Swaying against the mantelpiece after a few drinks, Fitzgerald tried to enliven the dull party by telling a couple of “rather rough stories.” When Wharton, not nearly as strait-laced as she seemed to be, encouraged him to proceed, he became entangled in a tale about a young couple, perhaps based on himself and his wife Zelda, who spent a night in a French whorehouse. Listening attentively, his hostess icily commented that the story “lacked data”—the kind of precise description he felt unable to provide. She made no effort to put her nervous guest at ease, deliberately led him into a situation which he was not quite drunk enough to ignore or brazen out, and seemed to enjoy his discomfort.2

Edith Wharton, a very grande dame indeed, was born in New York City in 1862, during the American Civil War, with the unpoetic name of Edith Jones. Her wealthy and privileged family, her biographer wrote, “reached back to the early eighteenth century, to Ebenezer Stevens, a gallant artillery commander and a fellow officer of the Marquis de Lafayette during the Revolutionary War, and to William and Frederick Rhinelander, who built a flourishing business in sugar and shipbuilding in the 1780s.”3

From the ages of four through ten, Edith traveled and lived with her family in England, France, Spain, Italy, and Germany. She was educated by governesses in the language and literature of each country. In 1870 Edith had a near-fatal attack of typhoid fever that weakened her hold on life. Two years later the family returned to America and to their homes in New York and Newport, Rhode Island. The old conservative New York families were indifferent, even hostile, to culture. In a telling anecdote in her autobiography, she recalled composing a novel when she was eleven that began, “Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Brown? ... If only I had known you were going to call, I should have tidied up the drawing room,” to which her mother, discouraging her attempt to write, frostily replied: “Drawing rooms are always tidy.”4

Edith was rather plain, with thin lips and a long, underslung chin. A late, unexpected child, she was twelve to sixteen years younger than her brothers and suspected she was the illegitimate offspring of their English tutor. This uncertainty about her parentage contributed to her haughty but defensive demeanor. The American writer Iris Origo called her “elegant, formidable, as hard and dry as porcelain.”5 The art historian Kenneth Clark agreed, but also stressed her more positive qualities: “She was, on many counts, a formidable person, extremely intelligent, immensely well read in four languages, witty, self-disciplined.”6 But Wharton lived in two worlds and couldn’t quite bring them together. In her autobiography she wrote that her intelligence frightened her fashionable friends as much as her elegance dismayed her intellectual companions.

In 1877 and 1878, the teenaged Edith finished her first novella and published her first book of poems, and made her debut in society. In 1882 her father died and left her $20,000 (now worth about $240,000). She also became engaged, and then broke the engagement when her fiancé’s mother opposed the match. In The House of Mirth two of Lily’s minor suitors have obstructive mothers. Dillworth’s mother was afraid Lily would have the family jewels reset and redecorate the always tidy drawing room. Percy Gryce, a grown-up mama’s boy, had solemnly promised his mother that he’d never go out in the rain without his overshoes.

In 1885 Edith married Edward Wharton, a handsome and appealing Harvard graduate with a modest income, twelve years her senior. Mainly interested in hunting and fishing, he did not share her intellectual interests, and it’s hard to imagine her sleeping out in the woods. Their sex life was unsatisfactory and, after a time, non-existent. They lived in Italy and in a cottage on her mother’s Newport estate. After Edith inherited $120,000 from a cousin, the Whartons returned to New York in 1889 and bought houses there and in Newport. In 1894 and 1895 the tensions and conflicts in Wharton’s life became unbearable and she suffered a protracted nervous breakdown.

In 1901 Wharton inherited another $90,000 on the death of her mother, bought a 100-acre property in Lenox, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, and began to build her grand estate, The Mount. Henry James—a longtime correspondent, frequent visitor, and major influence on her work—called it “a French château mirrored in a Massachusetts pond.” The critic Edmund Wilson visited The Mount, after Wharton’s death, in the 1940s. He described its “white façade with rather small windows ... and a little gray cupola with a weather vane—all in imitation of a French château.... Stable-garage ... and gatehouse to match: winding drives, rolling lawn with terraces, views of the hills and the little lake ...