On this day in 1862, Edith Wharton was born to an affluent New York family. She was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, an honorary doctorate of letters from Yale, and full membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Money and marriage did not bring happiness, but they did help provide the material for novels like The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and dozens more novels, essays, poems, and non-fiction books on architecture and gardening. She wrote until her death at age seventy-five.
Wharton’s ideas on architecture and gardening were manifested in her beautiful Massachusetts home, The Mount. Wharton designed not only the house, but all the gardens. After her death, the property went through several owners, including a school and a theater company. By 1980, the buildings were in disrepair and the gardens overgrown when it was taken over the by the not-for-profit Edith Wharton Restoration.
After years of work on the house and other structures as well as the gardens, the property was almost foreclosed on last year. With help from continuing donations and careful planning for new and more financially sound uses and management of The Mount, there’s hope that this one of only five percent of Historic National Landmarks dedicated to women is preserved.
Thanks for posting this. I loved reading The Age of Innocence. It’s one of my all time favorites.
After doing this post, I made a commitment to myself to re-read that and The House of Mirth. I’m also going to re-read Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and Melville’s Moby Dick. I want to see how much they’ve changed because of how I’ve changed from the time I first read them. Except Moby Dick, of which I read only the first few chapters. (BAD student. Bad.)