The House of Mirth is still acclaimed for the elegant clarity of its narrative, as well as for its wry sense of humor and the ultimate impact of its tragic conclusion.įinding herself with a much wider audience, Wharton began to write novels rapidly, and some critics have argued that as her productivity increased the quality of her fiction began to decline. The novel, a deeply ironical critique of New York upper-class society, was immediately popular and Wharton became an overnight literary celebrity.
It would not be until 1905, however, with the publication of her masterpiece The House of Mirth that Wharton would break into her own as a serious novelist and fiction-writer. The Valley of Decision was the first to be published in 1902.
Towards the close of the decade, in 1899, she published her first collection of stories, The Greater Inclination, followed closely by a similar collection Crucial Instances, in 1901.īeginning in the early 1900s, Wharton began to write novels. During this time Wharton also took up an additional career as an expert on interior design, publishing a book The Decoration of Houses on the subject in 1897. In the 1890s she submitted a handful of poems and short stories to periodicals such as Harper's. Wharton consciously took the prose of Henry James as a role-model, adopting James' elegant prose-style as well as his strict adherence to narrative form and his tendency to use fiction as a means of investigating moral dilemmas. Although she had privately published a collection of poetry at the age of sixteen and had read widely throughout her early life, Wharton did not begin to write seriously until several years after her marriage. In 1885, at 23 years of age, she married Edward Robbins Wharton, who was twelve years her senior. She was educated privately by tutors as the family traveled widely across Europe and the United States. Comparisons aside, Wharton is one of the most significant American novelists of the early twentieth century, one of the consummate masters of American prose, and one of the most important woman writers in the American literary canon.īorn Edith Newbold Jones, to a wealthy New York family often associated with the phrase "Keeping up with the Joneses," Edith grew up in a world of extraordinary luxury, and the themes of upper-class life would dominate her fiction.
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