What did Edith Wharton write about?

Wharton broke through these strictures to become one of America’s greatest writers. Author of The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and The House of Mirth, she wrote over 40 books in 40 years, including authoritative works on architecture, gardens, interior design, and travel.

What is Edith Wharton’s writing style?

Edith Wharton’s style included the use of subtle dramatic irony. Her writing style is called social realism, a style of the later part of the nineteenth century. It prevailed mostly as a reaction to the romanticism that had taken up most of the century in its grip. Edith Wharton was also a talented designer.

Why did Edith Wharton wrote Ethan Frome?

Wharton began the story that became Ethan Frome in the early 1900s as an exercise in writing for a tutor she hired to improve her French conversational skills. She based the tale on her experiences of several summers’ residence at the Wharton country home in Lenox, Massachusetts.

How old was Edith Wharton when she got married?

age 23
On April 29, 1885, at age 23, Wharton married Edward Robbins (Teddy) Wharton, who was 12 years her senior, at the Trinity Chapel Complex in Manhattan.

Is Edith Wharton a feminist?

Edith Wharton was claimed to be a feminist [4] especially after her novel, House of Mirth was published. This is due to her preference of emphasizing, either directly or figuratively, on the repression of women in her novels recurrently.

What inspired Edith Wharton to write?

Although she had had a book of her own poems privately printed when she was 16, it was not until after several years of married life that Wharton began to write in earnest. Her major literary model was Henry James, whom she knew, and her work reveals James’s concern for artistic form and ethical issues.

What are some themes commonly found in Wharton’s works?

Major themes in Wharton’s work include the effects of class on both behavior and consciousness (divorce, for example, often horrifies the established upper class as much for its offense against taste as for its violation of moral standards); the American belief in progress as actual and good (many “advances” Wharton …

Is Edith Wharton a realist writer?

Wharton was a realist, not a romantic. She turned her artistic eye toward critiquing the ways that power comports itself within American culture along the great axes of sex and class. She so savagely condemned the annihilating effects of social conditions that Henry James called his dear friend the “dark prophetess.”

What is the main theme of Ethan Frome?

Major themes in Ethan Frome include silence, isolation, illusion, and the consequences that are the result of living according to the rules of society. Wharton relies on personal experiences to relate her thematic messages.

Is Ethan Frome based on a true story?

Wharton likely based the story of Ethan and Mattie’s sledding experience on an accident that she had heard about in 1904 in Lenox, Massachusetts. Five people total were involved in the real-life accident, four girls and one boy.

Why did Edith Wharton get divorced?

Her tragic love story, Ethan Frome, was published in 1911 to much success and acclaim. Eventually, Edith and Teddy began living apart, and in 1913, Edith divorced Teddy because of his unstable mental health and acts of adultery. Edith was also guilty of adultery.

Was Edith Wharton religious?

Raised as an Episcopalian and later influenced by Calvinist thinking, Edith Wharton was drawn towards Roman Catholicism in the final years of her life.

Who was Edith Wharton’s partner?

So began the most significant relationship in Edith Wharton’s life, and also the most deliciously mysterious. At his death in 1927, Wharton called Berry, “the great love of all my life,” and wrote to a mutual friend, “All my life goes with him.

Did Edith Wharton wish she had been married to Walter Berry?

In her biography of Edith, Hermione Lee argues that we “cannot assume from this one tender (if self-preserving) note from an old friend in his mid-sixties, or from her fiction, that Edith Wharton spent the years of her marriage, and the rest of her life, wishing she had been married to Walter Berry.” This caution is reasonable, but conservative.

What can we learn from Wharton’s love letters?

The love letters are the creation of a writer worshipful of life and love, a bone-deep romantic who felt the tragic endings of her stories. The Fullerton affair gave Wharton the chance to express her depth of feeling (outside of her fiction) for the first, and possibly only, time in her life. With Berry, full expression may have been complicated.

What are the themes of Wharton’s writing?

The themes that encompass Wharton’s writing—silent longing, chances lost, words never spoken—all seem to trace the enigmatic figure of Walter Berry. And perhaps that’s how she wanted it, even within her own heart. “…

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