Some time ago I wrote about Edith Wharton and the Mountains of Northwestern Massachusetts with special attention to the mansion she created there. A recent news item in the New York Times about The Mount, her mansion, has prompted me to write about that remarkable woman again. The Mount is about to be foreclosed if an infusion of three million dollars is not immediately forthcoming; more money will be required soon. A financial restructuring must take place in the near future if this magnificent landmark is to be saved.
Eleanor Dwight, Wharton's biographer wrote in a letter to the Times: "Visits to writers' houses are not always that rewarding. But a visit to The Mount is different and has something to offer to a wide range of interests. It offers an understanding of Wharton's ideas on decorating and architecture and the way she live in the world. The Mount is the perfect place for a research center for American cultural and literary history. The accomplished scholar, the aspiring writer, the high school student, the curious tourist cannot help but come away knowing more about our past and specifically the past of this unusual woman."
Edith Wharton's first book was written with architect and fellow tastemaker Ogden Codman. The Decoration of Houses denounced the contemporary standard Victorian techniques of heavy draperies, overstuffed upholstery, draped tables topped with assortments of dust collectors. Their rooms stressed classical design, symmetry and balance. The book sold well and fostered emerging professional decorators in the new style. Soon there was to be light in the drawing rooms of the mansions. Who would think that with this beginning Wharton would someday write Ethan Frome?
Born to the wealth of the Jones family, descendants of English and Dutch colonists with fortunes from shipping, banking and real estate, Edith was not sent to school. From the age of four she lived and traveled in Europe with her family. When she was ten they returned to their home on Twenty-Third Street in New York City where she had access to her father's extensive gentleman's library and thus educated herself assisted by lessons by a governess. Thirteen years later she married Edward Robbins Wharton who had none of her artistic or intellectual interests. His background was, of course, socially similar; he was an attractive man of leisure. Their marriage was not a happy one. It did last eighteen years however; Edith divorced him in 1913.
From her position in the world of old money she could observe the social and intellectual conflicts of the newly rich of the Gilded Age. Her world looked down on the pretensions and ostentatious displays of new found wealth and the shifting social scene, a deep vein to be mined in her storytelling. The House of Mirth (1905) depicted the contemporary world of the very rich and its materialism. The personalities were famous social leaders, like Cornelius Vanderbilt, the owner of The Breakers, one of Newport's palatial "cottages," a place she had visited many times. Wharton had built The Mount, her own cottage of 35 rooms, in Lenox, Massachusetts in 1902 just three years before The House of Mirth was published.
In the 1890s the anxiety of the conflicting roles of being an acknowledged social leader and arbitrator of the high social life of New York as well as a professional fiction writer caused Wharton to become mired in depression which she tried to dispel by frequent trips to Italy and France, eventually to settle in Paris. She returned to the United Stated only to receive awards. Although she supported The Mount, she never lived in it again. Yet, it does somehow reflect the Edith Wharton we know. There is the great wealth she experienced, examples of the shifts in home decoration and architecture she espoused and there is the grim New England life she offered in that great story of Ethan Frome.
