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Now onto today's video, The Tragic Life Of Edith Wharton In The Gilded
Age
Edith Wharton entered early adulthood as an awkward young woman in the Gilded Age of New
York City.
It was a time that limited her options and harshly judged her for trying to be a woman
who wanted more from life.
Her life was marked by unhappy relationships including her unrequited lifelong love for
a confirmed bachelor, her unhappy marriage to a man who would later fall prey to mental
illness; and her extramarital affair with an openly bisexual and promiscious American
journalist.
Stay to the end to find out about Edith's secret life that is not well known.
To know Edith Wharton, all you have to do is read her many books.
In the House of Mirth, her first of many best-sellers which was published in 1905, the main character
Lily Bart is said to be the embodiment of Edith's experience of the constraints that
society of the Gilded Age placed upon her and all women of that era.
There is a scene in the book, where Lily reflects on her dreaded fate of marriage with a rich
man who will “do her the honour of boring her for life.”
That is what happened to Edith Wharton and so much more....
Her Childhood
The tragic unhappiness which overshadowed Edith Wharton's entire life begins in childhood
with a controlling mother who was emotionally unavailable and who sought to stifle her daughter's
active imagination, and a father who she adored and who died all too soon.
In her own family, she was always an outsider, even as she desperately wanted to fit in.
She yearned to satisfy her mother and to some extent, to be accepted by the society into
which she had been born.
Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24th, 1862 to George Frederic Jones
and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander, both from wealthy 'old money' families in 18th century
New York.
In fact, The expression "keeping up with the Joneses" is said to have originated with reference
to two of her great-aunts from Old New York
Edith's ancestry was a long succession of important names.
The Scharmerhorns, [scaremerhorns ] the Joneses, Pendletons, Stevenses, Ledyards, Rhinelanders
and Gallatins, who had led the social life of New York before Mrs. Astor reign of the
gilded age.
Even as her family held high positions in American society, money often was tight.
Still her father, although not overly rich was able to provide, as she once wrote "a
life of leisure and amiable hospitality."
George Jones was a sensitive man with a taste for art, history, classical architecture,
and travel.
She describes him as "tall and handsome" and when in his presence, she felt safe and protected.
At the conclusion of the Civil War in 1866, the Joneses embarked on a journey around Europe
during which Edith was schooled by servants and house tutors.
During her travels as a child, she studied the languages of the countries the family
visited, such as German, Italian, and French.
She was called "Pussy Jones" or Miss Pussy, as a child and had two brothers that were
much older than her, creating a lonely life while developing both her gift for languages
and her own deep appreciation for beauty in art, architecture and literature.
When she was ten years old, the family returned to the U.S. and settled in New York City where
they spent their winters in New York City and their summers in Newport, Rhode Island,
and where Edith was indoctrinated into the standards of womanhood of her era.
She was brought up to see marriage as her only means of survival and happiness.
Her education turned to learning how to charm and do nothing more.
But nothing more was not in Edith's nature.
She read voraciously from her father's library (her mother forbad her to read novels); and
on her own, and much denounced by her mother and later society, she began to follow her
passion to write.
At age 16, she privately published her first volme of poems and when she escaped the confines
of her mother's strict upbringing, she went on to write 40 books in 40 years including
her own novels along with innumerable short stories and essays covering topics such as
architecture, gardens, interior design, travel and, of course, the dire straits of womanhood
in the later 1800's and early 1900's America's upper crust.
Coming Out
At age 17, a shy young red-headed Edith Jones “came out” into society while inwardly
rejecting the standards of fashion and etiquette that were expected of young girls at the time
and, all with the intention of marrying well.
She hated the thought of being put on display at balls and parties and the required attendance
at the many dances and parties in Newport and New York throughout the season.
Ironically, Edith never had to attend her own coming out ball.
Her staid and conservative mother thought that an informal coming out party more suited
the occasion, plus it spared the exorbitant expense that the family couldn't really afford.
At the party, Edith shrunk back from the invitations to dance from her older brother's friends
and cowered beside her mother in speechless misery.
She wrote, "To me, the evening was a long, cold agony of shyness."
Throughout her life, Edith would be characterized by those around her as cool and unapproachable
but in truth, it was this extreme shyness that marked her demeanor.
Three years later in March of 1882, Edith's childhood security ended with the death of
her father, whom she felt was the only person who could ever and would ever, see her and
be supportive of her creative nature.
First Failed Attempt At Marriage.
In the summer of 1881, the year of her father's illness leading to his death, the eighteen
year old Edith was courted by Henry Leyden Stevens, three years her senior, who was from
a new money family.
His late father, Paran Stevens, had been a co-owner of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, opposite
the Joneses’ New York home; his mother, the daughter of a grocer from Lowell Massachusetts,
was a social climber whom Edith's mother did not approve of.
Henry and Edith seemed to hit it off well enough, and soon Henry proposed marriage but
the marriage did not happen, and speculations range as to why.
Some say Henry's mother considered Edith Jones an insufficient catch, or that she felt snubbed
by the Joneses.
Another account says Henry did not approve of Edith's ambitions to be a published author,
so she chose to break off the engagement.
Unrequited Love
In 1883, Edith met Walter Van Rensselaer Berry, a confirmed bachelor who would be a life long
friend.
She was 21 and he was 27 and it was in Berry that she discovered the connection she had
longed for to replace her father in the role of a husband.
But Walter Berry turned out to be a man who would never settle down.
Years later after his death, Edith called Walter, “the great love of all my life,"
and remarked that he was the only man, aside from her father, who really understood her
and her passion to write and live life independently of its constraints.
Berry was soon to become a lawyer with an established career in international law and
diplomacy.
After serving as a judge at the International Tribunal of Egypt from 1908 to 1911, he settled
in Paris for the remainder of his life.
Berry would move in and out of Edith's life, offering her support and advice regarding
her writing and publishing.
He also connected with her again after the start of World War one.
In 1914, the two became involved in a campaign for France where they tirelessly promoted
it's cause in the United States.
She and Berry, now president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris, were among the
few foreigners in France allowed to travel to the front lines during World War I. They
made five journeys between February and August 1915, travelling by car.
Edith and Walter drove through the war zone, viewing one decimated French village after
another.
Edith described this war effort in a series of articles that were first published in Scribner's
Magazine and later as a compilation in the book, Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort,
which became an American bestseller.
Walter Berry died in 1927 and upon her death ten years later, Edith was buried by his side
in France.
Her Unhappy Marriage
Approaching the age of 23, Edith felt the pressures of society to marry, as was her
duty.
Plus she wanted desperately to get out of the home and get away from her mother.
As Walter Berry was no longer an option, she turned to a friend of her older brother, a
man 12 years her senior and of the same social class.
Edward Robbins Wharton, who went by the name of Teddy, was from a well-established Boston
family,good looking and had a liking for small dogs as did Edith.
In addition, he shared her love of travel.
On April 29th, 1885, they were married at the Trinity Chapel Complex in Manhattan.
The New York Times labeled it a quiet affair in which the bride had no bridesmaids in attendance.
Teddy was twelve years her senior.
At the age of 33, he was still living with his mother and was amiable, respected, and
unassertive.
He, like many other men in his class, had no actual employment and relied on a trust
fund to get by.
He was a physical man who spent his time on sports, fishing and horseback riding without
interest at all in the arts.
It's difficult to imagine a less suited match for Edith Jones.
Edith was completely unprepared for the sexual nature of marriage with her mother offering
no support whatsoever.
It was a marriage in which there was no sex at all for many weeks after the wedding, and
then eventually settled into a state of celibacy.
Between 1886 and 1897 they travelled and Edith set aside her writing.
but a life without writing, physical intimacy, or intellectual friendship put her into a
state of poor health.
She began to suffer from eating disorders, headaches, claustrophobia, and asthma.
She'd also started to have an identity problem, with her creative self at odds with the self
locked in a frivolous society and an unsatisfying marriage.
This lasted for a number of years in which she recalls it as a time, being marked by
a "intense feeling of sickness, & such unutterable exhaustion."
Over time, Edith began to draw herself out of it and started writing again.
Success came quickly and with the money earned, she designed and moved into her first real
home, an estate in the Berkshires of Massachusetts that she named, The Mount.
Here she developed her own circle of intellectual and artistic friends, leaving Teddy to his
own past times of sports and frivolous activities that she no longer pretended to be interested
in.
Just when things were improving for Edith, tragedy started to seep into the marriage
in other ways than just a marriage without intimacy.
About this time, Teddy began to show more and more, signs of mental instability.
He increasingly displayed signs of acute depression interrupted by periods of mania, seemingly
having what we would call today, manic depressive.
Teddy also began to have affairs and when Teddy had difficulty meeting the expenses
of his many mistresses, he helped himself to Edith's money without her consent.
Still Edith sought to find him effective psychiatric treatment, but the marriage was , more and
more, seeming like a prison much as her debutante years under her mother's rule had become.
After a few more years of painful consideration, Edith divorced her husband of twenty-eight
years in 1913.
The Affair
In the same year as her divorce, Edith Wharton began an affair with Morton Fullerton, an
author and foreign correspondent for The Times of London, in whom she found at first, an
intellectual partner and then her lover.
But happiness was once again to allude Edith.
Fullerton was a fervant bisexual wh had a sociopathic inability to love, a lack of affect,
and a need for power.
Though the affair was short lived, Edith's surviving letters to Fullerton reveal the
passionate infatuation she felt for him, though it is unclear how he actually felt about her.
Her Secret Life
It has been suggested by author Keith Stern that Edith Wharton was a lesbian, at least
for a time.
In his book, Queers in History: The Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Historical Gays, Lesbians
and Bisexuals, Stern says that Edith had a lesbian affair with writer Janet Flanner.
Janet Flanner was an American writer and journalist who served as the Paris correspondent of The
New Yorker magazine from 1925 until she retired in 1975.
Not having read the book, I am not sure of the basis for this claim but it is very likely.
Edith was in Paris, mixing with intellectuals, many of whom were gay.
Her lover Fullerton was bisexual, so she could not have been ignorant of homosexuality.
She was friends with British writer Violet Paget, an out lesbian as well as friends with
Teddy Roosevelt's younger sister, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson who is said to have been
bisexual.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
How likely was it that Edith Wharton was gay?
Her Death.
Well that sums it up, other than to say that Edith Wharton died of a stroke on August 11,
1937 in her home in Paris with a friend by her side.