,
speaking of raw truth. we need to pivot to the
chapter of her life that completely shattered
my perception of her, World War I. This is the
untold story for most people, and honestly, it
is arguably the most impressive part of her entire
life. So set the scene for us. It's 1914. Edith
is living in her fashionable apartment on the
route of Oran in Paris. She's finally divorced
Teddy the year before, in 1913, after a long
and painful process. So she's free. She's 52
years old. She's famous. She's rich. The war
breaks out. The Germans are marching toward Paris.
What does everyone else in her position do? They
flee. It was a mass panic. The wealthy expats
in Paris, and there were thousands of them, Americans
and Brits, were fleeing. They were packing their
trunks and bribing their way onto steamships
back to New York or London. And logically, Edith
should have been with them. Why stay? She has
a house in the Berkshires. She has more than
enough money. Why would you stay in a war zone?
That's the key question, and the answer is complex.
She loved France. She truly believed that France
was the guardian of civilization and that it
was under attack by barbarians. But more than
that, I think she finally found a situation that
was big enough for her talents, a crisis that
demanded everything she had to give. And she
didn't just stay. She went to work. And I don't
mean she knit socks for soldiers. She became
the CEO of a massive humanitarian aid operation.
Let's look at the scale of this because the notes
here are just staggering. It started almost immediately.
August 1914. The French economy collapses overnight.
All the wealthy people leave Paris, which means
all their seamstresses, maids, and cooks are
instantly unemployed. They're on the streets
starving. So what does Edith do? She opens a
workroom. She turns it into a business. A business,
not a charity. A massive operation. She finds
a space. She gets donations of sewing machines.
And she employs these women to sew clothes for
the hospitals and for the army. She pays them
a living wage. She feeds them. And she creates
a self -sustaining... And then the refugees came.
And Edith steps into the breach. States, and
she starts building an entire infrastructure.
What did that entail? What was she actually doing?
Everything. She found them apartments. She set
up cafeterias to feed thousands of people a day.
She set up a free grocery store. She set up a
medical clinic. She even created a lost and found
system for their luggage. She was managing the
logistics for thousands upon thousands of displaced
people. And the Children of Flanders Committee.
This is the one that really gets me. This was
a project very close to her heart. This was specific
to the children, the orphans. She took personal
responsibility for nearly 900 of them. 900 kids.
900 children. She had to find them beds, schools,
clothes, medical care. She was fundraising huge
amounts of money. The records show that in 1915,
she was raising over $100 ,000 for her charities.
That's millions in today's money. This is the
woman who grew up being told she wasn't allowed
to read novels because it might upset her delicate
constitution. And now she is managing a refugee
crisis that would stress out a modern government
agency. It shows you her genius for organization.
The same mind that could structure a perfect,
intricate novel or design a perfectly symmetrical
house could also organize a complex logistical
supply chain in the middle of a war. She was
an absolute powerhouse. But she didn't just stay
in the office in Paris. This is the General Wharton
part of the story. She went to the front. She
did. This is what sets her apart from almost
everyone else. She used her high -level connections
in the French government, and she knew everyone,
to get a military pass. This was unheard of for
a civilian, let alone a woman. And she made five
separate journeys to the front lines in 1915.
We are talking actual trenches. Actual war zones.
The Argonne. The Vosges Mountains. She was in
a car, often with her friend Walter Berry, driving
through villages that had been shelled into rubble
just hours before. She was within earshot of
the machine guns. She describes the noise of
the artillery as incessant. Why did she go? Was
it just thrill -seeking? I don't think so. I
think it was an act of witnessing. She felt the
world, especially America, which hadn't entered
the war yet, needed to see what was happening.
She viewed the Germans as barbarians destroying
civilization, and she wanted to report back.
And she did. She wrote a series of... bestselling
articles called Fighting France. She wrote them
to shame Americans into joining the fight. She
was a propagandist for the allied cause. She
described herself in her own words as a rabid
imperialist. She was not neutral. Not even slightly.
She was fiercely pro -French. She even edited
a charity book called The Book of the Homeless.
And she got all these famous people, Henry James,
Joseph Conrad, Jean Cocteau to contribute. And
she got Theodore Roosevelt to write an introduction.
That was basically a call to arms for America.
There is an anecdote in the notes about a French
officer telling her to keep her head down. Yes,
I love that story. She was near the front and
an officer warned her about snipers in the area.
And Edith apparently just looked at him completely
unfazed and said, I have never known how to be
afraid. I have never known how to be afraid.
I mean, looking at her life, standing up to her
mother, surviving that marriage, going through
a public divorce, staying in Paris when the bombs
were falling. I kind of believe her. The French
government believed her, too. In 1916, they appointed
her a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. That
is the highest civilian and military honor in
France. She wasn't just a writer to them. She
was a genuine war hero. It really reframes the
age of innocence, doesn't it? Yeah. When she
sits down to write that book in 1920, she has
just come through four years of absolute hell.
She has seen the industrial scale destruction
of Europe, and she writes a book about... 1870s
New York dinner parties. It puts the whole idea
of nostalgia in a very different light. When
she looks back at old New York from the vantage
point of 1920, she isn't just missing the pretty
dresses. She's looking at a world that was safe,
yes, but also incredibly naive and trivial. A
world that worried about using the wrong fork
while she now knows that the entire world can
literally blow up. It explains the profound sadness
in that book. It's not nostalgia. It's a eulogy
for a world that has gone forever. Exactly. Dead
and gone. So the war ends. She is a decorated
hero. She never moves back to America, does she?
No. She returns once, briefly, in 1923 to accept
an honorary degree from Yale University. But
she felt completely out of place. America had
changed into the Jazz Age. Flappers, speakeasies.
Right. It was loud and fast and she didn't recognize
it and frankly didn't like it very much. France
was her home. She had crossed the Atlantic over
60 times in her life. But after the war, war,
she stayed put. And she sets up this incredible
expat life for herself, the gardens, the homes.
It sounds idyllic. She bought two beautiful homes,
Pavillon Cologne, which was a villa near Paris,
and Sinclair du Vieux Chateau, a restored convent
in the south of France with amazing gardens,
and she created her own court. She surrounded
herself with the queen of the European and American
intelligentsia. Who is in this inner circle?
Henry James was her closest friend for years
until his death. André Gide, the French writer,
Jean Cocteau. Sinclair Lewis, funnily enough,
became a friend. She was the queen bee, and people
came to pay homage. But not everyone fit in.
We have to talk about the F. Scott Fitzgerald
story. Oh, the failed encounter. It is legendary.
It tells you everything you need to know about
her in her later years. So Fitzgerald was the
young hotshot, the voice of the Jazz Age. Right.
And he was invited to have tea with Wharton,
the voice of the Gilded Age. He was completely
terrified of her. As he should be. She's intimidating.
So he gets drunk for courage before he goes,
which was a bad start. And then he decides he's
going to try to shock her. He's going to tell
a scandalous story to prove he's sophisticated.
What was the story? He told this long, rambling
story about an American couple who accidentally
ended up living in a brothel in Paris for a while.
And he finishes the story thinking he's just
scandalized the great Grand Dame. What was her
reaction? Edith just looked at him with this
icy, completely bored expression and said, But
Mr. Fitzgerald, you haven't told us what they
did in the evenings? She completely dismissed
him, like a naughty schoolboy trying to get a
rise out of his teacher. It crushed him. It showed
that she wasn't some pearl -clutching Victorian
grandmother. She was tougher and more worldly
than he could ever be. She had seen the trenches
of Verdun. A story about a brothel wasn't going
to shock her. Not even a little bit. But we also
know now, thanks to her private papers, that
her own life wasn't as nun -like. as people assumed
for decades. For years, critics called her repressed
because of the famously sexless marriage to Teddy.
That was the standard reading of her, all mind,
no passion. But then her papers were unsealed
in 1968. And we met Morton Fullerton. The affair.
the secret lover. This changes the reading of
her work completely. Around 1908, while she was
still married to Teddy, but their relationship
was falling apart, she met Fullerton. He was
a journalist for the Times in London. He was
handsome, charming, intellectual, and sexually
experienced in a way Teddy Wharton clearly was
not. And they had a passionate, intense affair.
A very real, very physical affair. We have the
letters. We even have a fragment of a pornographic
story she started writing. It was an intellectual
and a physical awakening for her in her mid -40s.
So when she writes about forbidden passion in
her novels, she isn't just guessing. She isn't
inventing it from books. She lived it. She wrote
a poem called Terminus about a night they spent
together in the Charing Cross Hotel in London.
It is incredibly erotic and tender. It proved
that Edith Wharton wasn't just a brain. in a
jar. She was a woman who desired and was desired.
It's tragic that she had to hide it her whole
life, though. She had to. It would have been
a career -ending, society -ending scandal. But
the experience unlocked something in her writing.
Without Fullerton, we probably don't get the
emotional depth of a book like The Age of Innocence.
She died in 1937 in France. She was 75. She died
of a stroke at her home near Paris. And the funeral.
This is the detail that always stays with me.
She was buried in the Cimetière de Gouinard in
Versailles. Which is fitting for a queen of letters.
It is. But she wasn't just buried as a writer.
The French government made sure she was buried
with all the honors owed a war hero. Really?
Yes. Members of the French government were there.
War veterans were there to pay their respects.
They remembered what she did in 1914. That is
the legacy, isn't it? It's not just the books
on the shelf. It's the life. It's the totality
of it. She took the raw materials she was given,
this immense wealth, these suffocating restrictions,
a disastrous marriage, and she didn't just accept
them. She re -engineered them into a life of
her own design. She designed her life the way
she designed the mount. Yeah. With intention.
Precisely. She built Edith Wharton, the literary
icon and war hero, out of the wreckage of Pussy
Jones, the debutante who wasn't allowed to read.
So as we wrap up this deep dive, I want to leave
the listener with a final thought. We've talked
a lot about The Age of Innocence. It's her most
famous book. We see the movie posters with the
beautiful costumes. We think of it as a romance,
maybe a tragedy. It is very seductive to view
it that way. The surfaces are so beautiful. But
knowing what we know now about the no novels
rule, about the mental prison of her marriage,
about the absolute horror of the trenches she
witnessed, I want to pertose something. Is The
Age of Innocence actually a horror story? That
is a provocative framing. I like it. Think about
it. It's a story about a polite, smiling, beautiful
society that slowly and methodically suffocates
anyone who tries to be real to feel a genuine
emotion. It's a world where form matters more
than life itself. A ghost story where the people
are the ghosts trapped in ritual. Exactly. So
when she wrote that in 1920. Looking back after
the devastation of the war, was she really mourning
old New York? Or was she performing an autopsy?
Was she dissecting a corpse to show us what killed
it? Was she showing us a world that deserved
to die because it cared more about which fork
you use than whether your soul was alive or dead?
It forces you to ask, what is the true cost of
conformity? And for Edith Wharton, who paid that
cost for the first half of her life before finally
violently breaking free, I think she wanted us
to see the blood on the ballroom floor. A chilling
thought. Something to think about the next time
you see a picture of a Gilded Age ballroom. It
looks pretty, but for Edith Wharton, it was a
battlefield. Thanks for listening to this deep
dive. A pleasure, as always.