rich grassy tree-grown country, so luxuriously upholstered, richly lined.”7 Wharton, who shared the auto-eroticism of Mr. Toad in The Wind in the Willows, bought her first car as early as 1904. She motored extensively, sometimes with Henry James perched in the back seat, and wrote travel books on Italy, France, and Morocco.

In 1905 Wharton dined with President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House, and in October published her first important book, The House of Mirth. Though her heroine Lily Bart dies instead of marrying Lawrence Selden in a conventionally happy conclusion, the novel sold an astonishing 140,000 copies by the end of the year. Readers were riveted by the beautiful, charming, and sacrificial Lily as well as by the satiric but authoritative portrayal of American high society, seen for the first time from the inside. Attempting to capitalize on its success, Wharton wrote a stage version of the novel. It opened in 1906, was condemned as “dreadful” by the New York Times, and promptly closed. A French translation, Chez les heureux du monde, appeared in 1907.

The publication of the novel made Wharton famous and even richer than she already was. In 1908 she began a three-year affair with the Paris-based bisexual American journalist Morton Fullerton and experienced for the first time in her life real sexual passion. Rapturously describing their bed after an encounter in the decidedly unromantic Charing Cross Hotel, on the Strand in London, she exclaimed in Whitmanesque lines:

perchance it has also thrilled
With the pressure of bodies ecstatic, bodies like ours,
Seeking each other’s souls in the depths of unfathomed caresses.8

Though she had not met Fullerton when she created the character of Lawrence Selden, they were remarkably similar. Wharton, like Lily Bart, seems to have been drawn to the type of man who “was curiously insubstantial on the human side; he seems to have had almost no impulse to engage another person to the full depths of the other’s being.”9

In 1909, during Edith’s affair with Fullerton, Teddy Wharton embezzled a substantial amount of her money, and bought a Boston apartment for his mistress. Increasingly abusive, often violent, and wildly manic depressive, he was finally placed in a mental institution in 1912. Henry James, in a fine phrase, called Teddy “cerebrally compromised.” The following year Edith divorced Teddy and returned to Europe. In The House of Mirth Edith gives two minor villains—the old lecher Ned Van Alstyne and Bertha Dorset’s lover Ned Silverton—her husband’s name.

In 1912 Edith began her close friendship with the influential art historian Bernard Berenson. When the Great War broke out in France, she devoted herself to relief work for French and Belgian refugees, provided medical supplies, and took care of more than 600 war orphans. She was the first woman to be awarded the Legion d’honneur. After the war she had splendid houses with magnificent gardens, outside Paris and in Hyères on the French Riviera, and employed nineteen servants of various nationalities to run them. But she was less fortunate with men. After her unhappy marriage and ultimately unsatisfactory love affair, she formed a lifelong friendship with the Paris-based American lawyer Walter Berry. According to Edmund Wilson, Berry had syphilis, which explains why they never married or had sexual relations.10 Edith Wharton died near Paris, at the age of seventy-five, in 1937.

James and Wharton saw the merits of, though they didn’t much like, each other’s work. In 1902, when they began to correspond, the Master wrote Wharton’s sister-in-law and close friend: “I take to her very kindly as regards her diabolical little cleverness, the quantity of intention and intelligence in her style, and her sharp eye for an interesting kind of subject.”11 When The House of Mirth was published, he gratifyingly told her that “the book remains one that does you great honour ... it is indeed throughout extremely well written, and in places quite ‘consummately.’”12 Reading A Backward Glance in 1934, Virginia Woolf agreed about her intelligence and style: “There’s a shell of a distinguished mind; I like the way she places colour in her sentences.”13 Wharton’s finest novels are, in addition to The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome (1911), The Custom of the Country (1913), and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. These works influenced two generations of American authors who followed the tradition of the novel of manners: Sinclair Lewis, John Marquand, Scott Fitzgerald, James Gould Cozzens, John O’Hara, and Louis Auchincloss, and, in her portrayal of sensitive women who fail to marry, the English novelist Anita Brookner.

II

The House of Mirth, conventional in form but still very readable and perceptive about the social roles of modern women, appeared almost a century ago, in 1905. That year, Japan’s defeat of Russia led to the first Russian Revolution, the formation of workers’ Soviets, and the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin. In 1905 Einstein proposed his First Theory of Relativity and Freud published his Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex. There were also new currents of modernism in art, music, and literature. John Singer Sargent painted The Marlborough Family, Henri Rousseau The Hungry Lion, and Henri Matisse La Joie de vivre. Franz Léhar composed The Merry Widow, Claude Debussy La Mer, and Richard Strauss Salome. G. B. Shaw brought out Major Barbara, H. G. Wells Kipps, and E. M. Forster Where Angels Fear to Tread. There was considerable unrest in the United States as well as in Russia, and as the historian John Higham noted, “It was a time of mass strikes, widening social chasms, unstable prices, and a degree of economic hardship unfamiliar in earlier American history.”14

Edith Wharton was intimately acquainted with the ruling class, with people who had money and property, wealth and power.