“It was very still in the small neglected chapel. When it appeared in 1902, it sold 25,000 copies in six months and established her career as a writer of fiction. She was determined that it be both highly literary and commercially viable.
#Wharton writing challenge how to#
Like the rest of her work, it combined a keen intelligence, a lively sensibility, an eye for close detail, a witty and graceful prose style, strong opinions about society and about how to live, and a certain constriction traceable to the upbringing and class about which she wrote with alternating and sometimes simultaneous savagery and compassion.įor her first novel, The Valley of Decision, a historical romance set in Italy, Edith Wharton chose as her model Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. Her first published book, The Decoration of Houses, written in collaboration with the architect Ogden Codman, was a success. “Never,” wrote Wharton, “shall I forget the sudden drop of my creative frenzy when she returned it with the icy comment, ‘Drawing rooms are always tidy.’” By eighteen, she had begun to publish poems-mostly on the subject of failed love, renunciation and longing, themes that would continue to resonate in her work throughout the decades. “If only I had known you were going to call, I would have tidied up the drawing room.” In her memoir, Wharton described “timorously” showing her work to her mother. Jones’s anxiety increased when Edith asked her to entertain children who came to play because she was too busy making up.Īt ten, Edith was composing sermons, poems, stories and dramas in blank verse. Edith’s Old New York, old-money-society mother tried to transcribe what Edith was saying, but she spoke too fast Mrs. Her parents spied on her, and it made them nervous. The constant pacing and shouting were important parts of the game, which (according to Wharton’s memoir, A Backward Glance) had an enraptured, trance-like, slightly erotic aspect.
When Edith Wharton-then Edith Jones-was a little girl, her favorite game was called “making up.” “Making up” involved pacing around with an open book and (before she could read) inventing and then later half reading, half inventing stories about real people, narratives that she would chant very loud and very fast. Edith Wharton Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale UniversityĮdith Wharton, detail from publicity photograph, c.
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