When she recovers, the family moves to Florence. Edith begins writing stories, which she recites to her family.

1872 The Joneses return to America, where they live in New York City and Newport, Rhode Island.
1877 Edith finishes a novella, Fast and Loose, which will be published a century later, in 1977. Henry James’s novel The American appears.
1878 Edith’s mother pays to publish a collection of Edith’s poems, verses.
1879 Edith is presented to society in New York City.
1880 A wealthy young man, Henry Leyden Stevens, proposes to Wharton. The Atlantic Monthly magazine publishes five of Wharton’s poems.
1881 Henry James’s novel Portrait of a Lady appears.
1882 Edith’s father dies in the south of France. Edith and her mother return to the United States to find that Henry Stevens’s mother disapproves of the engagement. It is broken off, and the Jones women return to France.
1883 While summering in Bar Harbor, Maine, Edith agrees to marry Edward Wharton, an independently wealthy sportsman from Massachusetts.
1885 Edith and Edward wed and over the next several years divide their time between Europe, New York, and Newport.
1889 Wharton’s poems appear in Scribner’s Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly.
1891 Wharton’s first published story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” appears in Scribner’s Magazine.
1897 The Decoration of Houses appears; a nonfiction work on interior design written by Wharton and architect Ogden Codman , Jr.
1898 Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is published.
1901 The Whartons begin to build The Mount, their summer home near Lenox, Massachusetts. Edith’s mother dies in Paris.
1905 The House of Mirth is published. The novel quickly becomes one of the best-selling books of the year; its popularity solidifies Wharton’s reputation as a major novelist. Wharton and Henry James develop a close friendship. George Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara is performed in London.
1908 Wharton publishes A Motor-Flight through France, in which she recounts her travels with Edward and Henry James. She meets Morton Fullerton, an American journalist living in London who is a friend of Henry James, and the two begin a passionate though short-lived love affair.
1911 Wharton’s Ethan Frome is published; it was inspired by the New England life the author witnessed near her home in Lenox.
1912 Wharton begins a friendship with art historian Bernard Berenson.
1913 Edith and Edward divorce. Wharton moves to France, where she will spend most of the rest of her life. Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! is published.
1914 Wharton travels to Tunisia and Algiers, then undertakes relief efforts during World War I. She finds homes for hundreds of Belgian orphans and raises money for refugees.
1916 Henry James dies.Wharton receives the French Legion of Honor award for her war relief activities.
1917 T. S. Eliot’s book of poetry Prufrock and Other Observations appears.
1920 The Age of Innocence, a novel about New York society, is published to great success.
1921 Wharton becomes the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which she receives for The Age of Innocence. Eugene O‘Neill’s play Anna Christie opens in New York City.
1922 T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is published.
1923 Yale University awards Wharton an honorary doctorate. Edna St. Vincent Millay receives the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
1924 Wharton publishes a collection of novellas and short stories as Old New York.
1925 Sinclair Lewis publishes Arrowsmith, which he dedicates to Wharton. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is published. Gertrude Stein publishes The Making of Americans.
1926 Ernest Hemingway publishes The Sun Also Rises.
1928 Edward Wharton dies. Poet Carl Sandburg’s Good Morning, America is published.
1930 Wharton is elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She continues to write, although her health is failing . Robert Frost’s Collected Poems is published.
1934 Wharton publishes “Roman Fever” in Liberty magazine for the then-astronomical sum of $3,000; one of her best-known short stories, it is based on her travels in Italy.
1937 After a severe stroke, Edith Wharton dies on August 11. She is buried in Versailles, France.

INTRODUCTION

I

At a London dinner party in 1908, the young Somerset Maugham found Edith Wharton, then aged forty-six, impressive and condescending: “She was a smallish woman, with fine eyes, regular features and a pale clear skin drawn rather tightly over the bones of her face. She was dressed with the sober magnificence suitable to a woman of birth, of wealth and of letters.” When he asked if she ever read thrillers, she disdainfully replied: “No.” “Never has a monosyllable contained more frigid displeasure, more shocked disapproval nor more wounded surprise.... Her manner was that of a woman to whom a man has made proposals offensive to her modesty, but which her good breeding tells her it will be more dignified to ignore than to make a scene about.”1

Wharton’s encounters with the young and socially insecure Scott Fitzgerald also revealed her forbidding, imperious character. When they met in Charles Scribner’s office in 1920, just after Fitzgerald’s first novel was published, he impulsively threw himself at her feet and exclaimed: “Could I let the author of Ethan Frome pass through New York without paying my respects?” Five years later, after complimenting him on The Great Gatsby, she invited him to tea at her house outside Paris.