WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.800 I have to be honest with you. When I first saw 00:00:01.800 --> 00:00:04.120 Edith Wharton on our schedule for this deep dive, 00:00:04.280 --> 00:00:07.879 my brain immediately went to a very specific, 00:00:08.240 --> 00:00:11.839 slightly dusty place. Let me guess. High school 00:00:11.839 --> 00:00:14.660 English class. Exactly. I'm thinking intensely 00:00:14.660 --> 00:00:17.519 uncomfortable corsets. I'm thinking of, you know, 00:00:17.579 --> 00:00:19.640 tea sets and people sitting in drawing rooms, 00:00:19.699 --> 00:00:21.989 not saying what they actually mean. That is the 00:00:21.989 --> 00:00:24.949 popular perception, the grand dame of American 00:00:24.949 --> 00:00:27.730 letters, the chronicler of the Gilded Age. It's 00:00:27.730 --> 00:00:30.149 a very persistent image. Right. It feels very, 00:00:30.210 --> 00:00:34.130 I don't know, beige, very polite. But then I 00:00:34.130 --> 00:00:36.630 started digging into the research stack we have 00:00:36.630 --> 00:00:41.509 here, the biographies, the letters, the war records. 00:00:41.770 --> 00:00:44.689 And I realized that the high school English version 00:00:44.689 --> 00:00:47.590 of Edith Wharton is basically a cover story. 00:00:48.140 --> 00:00:50.539 A disguise. It's a total disguise. It is a very 00:00:50.539 --> 00:00:52.500 effective disguise and it's one that... In some 00:00:52.500 --> 00:00:54.579 ways, she actually helped construct. But you 00:00:54.579 --> 00:00:56.780 are absolutely right. The popular image captures 00:00:56.780 --> 00:00:59.679 maybe 10 % of who she actually was. And it misses 00:00:59.679 --> 00:01:02.119 the most interesting 90%. Completely. That is 00:01:02.119 --> 00:01:05.379 exactly what we are going to unpack today. Because 00:01:05.379 --> 00:01:07.519 the woman I found in these files is not just 00:01:07.519 --> 00:01:10.620 a society writer. She's a survivalist. She's 00:01:10.620 --> 00:01:14.859 a war hero. She's a divorcee in an era when that 00:01:14.859 --> 00:01:17.159 was, I mean, that was social suicide. Unthinkable 00:01:17.159 --> 00:01:19.340 for a woman of her class. And this is the part 00:01:19.340 --> 00:01:21.439 that really got me. She's the literal definition. 00:01:21.480 --> 00:01:23.739 of the Joneses everyone is trying to keep up 00:01:23.739 --> 00:01:26.319 with. That is a great place to start. It's one 00:01:26.319 --> 00:01:28.239 of those details that sounds like a fun fact, 00:01:28.400 --> 00:01:30.299 but it's actually central to her whole story. 00:01:30.459 --> 00:01:33.540 The idiom itself. Yeah. The phrase, keeping up 00:01:33.540 --> 00:01:35.760 with the Joneses, is so embedded in our culture 00:01:35.760 --> 00:01:37.739 we don't even think about it. But in this case, 00:01:37.819 --> 00:01:41.379 it is biographical. Edith was born Edith Newbold 00:01:41.379 --> 00:01:44.760 Jones. Wow. And her father's family, the Joneses, 00:01:44.780 --> 00:01:47.859 were so wealthy, so socially dominant in New 00:01:47.859 --> 00:01:50.040 York, that they are the most likely source for 00:01:50.040 --> 00:01:52.280 that idiom. So when we say she was an insider, 00:01:52.400 --> 00:01:54.480 we don't just mean she had money. We mean she 00:01:54.480 --> 00:01:56.879 was the standard. She was the finish line. She 00:01:56.879 --> 00:01:59.739 was the absolute apex. I mean, you look at her 00:01:59.739 --> 00:02:02.599 family tree. She was related to the Astors, the 00:02:02.599 --> 00:02:05.959 Rensselaers. Her cousin was the Mrs. Astor, Caroline 00:02:05.959 --> 00:02:09.400 Schermerhorn Astor. The woman who literally decided 00:02:09.400 --> 00:02:13.139 who was in or out of New York society. So Edith 00:02:13.139 --> 00:02:14.960 wasn't writing about the elite from the outside. 00:02:15.530 --> 00:02:17.590 Pressing her nose against the glass? No, no. 00:02:17.650 --> 00:02:19.949 She was inside the glass, she was the specimen 00:02:19.949 --> 00:02:23.289 in the jar, and she was taking notes. And that 00:02:23.289 --> 00:02:25.949 is the mission of this deep dive. We want to 00:02:25.949 --> 00:02:28.250 move beyond the tea parties and look at the tension 00:02:28.250 --> 00:02:31.810 between this insanely restrictive, ultra -wealthy 00:02:31.810 --> 00:02:35.750 upbringing and the woman who eventually... just 00:02:35.750 --> 00:02:38.009 savages that entire world in her writing. The 00:02:38.009 --> 00:02:40.469 central contradiction of her life. Exactly. We 00:02:40.469 --> 00:02:42.590 need to figure out how a girl who was forbidden, 00:02:42.750 --> 00:02:44.750 literally forbidden from reading novels until 00:02:44.750 --> 00:02:46.889 she got married, ended up becoming the first 00:02:46.889 --> 00:02:48.750 woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. 00:02:49.009 --> 00:02:51.169 It's a massive contradiction. And to understand 00:02:51.169 --> 00:02:53.370 it, we have to look at the Jones reality. We 00:02:53.370 --> 00:02:55.430 have to go back to the beginning. Back to 1862. 00:02:55.990 --> 00:02:59.169 1862, the height of the American Civil War. Edith 00:02:59.169 --> 00:03:02.189 is born in New York. Now, usually when you read 00:03:02.189 --> 00:03:05.819 a biography of someone born in 1862, The war 00:03:05.819 --> 00:03:08.740 is the backdrop. It's everything. But in the 00:03:08.740 --> 00:03:11.199 Jones family records we've got here, it's almost 00:03:11.199 --> 00:03:13.340 like it wasn't happening. The silence is deafening, 00:03:13.379 --> 00:03:15.419 isn't it? The Civil War was tearing the country 00:03:15.419 --> 00:03:18.800 apart. But in Edith's old New York, it was treated 00:03:18.800 --> 00:03:20.860 as something, you know, vulgar, something that 00:03:20.860 --> 00:03:22.659 was happening elsewhere to other people. The 00:03:22.659 --> 00:03:24.939 only way the war really impacted the Jones family 00:03:24.939 --> 00:03:28.789 was economically. Which brings us to a detail 00:03:28.789 --> 00:03:31.110 that I think perfectly encapsulates their privilege. 00:03:31.330 --> 00:03:33.789 It's almost comical. The currency depreciation. 00:03:33.810 --> 00:03:35.889 Right. So the war caused the American dollar 00:03:35.889 --> 00:03:38.770 to depreciate against European currencies. So 00:03:38.770 --> 00:03:41.229 for the Jones family, living in New York suddenly 00:03:41.229 --> 00:03:44.270 became expensive relative to their assets. So 00:03:44.270 --> 00:03:46.009 what's the solution? Do they tighten their belts? 00:03:46.189 --> 00:03:48.919 Do they buy? Fewer carriages? Of course not. 00:03:48.979 --> 00:03:51.340 They tack up the entire household servants, luggage, 00:03:51.599 --> 00:03:53.219 the whole operation, and they move to Europe 00:03:53.219 --> 00:03:55.759 for six years. It's the ultimate 1 % problem. 00:03:55.939 --> 00:03:59.300 Oh dear, the dollar is down, so we simply must 00:03:59.300 --> 00:04:02.479 spend the next half decade touring France, Italy, 00:04:02.699 --> 00:04:06.340 Germany, and Spain. It's just wild. It sounds 00:04:06.340 --> 00:04:08.939 absurd to us, but that decision was foundational 00:04:08.939 --> 00:04:12.500 for Edith. Think about the timing. She is four 00:04:12.500 --> 00:04:14.560 years old when they leave and 10 when they return. 00:04:14.719 --> 00:04:17.100 Those are crucial developmental years. Absolutely. 00:04:17.139 --> 00:04:19.079 So while other American children are dealing 00:04:19.079 --> 00:04:21.620 with the aftermath of the Civil War, Edith is 00:04:21.620 --> 00:04:23.699 walking through the ruins of the Roman Forum. 00:04:24.410 --> 00:04:27.410 She's hearing French, German, and Italian spoken 00:04:27.410 --> 00:04:30.170 around her every single day. She became fluent 00:04:30.170 --> 00:04:32.129 in all of them, right? Completely fluent. She 00:04:32.129 --> 00:04:35.189 just absorbed them. She was seeing art and architecture 00:04:35.189 --> 00:04:38.129 that simply didn't exist in the America of that 00:04:38.129 --> 00:04:41.490 time. It gave her this perspective that was so 00:04:41.490 --> 00:04:43.870 much broader than the narrow strip of Manhattan 00:04:43.870 --> 00:04:47.490 Island she came from. But, and here is the tension, 00:04:47.829 --> 00:04:50.509 while she is getting this cosmopolitan exposure, 00:04:51.339 --> 00:04:53.879 She's also being groomed. Constantly. The marriage 00:04:53.879 --> 00:04:56.000 market grooming. So this wasn't an education 00:04:56.000 --> 00:04:58.560 for her own enrichment. Not at all. Her education, 00:04:58.639 --> 00:05:00.839 which was handled by tutors and governesses, 00:05:00.839 --> 00:05:03.300 wasn't designed to make her a scholar or an intellectual. 00:05:03.579 --> 00:05:06.160 It was designed to make her a catch. What does 00:05:06.160 --> 00:05:08.829 that even mean in practical terms? It means the 00:05:08.829 --> 00:05:12.189 goal was polish, not depth. She needed to know 00:05:12.189 --> 00:05:14.689 how to enter a room correctly, how to make pleasant, 00:05:14.810 --> 00:05:17.769 meaningless conversation, how to dress, how to 00:05:17.769 --> 00:05:20.589 manage a household. Her mind was secondary. Her 00:05:20.589 --> 00:05:23.329 appearance and her manners were primary. But 00:05:23.329 --> 00:05:25.629 the sources imply she was fighting this right 00:05:25.629 --> 00:05:28.170 from the start. Oh, she hated it. She found the 00:05:28.170 --> 00:05:31.009 fashions of the time, the bustles, the layers, 00:05:31.170 --> 00:05:33.790 the corsets, physically oppressive. She later 00:05:33.790 --> 00:05:35.949 wrote about feeling suffocated by them. And the 00:05:35.949 --> 00:05:39.319 etiquette. Superficial, pointless. Here she was, 00:05:39.360 --> 00:05:42.139 this intellectually hungry child, and she was 00:05:42.139 --> 00:05:45.019 being told that her only real value lay in being 00:05:45.019 --> 00:05:47.360 decorative and agreeable. And this brings us 00:05:47.360 --> 00:05:49.139 to that big restriction I mentioned in the intro. 00:05:49.360 --> 00:05:51.519 I need to circle back to this because it sounds 00:05:51.519 --> 00:05:54.220 fake, but the biographers are adamant about it. 00:05:54.279 --> 00:05:57.480 Her mother, Lucretia Jones, forbade her from 00:05:57.480 --> 00:05:59.519 reading novels. Until she was married, it was 00:05:59.519 --> 00:06:01.600 a hard and fast rule. What was the logic there? 00:06:01.660 --> 00:06:03.560 Was it a religious thing? I don't get it. It 00:06:03.560 --> 00:06:05.339 wasn't religious so much as it was about social 00:06:05.339 --> 00:06:07.980 morality. In that specific slice of upper crust 00:06:07.980 --> 00:06:11.779 society, novels were viewed as dangerous for 00:06:11.779 --> 00:06:14.560 unmarried young women. They dealt with emotions. 00:06:15.439 --> 00:06:19.480 with passion, with messy human situations. The 00:06:19.480 --> 00:06:21.699 fear was that a novel might give a young girl 00:06:21.699 --> 00:06:24.959 ideas about romance or, you know, personal fulfillment 00:06:24.959 --> 00:06:27.420 that didn't align with a strategic marriage alliance. 00:06:27.720 --> 00:06:30.199 So Lucretia wanted a daughter who was compliant, 00:06:30.420 --> 00:06:33.920 not one whose head was filled with romantic fantasies 00:06:33.920 --> 00:06:36.180 from books. Precisely. She was trying to control 00:06:36.180 --> 00:06:38.139 the narrative of Edith's life by controlling 00:06:38.139 --> 00:06:40.839 the narratives she consumed. But this backfired 00:06:40.839 --> 00:06:44.019 spectacularly. Because you can ban novels, but 00:06:44.019 --> 00:06:46.199 you can't ban the library. And that is the great 00:06:46.199 --> 00:06:48.519 irony of her childhood. She had access to her 00:06:48.519 --> 00:06:50.740 father's library, which was extensive and full 00:06:50.740 --> 00:06:53.800 of serious books. So she couldn't read the popular 00:06:53.800 --> 00:06:55.899 fluff of the day. She couldn't read the romances. 00:06:55.939 --> 00:06:59.279 Instead, she read. Instead, she read the quote 00:06:59.279 --> 00:07:02.060 unquote safe books, which turned out to be the 00:07:02.060 --> 00:07:04.860 classics, philosophy and science. Safe meaning 00:07:04.860 --> 00:07:07.930 Darwin. Exactly. I mean, can you imagine she's 00:07:07.930 --> 00:07:09.829 a teenager reading these legitimate intellectual 00:07:09.829 --> 00:07:12.750 heavyweights? She's reading Plutarch, Dante, 00:07:13.050 --> 00:07:16.850 Milton. But crucially, as you said, she is reading 00:07:16.850 --> 00:07:19.189 the scientists and philosophers of the 19th century. 00:07:19.350 --> 00:07:21.629 She is reading Charles Darwin. She is reading 00:07:21.629 --> 00:07:24.370 Herbert Spencer. She's reading Nietzsche. I want 00:07:24.370 --> 00:07:26.009 to pause on that because I think it explains 00:07:26.009 --> 00:07:28.870 so much about her later writing. If you are a 00:07:28.870 --> 00:07:32.350 teenage girl in a corset training to be a debutante, 00:07:32.389 --> 00:07:34.790 but your brain is steeped in the origin of species, 00:07:35.209 --> 00:07:37.810 how does that change how you see the world around 00:07:37.810 --> 00:07:39.920 you? It changes everything. It's not just about 00:07:39.920 --> 00:07:42.000 accumulating facts. It gives her a framework. 00:07:42.379 --> 00:07:45.579 It introduces the concept of determinism and 00:07:45.579 --> 00:07:47.800 naturalism. The idea that we're all just products 00:07:47.800 --> 00:07:50.360 of our environment. Exactly. If you read Darwin, 00:07:50.420 --> 00:07:52.939 you start to see human beings not as autonomous 00:07:52.939 --> 00:07:55.759 heroes of their own stories, but as organisms 00:07:55.759 --> 00:07:58.079 reacting to their environment. You see survival 00:07:58.079 --> 00:08:00.480 of the fittest. You see that if an animal doesn't 00:08:00.480 --> 00:08:03.459 adapt to its specific habitat, it dies. So when 00:08:03.459 --> 00:08:05.379 she looks around a Gilded Age ballroom in New 00:08:05.379 --> 00:08:08.279 York, she isn't seeing a party. No. She's seeing 00:08:08.279 --> 00:08:11.180 an ecosystem. She is seeing a tribal ritual. 00:08:11.339 --> 00:08:15.439 She's seeing predators and prey. She's observing 00:08:15.439 --> 00:08:17.920 mating displays. This is why her later novels, 00:08:18.040 --> 00:08:20.779 like The House of Mirth, feel so different from 00:08:20.779 --> 00:08:23.040 other books of the time. They feel almost clinical. 00:08:23.319 --> 00:08:26.279 Right. She dissects her characters like a scientist 00:08:26.279 --> 00:08:29.220 pinning a butterfly to a board. She does. She 00:08:29.220 --> 00:08:31.519 looks at Lily Bart, the protagonist of that novel, 00:08:31.639 --> 00:08:34.730 and she asks, Does this organism have the specific 00:08:34.730 --> 00:08:37.610 tools required to survive in this very specific, 00:08:37.870 --> 00:08:39.990 very hostile environment? And the answer is a 00:08:39.990 --> 00:08:42.950 brutal no. Oh, brutal no. That clinical detachment. 00:08:42.970 --> 00:08:44.990 You're right. It comes from the library. It comes 00:08:44.990 --> 00:08:46.809 directly from the fact that her mother forced 00:08:46.809 --> 00:08:49.629 her to read science instead of romance. So the 00:08:49.629 --> 00:08:51.549 restriction actually gave her the analytical 00:08:51.549 --> 00:08:54.950 tools to dismantle the very society that restricted 00:08:54.950 --> 00:08:57.850 her. It's a perfect tragic irony. But before 00:08:57.850 --> 00:08:59.450 she could write those books, she had to deal 00:08:59.450 --> 00:09:02.730 with this intense internal urge to tell. stories. 00:09:02.970 --> 00:09:05.509 The research mentions a childhood ritual she 00:09:05.509 --> 00:09:09.029 had called making up. Can we visualize that? 00:09:09.169 --> 00:09:12.340 Because it sounds almost trance -like. It was 00:09:12.340 --> 00:09:14.799 obsessive. We aren't just talking about a kid 00:09:14.799 --> 00:09:17.559 playing pretend. This was something else. From 00:09:17.559 --> 00:09:19.779 a very young age, before she could even properly 00:09:19.779 --> 00:09:22.639 read, she would grab a book, often holding it 00:09:22.639 --> 00:09:25.259 upside down. Upside down? Yeah. And she would 00:09:25.259 --> 00:09:28.000 pace back and forth in her room, turning the 00:09:28.000 --> 00:09:30.600 pages frantically while chanting a story out 00:09:30.600 --> 00:09:33.059 loud at high speed. It was a torrent of words. 00:09:33.360 --> 00:09:35.659 And her parents didn't think this was, you know... 00:09:35.870 --> 00:09:38.389 Cute. They were disturbed by it. They would beg 00:09:38.389 --> 00:09:40.490 her to stop. It was like she was leaving reality, 00:09:40.710 --> 00:09:43.509 entering some other state. And in a way, she 00:09:43.509 --> 00:09:46.090 was. She was building a mental fortress. That's 00:09:46.090 --> 00:09:48.389 a great way to put it. She was creating a world 00:09:48.389 --> 00:09:50.769 where she had control. Unlike the real world 00:09:50.769 --> 00:09:53.370 where she was just Pussy Jones. The little girl 00:09:53.370 --> 00:09:56.570 who had to sit still and look pretty. Ugh. Pussy 00:09:56.570 --> 00:09:57.990 Jones. I can't believe that was her nickname. 00:09:58.230 --> 00:10:01.009 It was. And she hated it. It infantilized her. 00:10:01.250 --> 00:10:04.309 But the making up was her escape. The problem 00:10:04.309 --> 00:10:06.409 was, as she got older and actually tried to write 00:10:06.409 --> 00:10:08.750 these stories down, the suppression from her 00:10:08.750 --> 00:10:11.230 family became much more active. She tried to 00:10:11.230 --> 00:10:14.330 write a novel at 11, right? She did. A very ambitious 00:10:14.330 --> 00:10:17.029 move for an 11 -year -old. And she made the critical 00:10:17.029 --> 00:10:19.850 mistake of showing it to her mother. And Lucretia's 00:10:19.850 --> 00:10:23.269 reaction was, what? It was just devastating. 00:10:23.409 --> 00:10:26.549 The story goes that the novel began with the 00:10:26.549 --> 00:10:28.529 character saying something like, oh, I'm so sorry, 00:10:28.590 --> 00:10:31.110 I have nothing to say. And Lucretia looked at 00:10:31.110 --> 00:10:34.129 it and said, coldly, that the book was absurd 00:10:34.129 --> 00:10:38.230 because in polite society, one always has something 00:10:38.230 --> 00:10:40.730 to say, even if it's meaningless small talk. 00:10:41.120 --> 00:10:43.340 Wait, she critiqued the etiquette of the characters, 00:10:43.539 --> 00:10:46.200 not the plot, not the writing. Exactly. It was 00:10:46.200 --> 00:10:48.559 a complete dismissal of the entire creative act. 00:10:48.659 --> 00:10:50.500 It was a slap in the face. It basically told 00:10:50.500 --> 00:10:53.039 Edith, your world of fiction is invalid because 00:10:53.039 --> 00:10:55.279 it doesn't follow my rules of social behavior. 00:10:55.700 --> 00:10:58.179 Crushed is the word the biographers use. It crushed 00:10:58.179 --> 00:11:00.179 her confidence in writing fiction for years. 00:11:00.320 --> 00:11:02.840 She pivoted to poetry because poetry was seen 00:11:02.840 --> 00:11:06.179 as slightly more elevated and abstract, less 00:11:06.179 --> 00:11:08.340 dangerous. But even that was a problem for them. 00:11:08.480 --> 00:11:11.860 A huge problem. In their circle, having your 00:11:11.860 --> 00:11:14.379 name in print was considered vulgar. It was common. 00:11:14.519 --> 00:11:16.460 It meant you were working for money, which was 00:11:16.460 --> 00:11:19.179 something only the lower lasses did. A lady's 00:11:19.179 --> 00:11:21.080 name should only appear in print three times. 00:11:21.480 --> 00:11:24.080 When she's born, when she marries, and when she 00:11:24.080 --> 00:11:26.299 dies. So she had to operate in stealth mode. 00:11:26.659 --> 00:11:29.860 A secret writer. Completely. She published poems 00:11:29.860 --> 00:11:33.000 anonymously. She used pseudonyms. At one point, 00:11:33.000 --> 00:11:34.700 she even used the name of a friend's father, 00:11:34.980 --> 00:11:39.009 E .A. Washburn, to translate a German poem. She 00:11:39.009 --> 00:11:41.029 was hiding her talent like it was a shameful 00:11:41.029 --> 00:11:43.909 secret. But she couldn't stop entirely. I love 00:11:43.909 --> 00:11:45.970 the detail about Fast and Loose. She wrote a 00:11:45.970 --> 00:11:50.289 novella at 15, in secret. In 1877, yes, it was 00:11:50.289 --> 00:11:53.090 a secret project. And even at 15, she was already 00:11:53.090 --> 00:11:55.450 satirizing her world. It was a mock society novel. 00:11:55.710 --> 00:11:57.909 She was making fun of the very debutante ritual 00:11:57.909 --> 00:12:00.590 she was being forced to participate in, but she 00:12:00.590 --> 00:12:02.610 had to keep it locked away in a drawer. Because 00:12:02.610 --> 00:12:05.250 now we are entering the real danger zone for 00:12:05.250 --> 00:12:08.039 her. The debutante years. From 1880 to 1890, 00:12:08.299 --> 00:12:10.559 the pressure was on. The clock is ticking. She 00:12:10.559 --> 00:12:13.620 comes out in 1879. That's a formal presentation 00:12:13.620 --> 00:12:16.460 to society. It meant she could finally put her 00:12:16.460 --> 00:12:18.620 hair up and wear dresses that bared her shoulders. 00:12:18.960 --> 00:12:20.940 It was a signal to the market. That's exactly 00:12:20.940 --> 00:12:23.759 what it was. It said, this merchandise is now 00:12:23.759 --> 00:12:26.299 available for inspection and purchase. And she 00:12:26.299 --> 00:12:29.139 almost made a match early on. Henry Legden Stevens. 00:12:29.879 --> 00:12:33.460 This is a pivotal and very painful moment. She 00:12:33.460 --> 00:12:37.409 was 20. He was 23. The Stevens family was wealthy. 00:12:37.490 --> 00:12:39.850 They were in the hotel business. But the Jones 00:12:39.850 --> 00:12:43.029 family disapproved. Not old money enough. Exactly. 00:12:43.029 --> 00:12:45.730 A lot of snobbery involved. But despite that, 00:12:45.870 --> 00:12:48.549 they got engaged. The wedding was planned. And 00:12:48.549 --> 00:12:51.350 then disaster. The engagement was broken off 00:12:51.350 --> 00:12:53.409 the very month they were supposed to marry. Do 00:12:53.409 --> 00:12:55.990 we know why? What happened? We don't have the 00:12:55.990 --> 00:12:58.850 smoking gun letter, but the consensus among biographers 00:12:58.850 --> 00:13:01.309 is that the families interfered, or perhaps Henry 00:13:01.309 --> 00:13:04.409 himself got cold feet. Maybe he realized Edith 00:13:04.409 --> 00:13:07.169 was simply too intellectual, too intense for 00:13:07.169 --> 00:13:09.429 him. But the why matters less than the what, 00:13:09.509 --> 00:13:13.450 I guess. I think so. In 1882, for a woman of 00:13:13.450 --> 00:13:16.210 her class, a broken engagement was a massive 00:13:16.210 --> 00:13:19.230 public humiliation. It suggested there was something 00:13:19.230 --> 00:13:21.950 wrong with her. It damaged her market value. 00:13:22.330 --> 00:13:24.429 It must have felt like she had failed the one 00:13:24.429 --> 00:13:26.850 and only job she was raised to do. Precisely. 00:13:26.870 --> 00:13:29.509 And many scholars believe this searing humiliation 00:13:29.509 --> 00:13:31.990 is what fueled the darkness and the cynicism 00:13:31.990 --> 00:13:34.730 in her writing about marriage. She knew firsthand 00:13:34.730 --> 00:13:36.889 what it felt like to be inspected, approved, 00:13:37.110 --> 00:13:39.610 and then suddenly rejected like faulty goods. 00:13:39.889 --> 00:13:42.850 So she's back on the shelf, so to speak. Three 00:13:42.850 --> 00:13:47.379 years pass. And then she marries Teddy. Edward 00:13:47.379 --> 00:13:49.919 Robbins Wharton. Teddy Wharton. On paper, he 00:13:49.919 --> 00:13:51.940 was a perfect solution. He was 12 years older. 00:13:52.080 --> 00:13:54.080 He was a gentleman from a good Boston family, 00:13:54.179 --> 00:13:56.620 same social class. It was a safe, respectable 00:13:56.620 --> 00:13:58.299 match to stop the whispering and get her married 00:13:58.299 --> 00:14:01.299 off. But in reality? In reality, it was a mismatch 00:14:01.299 --> 00:14:03.480 of catastrophic proportions. And we need to sit 00:14:03.480 --> 00:14:05.200 with this for a moment. This wasn't just a bad 00:14:05.200 --> 00:14:07.600 marriage where they argued over finances or whatever. 00:14:07.840 --> 00:14:10.879 This was a slow motion tragedy that lasted for 00:14:10.879 --> 00:14:14.980 28 years. 28 years. That is a lifetime. It is. 00:14:15.159 --> 00:14:17.799 Teddy was, by all accounts, a nice enough man 00:14:17.799 --> 00:14:20.419 initially. He was a sportsman. He loved dogs. 00:14:20.600 --> 00:14:23.440 He loved hunting and fishing. But he had zero 00:14:23.440 --> 00:14:26.779 intellectual curiosity. Absolutely none. So you 00:14:26.779 --> 00:14:28.879 have Edith, who is reading Misha and corresponding 00:14:28.879 --> 00:14:31.720 with scholars. And she's married to a man whose 00:14:31.720 --> 00:14:33.980 main topics of conversation are the weather, 00:14:34.120 --> 00:14:37.399 his horses and his travel plans. There was just 00:14:37.399 --> 00:14:41.320 a void, a complete lack of intellectual or emotional 00:14:41.320 --> 00:14:43.639 connection. That sounds boring, but manageable. 00:14:43.799 --> 00:14:46.370 People live with that. But it got. Much worse 00:14:46.370 --> 00:14:49.070 than just boredom. So much worse. Teddy suffered 00:14:49.070 --> 00:14:51.730 from severe mental health issues. Today, we would 00:14:51.730 --> 00:14:53.950 likely diagnose him with bipolar disorder or 00:14:53.950 --> 00:14:56.429 severe manic depression. As the years went on, 00:14:56.450 --> 00:14:59.120 his condition deteriorated. How did that manifest? 00:14:59.340 --> 00:15:01.960 He would spiral into deep catatonic depressions 00:15:01.960 --> 00:15:04.039 where he couldn't function for weeks at a time. 00:15:04.259 --> 00:15:06.700 Then he would have these wild manic episodes. 00:15:06.720 --> 00:15:08.759 The notes mention embezzlement. That's more than 00:15:08.759 --> 00:15:11.659 just a mood swing. Yes. In his manic phases, 00:15:11.820 --> 00:15:14.340 he would spend money wildly, uncontrollably. 00:15:14.500 --> 00:15:17.279 He embezzled a significant amount of money from 00:15:17.279 --> 00:15:19.960 Edith's own trust funds to buy a house and set 00:15:19.960 --> 00:15:22.320 up a mistress in an apartment in Boston. So he 00:15:22.320 --> 00:15:24.659 wasn't just sick. He was destroying their financial 00:15:24.659 --> 00:15:27.700 stability and publicly humiliating her. Exactly. 00:15:27.690 --> 00:15:30.649 Exactly. So picture the situation. You are arguably 00:15:30.649 --> 00:15:33.210 one of the most brilliant women of your generation. 00:15:33.629 --> 00:15:35.889 You are trapped in a house with a man who is 00:15:35.889 --> 00:15:38.409 mentally unraveling, stealing your money and 00:15:38.409 --> 00:15:41.149 sleeping with other women. And because of the 00:15:41.149 --> 00:15:43.970 laws and the social rules of the time, you cannot 00:15:43.970 --> 00:15:46.889 leave. Divorce is unthinkable. Utterly unthinkable. 00:15:46.990 --> 00:15:49.889 It creates this intense pressure cooker. And 00:15:49.889 --> 00:15:52.210 we see it in her health. She was dealing with 00:15:52.210 --> 00:15:56.889 chronic asthma, nausea, severe fatigue, all psychosis. 00:15:56.909 --> 00:15:59.669 somatic symptoms of living in a trap. And this 00:15:59.669 --> 00:16:02.049 is where we see her start to channel that frustrated, 00:16:02.289 --> 00:16:04.809 trapped energy into the only thing she could 00:16:04.809 --> 00:16:07.049 control. Her environment. Houses. Architecture, 00:16:07.250 --> 00:16:09.649 absolutely. Most people know her as a novelist, 00:16:09.669 --> 00:16:12.610 but she was a design pioneer first. Her first 00:16:12.610 --> 00:16:15.429 major published book wasn't a novel at all. It 00:16:15.429 --> 00:16:18.149 was The Decoration of Houses in 1897. And this 00:16:18.149 --> 00:16:19.970 wasn't a book about, you know, how to arrange 00:16:19.970 --> 00:16:22.610 throw pillows. It was a manifesto, a declaration 00:16:22.610 --> 00:16:24.730 of war on the Gilded Age aesthetic. What did 00:16:24.730 --> 00:16:27.350 she hate so much about it? the clutter the heavy 00:16:27.350 --> 00:16:30.090 velvet drapes the dark wood the bric -a -brac 00:16:30.090 --> 00:16:33.129 everywhere she felt it was visually and intellectually 00:16:33.129 --> 00:16:36.990 stifling her book argued for classical principles 00:16:36.990 --> 00:16:41.789 proportion logic symmetry light proportion is 00:16:41.789 --> 00:16:44.019 the good breeding of architecture That's the 00:16:44.019 --> 00:16:45.840 quote that stood out to me. It's a telling quote, 00:16:45.940 --> 00:16:48.580 isn't it? She was trying to impose order and 00:16:48.580 --> 00:16:51.320 good breeding on her physical environment because 00:16:51.320 --> 00:16:53.840 her emotional environment with Teddy was pure 00:16:53.840 --> 00:16:57.340 chaos. If she couldn't fix her marriage, by God, 00:16:57.399 --> 00:16:59.419 she was going to fix the walls. And she took 00:16:59.419 --> 00:17:01.759 this philosophy to its ultimate conclusion with 00:17:01.759 --> 00:17:04.279 the mount. Her estate in Lenox, Massachusetts. 00:17:04.640 --> 00:17:07.079 She designed it from the ground up in 1902. It's 00:17:07.079 --> 00:17:09.720 a beautiful place, a classic French and Italian 00:17:09.720 --> 00:17:12.000 style manor. But if you look at the floor plan, 00:17:12.259 --> 00:17:15.039 it is a biography written in rooms. How so? It 00:17:15.039 --> 00:17:17.759 is designed to separate her from Teddy. She created 00:17:17.759 --> 00:17:20.380 a suite for herself that was essentially a fortress 00:17:20.380 --> 00:17:23.259 within the house. It had her bedroom, her boudoir, 00:17:23.339 --> 00:17:25.920 her library, her bath. And it was separated from 00:17:25.920 --> 00:17:27.819 the rest of the house by a series of doors that 00:17:27.819 --> 00:17:30.059 could be shut and locked. This is where she wrote. 00:17:30.180 --> 00:17:32.660 This was her sanctuary. The famous images of 00:17:32.660 --> 00:17:35.460 her writing are from this space. She would sit 00:17:35.460 --> 00:17:37.980 up in bed in the morning, writing longhand on 00:17:37.980 --> 00:17:40.680 page after page and just dropping them on the 00:17:40.680 --> 00:17:42.900 floor for her secretary to come in and collect. 00:17:43.180 --> 00:17:45.799 So the house wasn't just a home. It was a machine 00:17:45.799 --> 00:17:48.460 for writing. It was a machine for survival. She 00:17:48.460 --> 00:17:51.259 built a sanctuary where she could be Edith Wharton, 00:17:51.299 --> 00:17:53.900 the writer, safely walled off from the misery 00:17:53.900 --> 00:17:57.079 of being Mrs. Teddy Wharton, the wife of the 00:17:57.079 --> 00:17:59.539 manic depressive. It's heartbreaking when you 00:17:59.539 --> 00:18:02.099 frame it that way. She built a perfect house 00:18:02.099 --> 00:18:05.140 to contain a broken life. And that tension between 00:18:05.140 --> 00:18:08.480 the perfect, orderly facade of the house and 00:18:08.480 --> 00:18:11.319 the misery inside it is the central engine of 00:18:11.319 --> 00:18:13.740 her fiction. She lived it at the Mount for years 00:18:13.740 --> 00:18:15.819 before she wrote it into books like The Age of 00:18:15.819 --> 00:18:17.799 Innocence. So let's talk about that writing, 00:18:17.920 --> 00:18:20.019 because she starts late. She doesn't publish 00:18:20.019 --> 00:18:23.089 her first novel until she is 40 years old. which 00:18:23.089 --> 00:18:25.069 is incredibly late for a debut author. But you 00:18:25.069 --> 00:18:27.589 have to think she had been storing up all this 00:18:27.589 --> 00:18:29.690 observation, all this analysis, all this frustration 00:18:29.690 --> 00:18:32.630 for decades. So when she finally started, it 00:18:32.630 --> 00:18:34.970 was like a dam breaking. The productivity was 00:18:34.970 --> 00:18:38.130 amazing. Extraordinary. Over the next 35 years, 00:18:38.369 --> 00:18:42.210 she wrote 15 novels, 7 novellas, and 85 short 00:18:42.210 --> 00:18:45.250 stories. She was incredibly prolific. And she 00:18:45.250 --> 00:18:47.549 hits big almost immediately with The House of 00:18:47.549 --> 00:18:50.589 Mirth in 1905. That was the breakout. It became 00:18:50.589 --> 00:18:52.930 a massive bestseller. It established her as the 00:18:52.930 --> 00:18:55.849 definitive chronicler of New York society. But 00:18:55.849 --> 00:18:58.269 it also proved she wasn't writing pleasant romances. 00:18:58.289 --> 00:19:01.430 It's a tragedy. A brutal one. It's about a woman 00:19:01.430 --> 00:19:03.750 who tries to play the social game and is destroyed 00:19:03.750 --> 00:19:07.160 by it. Then you get Ethan Frum in 1911. The one 00:19:07.160 --> 00:19:09.059 everyone reads in school. Right, the sledding 00:19:09.059 --> 00:19:11.339 into the tree book. It's so grim. But it showed 00:19:11.339 --> 00:19:13.720 her range. It proved she wasn't just a society 00:19:13.720 --> 00:19:15.859 lady who could only write about what she knew. 00:19:16.079 --> 00:19:18.599 She could write about poverty, isolation, and 00:19:18.599 --> 00:19:21.259 rural despair with just as much authority. It 00:19:21.259 --> 00:19:23.359 proved she was a serious artist. But the crown 00:19:23.359 --> 00:19:25.259 jewel, at least in terms of public recognition, 00:19:25.539 --> 00:19:28.299 is The Age of Innocence. She writes it in 1920. 00:19:28.619 --> 00:19:31.599 She wins the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1921. And 00:19:31.599 --> 00:19:33.500 she's the first woman to ever win it for fiction. 00:19:33.740 --> 00:19:37.309 A historic moment. A huge achievement. But, and 00:19:37.309 --> 00:19:39.130 we have to get into the weeds here, the story 00:19:39.130 --> 00:19:41.549 behind that Pulitzer win is messy. And it is 00:19:41.549 --> 00:19:43.990 a perfect example of how the male establishment 00:19:43.990 --> 00:19:47.150 viewed her versus who she actually was. This 00:19:47.150 --> 00:19:49.250 is the jury versus the board controversy. Exactly. 00:19:49.250 --> 00:19:51.930 So the way the Pulitzer Prize worked then, and 00:19:51.930 --> 00:19:54.589 still does, is you have a fiction jury that reads 00:19:54.589 --> 00:19:56.910 the books and selects the winner. Then you have 00:19:56.910 --> 00:19:59.069 an advisory board at Columbia University that 00:19:59.069 --> 00:20:01.549 officially approves it. Okay. The jury that year 00:20:01.549 --> 00:20:04.559 actually voted for Sinclair Lewis's book. Main 00:20:04.559 --> 00:20:07.039 Street, which was a huge deal at the time, a 00:20:07.039 --> 00:20:09.539 really biting satire of small town America. Very 00:20:09.539 --> 00:20:12.319 modern, very cynical. The jury loved it. But 00:20:12.319 --> 00:20:14.920 the advisory board at Columbia was led by this 00:20:14.920 --> 00:20:17.660 very conservative, very stuffy president named 00:20:17.660 --> 00:20:20.279 Nicholas Murray Butler. He hated Main Street. 00:20:20.359 --> 00:20:22.440 He thought it was un -American and nasty. What 00:20:22.440 --> 00:20:25.559 did he do? He wanted a book that upheld the wholesome 00:20:25.559 --> 00:20:28.920 atmosphere of American life. So he strong armed 00:20:28.920 --> 00:20:30.920 the board. They overturned the jury's decision 00:20:30.920 --> 00:20:33.759 and they gave the prize to Edith Wharton. But 00:20:33.759 --> 00:20:36.660 The Age of Innocence instead. Wait. They gave 00:20:36.660 --> 00:20:38.160 it to her because they thought she was the wholesome 00:20:38.160 --> 00:20:40.720 choice. They thought she was safe. They saw a 00:20:40.720 --> 00:20:43.339 book about old New York, about good manners and 00:20:43.339 --> 00:20:45.119 wealthy families. And they thought, ah, nostalgia. 00:20:45.200 --> 00:20:48.039 This is a nice, respectable book. That is hilarious. 00:20:48.140 --> 00:20:50.319 Because if you actually read The Age of Innocence, 00:20:50.380 --> 00:20:53.359 it is not a nice book at all. It is a savage 00:20:53.359 --> 00:20:57.109 critique of that. very society. It is a devastating 00:20:57.109 --> 00:21:00.710 book. It's about a society that strangles human 00:21:00.710 --> 00:21:03.349 emotion and individuality in the name of keeping 00:21:03.349 --> 00:21:06.329 up appearances. It is about the quiet cruelty 00:21:06.329 --> 00:21:09.410 of conformity. The board completely missed the 00:21:09.410 --> 00:21:11.990 point. So they gave the award to the Grand Dame, 00:21:12.230 --> 00:21:14.809 not realizing she was secretly holding a scalpel. 00:21:15.170 --> 00:21:17.269 Precisely. They saw the corset, not the mind 00:21:17.269 --> 00:21:19.250 behind it. This all connects back to her mother, 00:21:19.329 --> 00:21:21.519 doesn't it? The way she critiques that world 00:21:21.519 --> 00:21:23.960 that feels so personal. Oh, deeply personal. 00:21:24.200 --> 00:21:27.480 The biographer Hermione Lee has this incredible 00:21:27.480 --> 00:21:30.680 line. She calls Wharton's fiction one of the 00:21:30.680 --> 00:21:33.339 most lethal acts of revenge ever taken by a writing 00:21:33.339 --> 00:21:36.579 daughter. And it's true. Lucretia Jones Edith's 00:21:36.579 --> 00:21:39.160 mother is everywhere in the fiction, but she's 00:21:39.160 --> 00:21:42.369 disguised. She is the cold mother, the superficial 00:21:42.369 --> 00:21:45.230 mother, the mother who cares more about what 00:21:45.230 --> 00:21:47.569 the neighbors think than about her own child's 00:21:47.569 --> 00:21:50.170 happiness. It's a recurring character type. But 00:21:50.170 --> 00:21:53.430 in her autobiography, A Backward Glance, which 00:21:53.430 --> 00:21:55.809 she wrote late in life, Edith doesn't mention 00:21:55.809 --> 00:21:57.849 any of this. Not a single word of it. In the 00:21:57.849 --> 00:22:00.130 autobiography, her mother is presented respectfully. 00:22:00.430 --> 00:22:02.809 The difficulties of her marriage to Teddy are 00:22:02.809 --> 00:22:05.490 glossed over. The passionate affair she had is 00:22:05.490 --> 00:22:08.309 completely invisible. She maintained the public 00:22:08.309 --> 00:22:11.490 Jones mask in her official life story while putting 00:22:11.490 --> 00:22:14.230 the raw, bleeding truth into the novels. Okay, 00:22:14.309 --> 00:22:17.059 speaking of raw truth. we need to pivot to the 00:22:17.059 --> 00:22:19.039 chapter of her life that completely shattered 00:22:19.039 --> 00:22:21.539 my perception of her, World War I. This is the 00:22:21.539 --> 00:22:23.880 untold story for most people, and honestly, it 00:22:23.880 --> 00:22:26.099 is arguably the most impressive part of her entire 00:22:26.099 --> 00:22:29.460 life. So set the scene for us. It's 1914. Edith 00:22:29.460 --> 00:22:31.339 is living in her fashionable apartment on the 00:22:31.339 --> 00:22:33.759 route of Oran in Paris. She's finally divorced 00:22:33.759 --> 00:22:37.380 Teddy the year before, in 1913, after a long 00:22:37.380 --> 00:22:39.839 and painful process. So she's free. She's 52 00:22:39.839 --> 00:22:42.200 years old. She's famous. She's rich. The war 00:22:42.200 --> 00:22:44.940 breaks out. The Germans are marching toward Paris. 00:22:45.690 --> 00:22:48.089 What does everyone else in her position do? They 00:22:48.089 --> 00:22:51.789 flee. It was a mass panic. The wealthy expats 00:22:51.789 --> 00:22:54.569 in Paris, and there were thousands of them, Americans 00:22:54.569 --> 00:22:57.569 and Brits, were fleeing. They were packing their 00:22:57.569 --> 00:22:59.630 trunks and bribing their way onto steamships 00:22:59.630 --> 00:23:02.789 back to New York or London. And logically, Edith 00:23:02.789 --> 00:23:04.930 should have been with them. Why stay? She has 00:23:04.930 --> 00:23:06.730 a house in the Berkshires. She has more than 00:23:06.730 --> 00:23:08.950 enough money. Why would you stay in a war zone? 00:23:09.269 --> 00:23:11.970 That's the key question, and the answer is complex. 00:23:12.779 --> 00:23:15.660 She loved France. She truly believed that France 00:23:15.660 --> 00:23:18.240 was the guardian of civilization and that it 00:23:18.240 --> 00:23:21.220 was under attack by barbarians. But more than 00:23:21.220 --> 00:23:23.519 that, I think she finally found a situation that 00:23:23.519 --> 00:23:25.920 was big enough for her talents, a crisis that 00:23:25.920 --> 00:23:28.299 demanded everything she had to give. And she 00:23:28.299 --> 00:23:30.539 didn't just stay. She went to work. And I don't 00:23:30.539 --> 00:23:33.099 mean she knit socks for soldiers. She became 00:23:33.099 --> 00:23:36.099 the CEO of a massive humanitarian aid operation. 00:23:36.720 --> 00:23:39.180 Let's look at the scale of this because the notes 00:23:39.180 --> 00:23:41.559 here are just staggering. It started almost immediately. 00:23:41.859 --> 00:23:45.700 August 1914. The French economy collapses overnight. 00:23:45.980 --> 00:23:48.460 All the wealthy people leave Paris, which means 00:23:48.460 --> 00:23:50.960 all their seamstresses, maids, and cooks are 00:23:50.960 --> 00:23:53.359 instantly unemployed. They're on the streets 00:23:53.359 --> 00:23:56.240 starving. So what does Edith do? She opens a 00:23:56.240 --> 00:23:59.140 workroom. She turns it into a business. A business, 00:23:59.279 --> 00:24:02.220 not a charity. A massive operation. She finds 00:24:02.220 --> 00:24:04.440 a space. She gets donations of sewing machines. 00:24:04.640 --> 00:24:07.460 And she employs these women to sew clothes for 00:24:07.460 --> 00:24:09.839 the hospitals and for the army. She pays them 00:24:09.839 --> 00:24:12.480 a living wage. She feeds them. And she creates 00:24:12.480 --> 00:24:21.859 a self -sustaining... And then the refugees came. 00:24:26.140 --> 00:24:42.900 And Edith steps into the breach. States, and 00:24:42.900 --> 00:24:44.680 she starts building an entire infrastructure. 00:24:45.079 --> 00:24:47.059 What did that entail? What was she actually doing? 00:24:47.259 --> 00:24:50.160 Everything. She found them apartments. She set 00:24:50.160 --> 00:24:52.819 up cafeterias to feed thousands of people a day. 00:24:52.920 --> 00:24:55.440 She set up a free grocery store. She set up a 00:24:55.440 --> 00:24:58.279 medical clinic. She even created a lost and found 00:24:58.279 --> 00:25:01.000 system for their luggage. She was managing the 00:25:01.000 --> 00:25:03.759 logistics for thousands upon thousands of displaced 00:25:03.759 --> 00:25:05.779 people. And the Children of Flanders Committee. 00:25:05.900 --> 00:25:07.740 This is the one that really gets me. This was 00:25:07.740 --> 00:25:10.599 a project very close to her heart. This was specific 00:25:10.599 --> 00:25:13.640 to the children, the orphans. She took personal 00:25:13.640 --> 00:25:17.299 responsibility for nearly 900 of them. 900 kids. 00:25:17.460 --> 00:25:20.740 900 children. She had to find them beds, schools, 00:25:21.140 --> 00:25:24.160 clothes, medical care. She was fundraising huge 00:25:24.160 --> 00:25:27.240 amounts of money. The records show that in 1915, 00:25:27.299 --> 00:25:30.299 she was raising over $100 ,000 for her charities. 00:25:30.400 --> 00:25:33.170 That's millions in today's money. This is the 00:25:33.170 --> 00:25:35.009 woman who grew up being told she wasn't allowed 00:25:35.009 --> 00:25:37.190 to read novels because it might upset her delicate 00:25:37.190 --> 00:25:40.289 constitution. And now she is managing a refugee 00:25:40.289 --> 00:25:42.890 crisis that would stress out a modern government 00:25:42.890 --> 00:25:45.740 agency. It shows you her genius for organization. 00:25:46.380 --> 00:25:49.119 The same mind that could structure a perfect, 00:25:49.180 --> 00:25:51.400 intricate novel or design a perfectly symmetrical 00:25:51.400 --> 00:25:54.880 house could also organize a complex logistical 00:25:54.880 --> 00:25:57.500 supply chain in the middle of a war. She was 00:25:57.500 --> 00:25:59.920 an absolute powerhouse. But she didn't just stay 00:25:59.920 --> 00:26:02.059 in the office in Paris. This is the General Wharton 00:26:02.059 --> 00:26:04.079 part of the story. She went to the front. She 00:26:04.079 --> 00:26:06.349 did. This is what sets her apart from almost 00:26:06.349 --> 00:26:08.950 everyone else. She used her high -level connections 00:26:08.950 --> 00:26:10.970 in the French government, and she knew everyone, 00:26:11.150 --> 00:26:14.390 to get a military pass. This was unheard of for 00:26:14.390 --> 00:26:17.309 a civilian, let alone a woman. And she made five 00:26:17.309 --> 00:26:19.910 separate journeys to the front lines in 1915. 00:26:20.109 --> 00:26:23.289 We are talking actual trenches. Actual war zones. 00:26:23.529 --> 00:26:28.539 The Argonne. The Vosges Mountains. She was in 00:26:28.539 --> 00:26:30.799 a car, often with her friend Walter Berry, driving 00:26:30.799 --> 00:26:32.900 through villages that had been shelled into rubble 00:26:32.900 --> 00:26:35.579 just hours before. She was within earshot of 00:26:35.579 --> 00:26:37.779 the machine guns. She describes the noise of 00:26:37.779 --> 00:26:40.680 the artillery as incessant. Why did she go? Was 00:26:40.680 --> 00:26:42.839 it just thrill -seeking? I don't think so. I 00:26:42.839 --> 00:26:44.960 think it was an act of witnessing. She felt the 00:26:44.960 --> 00:26:47.119 world, especially America, which hadn't entered 00:26:47.119 --> 00:26:49.500 the war yet, needed to see what was happening. 00:26:49.779 --> 00:26:52.740 She viewed the Germans as barbarians destroying 00:26:52.740 --> 00:26:55.180 civilization, and she wanted to report back. 00:26:55.339 --> 00:26:57.829 And she did. She wrote a series of... bestselling 00:26:57.829 --> 00:27:00.730 articles called Fighting France. She wrote them 00:27:00.730 --> 00:27:03.569 to shame Americans into joining the fight. She 00:27:03.569 --> 00:27:06.289 was a propagandist for the allied cause. She 00:27:06.289 --> 00:27:09.109 described herself in her own words as a rabid 00:27:09.109 --> 00:27:11.630 imperialist. She was not neutral. Not even slightly. 00:27:11.910 --> 00:27:15.130 She was fiercely pro -French. She even edited 00:27:15.130 --> 00:27:17.089 a charity book called The Book of the Homeless. 00:27:17.170 --> 00:27:19.630 And she got all these famous people, Henry James, 00:27:19.890 --> 00:27:22.630 Joseph Conrad, Jean Cocteau to contribute. And 00:27:22.630 --> 00:27:25.069 she got Theodore Roosevelt to write an introduction. 00:27:25.960 --> 00:27:28.380 That was basically a call to arms for America. 00:27:28.680 --> 00:27:31.319 There is an anecdote in the notes about a French 00:27:31.319 --> 00:27:33.819 officer telling her to keep her head down. Yes, 00:27:33.859 --> 00:27:36.099 I love that story. She was near the front and 00:27:36.099 --> 00:27:38.480 an officer warned her about snipers in the area. 00:27:38.640 --> 00:27:40.539 And Edith apparently just looked at him completely 00:27:40.539 --> 00:27:42.599 unfazed and said, I have never known how to be 00:27:42.599 --> 00:27:44.799 afraid. I have never known how to be afraid. 00:27:44.900 --> 00:27:48.779 I mean, looking at her life, standing up to her 00:27:48.779 --> 00:27:51.480 mother, surviving that marriage, going through 00:27:51.480 --> 00:27:53.380 a public divorce, staying in Paris when the bombs 00:27:53.380 --> 00:27:56.230 were falling. I kind of believe her. The French 00:27:56.230 --> 00:27:59.009 government believed her, too. In 1916, they appointed 00:27:59.009 --> 00:28:01.509 her a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. That 00:28:01.509 --> 00:28:04.150 is the highest civilian and military honor in 00:28:04.150 --> 00:28:06.730 France. She wasn't just a writer to them. She 00:28:06.730 --> 00:28:09.529 was a genuine war hero. It really reframes the 00:28:09.529 --> 00:28:11.470 age of innocence, doesn't it? Yeah. When she 00:28:11.470 --> 00:28:13.930 sits down to write that book in 1920, she has 00:28:13.930 --> 00:28:16.210 just come through four years of absolute hell. 00:28:16.730 --> 00:28:18.910 She has seen the industrial scale destruction 00:28:18.910 --> 00:28:22.619 of Europe, and she writes a book about... 1870s 00:28:22.619 --> 00:28:24.880 New York dinner parties. It puts the whole idea 00:28:24.880 --> 00:28:27.599 of nostalgia in a very different light. When 00:28:27.599 --> 00:28:29.539 she looks back at old New York from the vantage 00:28:29.539 --> 00:28:31.900 point of 1920, she isn't just missing the pretty 00:28:31.900 --> 00:28:34.240 dresses. She's looking at a world that was safe, 00:28:34.299 --> 00:28:37.740 yes, but also incredibly naive and trivial. A 00:28:37.740 --> 00:28:39.559 world that worried about using the wrong fork 00:28:39.559 --> 00:28:41.619 while she now knows that the entire world can 00:28:41.619 --> 00:28:44.559 literally blow up. It explains the profound sadness 00:28:44.559 --> 00:28:47.359 in that book. It's not nostalgia. It's a eulogy 00:28:47.359 --> 00:28:50.130 for a world that has gone forever. Exactly. Dead 00:28:50.130 --> 00:28:52.990 and gone. So the war ends. She is a decorated 00:28:52.990 --> 00:28:55.549 hero. She never moves back to America, does she? 00:28:55.670 --> 00:28:59.170 No. She returns once, briefly, in 1923 to accept 00:28:59.170 --> 00:29:02.230 an honorary degree from Yale University. But 00:29:02.230 --> 00:29:05.690 she felt completely out of place. America had 00:29:05.690 --> 00:29:08.529 changed into the Jazz Age. Flappers, speakeasies. 00:29:08.569 --> 00:29:11.390 Right. It was loud and fast and she didn't recognize 00:29:11.390 --> 00:29:13.910 it and frankly didn't like it very much. France 00:29:13.910 --> 00:29:16.309 was her home. She had crossed the Atlantic over 00:29:16.309 --> 00:29:18.769 60 times in her life. But after the war, war, 00:29:18.829 --> 00:29:21.089 she stayed put. And she sets up this incredible 00:29:21.089 --> 00:29:23.569 expat life for herself, the gardens, the homes. 00:29:24.400 --> 00:29:27.200 It sounds idyllic. She bought two beautiful homes, 00:29:27.380 --> 00:29:29.400 Pavillon Cologne, which was a villa near Paris, 00:29:29.559 --> 00:29:32.680 and Sinclair du Vieux Chateau, a restored convent 00:29:32.680 --> 00:29:34.559 in the south of France with amazing gardens, 00:29:34.660 --> 00:29:36.920 and she created her own court. She surrounded 00:29:36.920 --> 00:29:39.200 herself with the queen of the European and American 00:29:39.200 --> 00:29:41.119 intelligentsia. Who is in this inner circle? 00:29:41.279 --> 00:29:43.400 Henry James was her closest friend for years 00:29:43.400 --> 00:29:45.920 until his death. André Gide, the French writer, 00:29:46.099 --> 00:29:48.680 Jean Cocteau. Sinclair Lewis, funnily enough, 00:29:48.720 --> 00:29:51.539 became a friend. She was the queen bee, and people 00:29:51.539 --> 00:29:54.019 came to pay homage. But not everyone fit in. 00:29:54.640 --> 00:29:57.039 We have to talk about the F. Scott Fitzgerald 00:29:57.039 --> 00:30:00.460 story. Oh, the failed encounter. It is legendary. 00:30:00.500 --> 00:30:02.480 It tells you everything you need to know about 00:30:02.480 --> 00:30:04.900 her in her later years. So Fitzgerald was the 00:30:04.900 --> 00:30:07.759 young hotshot, the voice of the Jazz Age. Right. 00:30:07.819 --> 00:30:10.420 And he was invited to have tea with Wharton, 00:30:10.500 --> 00:30:12.619 the voice of the Gilded Age. He was completely 00:30:12.619 --> 00:30:15.579 terrified of her. As he should be. She's intimidating. 00:30:15.960 --> 00:30:18.380 So he gets drunk for courage before he goes, 00:30:18.539 --> 00:30:20.839 which was a bad start. And then he decides he's 00:30:20.839 --> 00:30:22.869 going to try to shock her. He's going to tell 00:30:22.869 --> 00:30:25.150 a scandalous story to prove he's sophisticated. 00:30:25.670 --> 00:30:28.390 What was the story? He told this long, rambling 00:30:28.390 --> 00:30:31.289 story about an American couple who accidentally 00:30:31.289 --> 00:30:34.089 ended up living in a brothel in Paris for a while. 00:30:34.349 --> 00:30:36.609 And he finishes the story thinking he's just 00:30:36.609 --> 00:30:39.549 scandalized the great Grand Dame. What was her 00:30:39.549 --> 00:30:41.849 reaction? Edith just looked at him with this 00:30:41.849 --> 00:30:45.450 icy, completely bored expression and said, But 00:30:45.450 --> 00:30:47.730 Mr. Fitzgerald, you haven't told us what they 00:30:47.730 --> 00:30:50.680 did in the evenings? She completely dismissed 00:30:50.680 --> 00:30:53.119 him, like a naughty schoolboy trying to get a 00:30:53.119 --> 00:30:56.299 rise out of his teacher. It crushed him. It showed 00:30:56.299 --> 00:30:58.339 that she wasn't some pearl -clutching Victorian 00:30:58.339 --> 00:31:01.400 grandmother. She was tougher and more worldly 00:31:01.400 --> 00:31:03.579 than he could ever be. She had seen the trenches 00:31:03.579 --> 00:31:06.339 of Verdun. A story about a brothel wasn't going 00:31:06.339 --> 00:31:08.740 to shock her. Not even a little bit. But we also 00:31:08.740 --> 00:31:11.779 know now, thanks to her private papers, that 00:31:11.779 --> 00:31:15.359 her own life wasn't as nun -like. as people assumed 00:31:15.359 --> 00:31:19.240 for decades. For years, critics called her repressed 00:31:19.240 --> 00:31:22.319 because of the famously sexless marriage to Teddy. 00:31:22.460 --> 00:31:24.980 That was the standard reading of her, all mind, 00:31:25.119 --> 00:31:27.599 no passion. But then her papers were unsealed 00:31:27.599 --> 00:31:30.940 in 1968. And we met Morton Fullerton. The affair. 00:31:31.740 --> 00:31:34.359 the secret lover. This changes the reading of 00:31:34.359 --> 00:31:36.819 her work completely. Around 1908, while she was 00:31:36.819 --> 00:31:38.259 still married to Teddy, but their relationship 00:31:38.259 --> 00:31:40.539 was falling apart, she met Fullerton. He was 00:31:40.539 --> 00:31:42.599 a journalist for the Times in London. He was 00:31:42.599 --> 00:31:46.619 handsome, charming, intellectual, and sexually 00:31:46.619 --> 00:31:49.059 experienced in a way Teddy Wharton clearly was 00:31:49.059 --> 00:31:51.259 not. And they had a passionate, intense affair. 00:31:51.680 --> 00:31:54.119 A very real, very physical affair. We have the 00:31:54.119 --> 00:31:56.880 letters. We even have a fragment of a pornographic 00:31:56.880 --> 00:31:59.799 story she started writing. It was an intellectual 00:31:59.799 --> 00:32:02.700 and a physical awakening for her in her mid -40s. 00:32:02.819 --> 00:32:05.259 So when she writes about forbidden passion in 00:32:05.259 --> 00:32:07.759 her novels, she isn't just guessing. She isn't 00:32:07.759 --> 00:32:10.940 inventing it from books. She lived it. She wrote 00:32:10.940 --> 00:32:13.099 a poem called Terminus about a night they spent 00:32:13.099 --> 00:32:15.180 together in the Charing Cross Hotel in London. 00:32:15.579 --> 00:32:19.079 It is incredibly erotic and tender. It proved 00:32:19.079 --> 00:32:21.099 that Edith Wharton wasn't just a brain. in a 00:32:21.099 --> 00:32:24.140 jar. She was a woman who desired and was desired. 00:32:24.420 --> 00:32:26.220 It's tragic that she had to hide it her whole 00:32:26.220 --> 00:32:28.279 life, though. She had to. It would have been 00:32:28.279 --> 00:32:31.640 a career -ending, society -ending scandal. But 00:32:31.640 --> 00:32:33.940 the experience unlocked something in her writing. 00:32:34.299 --> 00:32:36.480 Without Fullerton, we probably don't get the 00:32:36.480 --> 00:32:38.819 emotional depth of a book like The Age of Innocence. 00:32:38.839 --> 00:32:42.640 She died in 1937 in France. She was 75. She died 00:32:42.640 --> 00:32:45.859 of a stroke at her home near Paris. And the funeral. 00:32:46.779 --> 00:32:48.940 This is the detail that always stays with me. 00:32:49.039 --> 00:32:51.480 She was buried in the Cimetière de Gouinard in 00:32:51.480 --> 00:32:53.539 Versailles. Which is fitting for a queen of letters. 00:32:53.819 --> 00:32:56.559 It is. But she wasn't just buried as a writer. 00:32:56.779 --> 00:32:59.460 The French government made sure she was buried 00:32:59.460 --> 00:33:02.640 with all the honors owed a war hero. Really? 00:33:03.079 --> 00:33:05.759 Yes. Members of the French government were there. 00:33:05.920 --> 00:33:08.160 War veterans were there to pay their respects. 00:33:08.440 --> 00:33:11.440 They remembered what she did in 1914. That is 00:33:11.440 --> 00:33:13.480 the legacy, isn't it? It's not just the books 00:33:13.480 --> 00:33:16.130 on the shelf. It's the life. It's the totality 00:33:16.130 --> 00:33:18.930 of it. She took the raw materials she was given, 00:33:19.029 --> 00:33:21.450 this immense wealth, these suffocating restrictions, 00:33:21.869 --> 00:33:24.849 a disastrous marriage, and she didn't just accept 00:33:24.849 --> 00:33:27.809 them. She re -engineered them into a life of 00:33:27.809 --> 00:33:30.369 her own design. She designed her life the way 00:33:30.369 --> 00:33:32.329 she designed the mount. Yeah. With intention. 00:33:32.970 --> 00:33:35.849 Precisely. She built Edith Wharton, the literary 00:33:35.849 --> 00:33:38.509 icon and war hero, out of the wreckage of Pussy 00:33:38.509 --> 00:33:40.930 Jones, the debutante who wasn't allowed to read. 00:33:41.359 --> 00:33:43.660 So as we wrap up this deep dive, I want to leave 00:33:43.660 --> 00:33:45.339 the listener with a final thought. We've talked 00:33:45.339 --> 00:33:47.039 a lot about The Age of Innocence. It's her most 00:33:47.039 --> 00:33:49.500 famous book. We see the movie posters with the 00:33:49.500 --> 00:33:52.140 beautiful costumes. We think of it as a romance, 00:33:52.200 --> 00:33:54.720 maybe a tragedy. It is very seductive to view 00:33:54.720 --> 00:33:57.119 it that way. The surfaces are so beautiful. But 00:33:57.119 --> 00:33:59.380 knowing what we know now about the no novels 00:33:59.380 --> 00:34:01.839 rule, about the mental prison of her marriage, 00:34:01.980 --> 00:34:04.440 about the absolute horror of the trenches she 00:34:04.440 --> 00:34:07.859 witnessed, I want to pertose something. Is The 00:34:07.859 --> 00:34:10.780 Age of Innocence actually a horror story? That 00:34:10.780 --> 00:34:13.659 is a provocative framing. I like it. Think about 00:34:13.659 --> 00:34:17.719 it. It's a story about a polite, smiling, beautiful 00:34:17.719 --> 00:34:21.559 society that slowly and methodically suffocates 00:34:21.559 --> 00:34:25.019 anyone who tries to be real to feel a genuine 00:34:25.019 --> 00:34:28.699 emotion. It's a world where form matters more 00:34:28.699 --> 00:34:31.340 than life itself. A ghost story where the people 00:34:31.340 --> 00:34:34.320 are the ghosts trapped in ritual. Exactly. So 00:34:34.320 --> 00:34:37.260 when she wrote that in 1920. Looking back after 00:34:37.260 --> 00:34:39.400 the devastation of the war, was she really mourning 00:34:39.400 --> 00:34:42.579 old New York? Or was she performing an autopsy? 00:34:42.579 --> 00:34:44.719 Was she dissecting a corpse to show us what killed 00:34:44.719 --> 00:34:46.739 it? Was she showing us a world that deserved 00:34:46.739 --> 00:34:48.679 to die because it cared more about which fork 00:34:48.679 --> 00:34:50.860 you use than whether your soul was alive or dead? 00:34:51.000 --> 00:34:53.380 It forces you to ask, what is the true cost of 00:34:53.380 --> 00:34:56.440 conformity? And for Edith Wharton, who paid that 00:34:56.440 --> 00:34:58.679 cost for the first half of her life before finally 00:34:58.679 --> 00:35:01.340 violently breaking free, I think she wanted us 00:35:01.340 --> 00:35:03.380 to see the blood on the ballroom floor. A chilling 00:35:03.380 --> 00:35:05.510 thought. Something to think about the next time 00:35:05.510 --> 00:35:08.949 you see a picture of a Gilded Age ballroom. It 00:35:08.949 --> 00:35:11.969 looks pretty, but for Edith Wharton, it was a 00:35:11.969 --> 00:35:14.750 battlefield. Thanks for listening to this deep 00:35:14.750 --> 00:35:16.329 dive. A pleasure, as always.