Edith Wharton lived an interesting life. While her primary claim to fame is being the first female recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, Wharton was quietly a transformational figure in her time.
Before Wharton, American literature was defined by a sort of rejection of society; in the Wild West mythos, unlimited opportunity lay at the frontier, away from civilization. And in Huckleberry Finn, that distaste for "'sivilizing" is literal. For the portion of a growing urban population seeking more relatable (or female, for that matter) fiction, they turned to Britain, which had recently seen an influx of critically lauded works by female authors.
In many respects, Wharton's entry onto the scene could not have been timed better. There was a growing appetite for the sort of trafficking in taboo and social criticism offered by the Bronte sisters, Mary Anne Evans and their compatriots. The frontier was officially declared "closed" in 1890, perhaps signalling that it was time to begin looking inwards, delving into the country's vibrant urban fabric. Wharton was well placed to deliver; having grown up in upper-class New York society with a penchant for writing, her upbringing and life would serve as a wellspring from which numerous novels, short stories and poems would flow.
Although her first novel would not be published until 1902, Wharton by no means came to literature late in life. Fluent in German (along with Italian and French), her first published work was a translation of a poem by Heinrich Karl Brugsch at the age of fifteen. Her father arranged for the private publication of a collection of original and translated poems, and she would have several poems appear in The Atlantic Monthly when she was just eighteen years old. She was close with several of her father's associates, many of whom supported her desire to write and would serve as mentors as she sought to advance her relatively limited formal education.
But while her privileged upbringing offered some benefits, as she reached adulthood Wharton found that it stymied her. She hadn't been able to put her name to the work she'd done as a teenager because writing was seen as unbecoming for a woman of her status, and her parents feared for her marriage prospects if such a fact were to come to light. She also bristled at the attitudes and gender norms she was subjected to growing up. Viewing the expectations New York high society placed on women as facile and oppressive, she would employ these criticisms to great effect in several of her later works.
Wharton during her lifetime was viewed as a technically skilled, albeit restrained, writer. This extended beyond the realm of fiction as well. Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort, a compilation of magazine articles she wrote chronicling her travels around France during the First World War became a bestseller. As for her fiction, despite generally positive reception she frequently came under criticism from various authors and editors. Wharton's primary innovation was transplanting the detailed, realistic portrayals of social environments typical of British fiction to an American setting, specifically "Aristocratic" New York. She did this to much acclaim with House of Mirth in 1905, and a string of well-received novels cemented her status as a progenitor of modern American fiction.
Unfortunately her placement by critics at the forefront of American literature opened her up to criticism, first from some other "naturalist" writers who felt her focus on 19th century elites was stale in light of newer works which tackled more marginalized,obscure and exotic environments, and later in her career from modernist critics and authors who thought her narrative structure defiantly conservative.
A Pulitzer would be enough to secure Wharton a place in history, but to her numerous boosters she represents something else entirely, namely a force bound by few conventions. The admittedly remote subject matter detailed in her novels were borne of a surprisingly frank creative process, one that seemingly ran counter to the conception of authors as tortured artists bearing a combination of unique insights and compelling voice entirely beyond the capability of a layperson. As she would write in an Atlantic Magazine article towards the end of her life, "“I remember saying to myself, when the book was done: ‘I don’t yet know how to write a novel; but I know how to find out how to.’” It perhaps is only too fitting that the chronicler of a world inaccessible to the average person would be the one to suggest that hard work could make a writer out of anybody.
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