Jacquie's Email Notice
Hello Literary Ladies!
It's that time again! No matter how cold and windy it gets outside, no matter what we're hearing is happening across the globe, no matter what or whom we are currently worrying about, thank goodness we can count on Literature Club to bring a few hours of sisterhood and literary delight to warm our hearts for a couple of hours. Our next meeting is this Wednesday, January 19th at 12:30 pm when we will once again be meeting on Zoom to hear Diana's presentation on Edith Wharton.
Until then, have a ball! xJacquie
Laura's Minutes
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| Imagine having to be on Zoom in a corset???!!! |
Although Wharton has been the subject of a couple of doorstop biographies, Diana primarily used Wharton’s autobiography, A Backward Glance, for information. Engaging writing wins the day!
Edith was born to the Jones family on January 24, 1862, third in birth order after her twelve and sixteen year old brothers. Although not as wealthy as the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, the expression “keeping up with the Jones” was thought to originate with people watching Edith’s family. Edith’s mother Lucretia was not the maternal, doting person, and on the birth of her daughter, called the Irish nanny back into service. Her mother was cold and aloof.
Edith’s earliest memory was holding her father’s hand when she was quite young, and quite dressed up. She characterized the moment as being “awakened to conscious life by love and vanity”. All her life, she loved beautiful clothes. With her brothers away at school, she was basically an only child, who loved making up stories, as well as listening to Greek myths told by a family friend.
The family went to Europe for six years after the Civil War. By the time her father began to teach her abc’s, she had already taught herself to read. Her mother would approve the books she got to read: epics and tales. After she contracted typhoid fever when at a spa in the Black Forest of Germany, she could read as much and whatever she liked. By the time she was ten years old, she spoke French, German, Italian and English.
Returning to New York in 1872, they lived in a brownstone Edith labeled as hideous. She was tutored at home in languages, English, and manners. She started to write in her father’s library, where she used the paper wrapping packages for her first writing paper. At eleven she starts her first novel. Her mother’s comment on Edith’s opening line: “Drawing rooms are always tidy.” So much for maternal literary encouragement!
Edith begins to notice boys, and a “ringing in my ears…”. She asks her mother “What is the passion of love?” No answer there.
However, her mother did keep a notebook of Edith’s poems, which she then had privately published and gave to friends. Through Longfellow, one copy got to the editor of Atlantic Monthly magazine, and he published five poems in his magazine. Edith is about 15 or 16.
At 17, she makes her debut, unhappy, and rebelling against the expectations of society. She was miserable at the ball, in an “agony of shyness”. However, following the ball, she did have a kind of social season, where Harry Stevens fell in love with her. But after her father’s death, the engagement is called off, from “a preponderance of intellectuality”.
There is another boy, Walter Berry at Bar Harbor in the summer of 1883, but he leaves in September. She meets Teddy Wharton, 33 years old, to her 21 years. He is a Harvard grad with a trust fund who likes fishing and hunting and such. They marry in April 1885. Edith is nervous about the physical side of marriage and asks her mother about it. Again, the door slams shut.
The sexual side of marriage to Teddy was a failure. They loved their dogs, and they loved to travel. Edith is challenged by Edgarton Winthrop to read more systematically and deeply. After receiving an inheritance, she and Teddy return to New York, where she buys two houses, the second at 78th St and Park Ave. She has her first short story published by Scribner's.
With her old friend Walter Berry, she writes The Decoration of Houses. It was a plea for simpler home decor. Banish the heavy draperies and furniture, and let the light in. First run of 1,000 copies sold out right away. The book continued to generate income for years.
Edith wrote in bed in the mornings. She enjoyed her three dogs in the bed as well! The typist would come in and take the manuscript to type it. In 1901, she bought The Mount, in the Berkshires, a house and 113 acres. Here she and Teddy lived from 1902 to 11. The marriage deteriorated over these years, as Teddy flew into rages and tantrums, hunted, fished and never read anything.
Edith longed for stimulating conversation. Henry James, her friend, said of her first novel set in ancient Italy, that Edith should “do New York”. She started House of Mirth in 1904. Wildly successful, her royalties were more than $500,000!
In 1907 she and Teddy go to Paris, where she meets Morton Fullerton, quite the ladies' man. She starts a love affair, and a secret love diary, both lasting about two years. Meanwhile, Teddy embezzles $50,000 from her, and sells the Mount besides. She divorces him. Custom of the Country, her novel about divorce, reflects this. The heroine has four marriages!
World War I breaks out. Edith makes intense efforts to care for refugees and makes six trips to the front lines in France. She writes of her experiences for Scribner’s, so Americans will donate money to the cause.
In 1921 she won the Pulitzer Prize for the Age of Innocence, the first woman to do so. But with James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S.Eliot’s The Wasteland both published in 1922, she worries her writing is old fashioned. But when F.Scott Fitzgerald visits her (although drunk), she is touched.
Her autobiography was published in 1932, leaving out her lover Morton Fullerton and lots about her mother. She died in 1937.
Respectfully submitted, Laura Rice
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