Edith Wharton in the country

Sep 15, 2024

“It was only at The Mount that I was truly happy.”

—Edith Wharton

Today I’d like to tell you about Edith Wharton at midlife, when she built a house in the country, and when she began to hit her stride as a writer. She spent only a decade’s worth of summers at this house, The Mount, but these were pivotal years.

In 1902, when she was 40, Edith Wharton and her husband Teddy, 52, began work on a summer house outside Lenox, MA, a small town in the Berkshires. Edith had been sending her stories and poetry out for the past ten years or so, and she’d coauthored The Decoration of Houses with architect and friend Ogden Codman to great acclaim, but she wasn’t yet the novelist she would become.

And her marriage of 17 years was strained. Teddy Wharton was beginning to fall apart—in the 21st century he might have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder—and he needed a focus. Both wanted a summer place that was less formal, less social than Newport, RI, a place where Edith could write and Teddy could hunt and fish and oversee a farm and the grounds. The Berkshires was becoming a summer destination for more casual rich folk, and Teddy’s mother and sister lived nearby.

There’s a long approach drive to the house, very green and wooded.

Edith and Teddy were involved in every aspect of the design of the house and garden, sometimes to the consternation of first architect (and Edith’s coauthor) Ogden Codman, and second architect Francis Hoppin.

The result was a grand but unfussy (for that era) house with English, Italian, and French influences. With 35 rooms, The Mount was smaller than many of the “cottages” that millionaires were building in the Berkshires. And the gardens, which Wharton designed and worked on with her niece Beatrix Farrand, a landscape architect, deserve a post of their own. (Which I’ll get to sometime soon!)

Period photo of the drawing room, with tapestry on the wall.

The second-floor gallery—all the rooms open off this space.

Over the next ten years, Edith wrote here in the summer and fall—she wrote The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and a host of other stories and novellas, many concerned with class differences and inequities. And she began to build a network of literary friends, including Henry James, inviting these new friends to stay.

Here’s a bit of what Henry James wrote to her in 1900, right before they became friends: “I applaud, I mean I value, I egg you on in, your study of the American life that surrounds you. Let yourself go in it & at it—it’s an untouched field, really: the folk who try, over there, don’t come within miles of any civilized, however superficially, any “evolved” life. And use to the full your remarkable ironic and satiric gifts; they form a most valuable (I hold,) & beneficent engine.”

Wharton took his words to heart, studying the American life that surrounded her, and she wrote The House of Mirth (1905) and Ethan Frome (1911) here. And she began to make her own money from her novels.

A publicity photo of Wharton at her desk in her library at the Mount, though she wrote in bed, not at her desk.

The library as restored today. A beautiful, formal but warm room.

But like her characters, Wharton was also trapped by society’s expectations (that is, the society made up of the very small segment of WASPy old New York, the New York she chronicled in her late novel The Age of Innocence). As Hermione Lee writes in her comprehensive biography Edith Wharton, the Mount “was the setting for passionate longing, despair, and frustration” in Wharton’s last few years there. That longing and frustration showed up in Wharton’s writing, Lee writes. “The novels she wrote there, The House of Mirth, The Fruit of the Tree, and the novellas and stories she set in New England, Ethan Frome and Summer…were full of bitter thwartings and failures.”

A few views of the gardens at The Mount. Wharton worked on the garden designs with her niece, landscape architect Beatrix Farrand.

We don’t know what happened in the middle/late years of her marriage with Teddy, or the specifics of Teddy’s slow-motion breakdowns. (And we don’t know why Wharton couldn’t have married her lifelong friend Walter Berry many years before, though that’s another story.) But by 1911, the marriage was over, and at the end of that summer, Wharton sailed to Europe—without Teddy. Teddy sold the house, and in 1913, Edith Wharton divorced Teddy; she was now living in France, where divorce laws were more lenient.

Wharton was 50, and she still had much productive work ahead—her novels The Age of Innocence and the unfinished The Buccaneers were years away. And she had no idea about all the work she’d plunge into during the Great War, aiding refugees and women workers.

When I toured The Mount this summer, I came away with an unexpected feeling of sadness. All that work and money that Edith and Teddy Wharton (and of course many hired workers) poured into the house and gardens, all gone too soon, after only ten years. It felt like the kind of thing very privileged people do—create something spectacular and then throw it away. Yet Edith knew she was going to leave Teddy, and she couldn’t afford to keep The Mount on her own. And to leave Teddy in that era meant she needed to leave the US. Teddy sold The Mount while she was traveling in Italy. To become the person and the writer she needed to be, Edith Wharton had to leave all of her old life behind.

While I stood in the house’s rooms and walked through the gardens, I also thought about Wharton’s Age of Innocence characters Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska—Wharton hadn’t yet invented them, but maybe as she moved forward out of her marriage and into her more unconventional writer’s life, Newland and Ellen might have been forming in her mind.

I don’t know why Wharton wrote that it was only at The Mount that she was truly happy, but she wrote those words in 1934, near the end of her life, and I can guess that despite the turmoil in her marriage earlier in the century, The Mount might have remained in her memory as a midlife turning point. The house was a shared project with Teddy, the gardens another shared and ongoing project. And most of all, this was the place where she truly took on the identity of American writer and novelist.

An Unfinished Story

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