Where to Start with Edith Wharton: A Reading Guide

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) is the finest American novelist of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era — a writer who knew the upper-class New York society she portrayed from the inside and who anatomised it with a precision and a cold intelligence that Henry James admired and that no other American writer of her period matched. Her central subject is the conflict between individual desire and social convention — between what her characters want and what their world permits — and she renders this conflict with unsentimental clarity and a dark comedy that has not dated. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Where to Start: The House of Mirth (1905)

The essential Wharton — and one of the most devastating novels in American literature. Lily Bart is twenty-nine, beautiful, intelligent, and running out of time to marry the wealthy man her position in 1890s New York society requires. She is simultaneously too morally fastidious to do what is necessary (accept the proposal of the rich but boring Percy Gryce; become the mistress of the married Gus Trenor) and too addicted to the luxury of her social world to give it up and live differently. Wharton traces Lily’s descent through the levels of New York society — as she loses ally after ally, makes enemy after enemy, and refuses compromise after compromise — with merciless precision.

The novel is not a tragedy of simple weakness: Lily’s failure is also, in a sense, her integrity. Wharton’s account of how the social system punishes women who are not sufficiently compliant is one of the most powerful in American fiction.

The Age of Innocence (1920)

Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize winner — set in the 1870s New York society she knew as a child, forty years before the novel was published. Newland Archer is engaged to May Welland, a lovely, conventional young woman who represents everything his world approves. When May’s cousin Ellen Olenska returns from Europe — separated from her husband, free in her behaviour and her conversation, intellectually alive — Newland is drawn to her with a force he cannot fully acknowledge. The novel traces his agonised inability to choose: to leave May for Ellen would be to destroy everything he has built; to stay is to live a life of polite deprivation.

The social machinery that enforces Newland’s conformity — which he does not even fully see until the novel’s devastating final pages — is Wharton’s most subtle achievement.

The Custom of the Country (1913)

Wharton’s most satirical novel — and her most modern in psychological analysis. Undine Spragg arrives in New York from the midwest with her parents’ money and her own extraordinary beauty, and proceeds to rise through New York society by discarding husbands with complete efficiency whenever a better opportunity presents itself. Where Lily Bart is destroyed by the social system she cannot wholly conform to, Undine succeeds by conforming to it absolutely — by wanting only what the system rewards. The novel is Wharton’s darkest comedy: Undine’s success is an indictment of everything the social system values.

Reading Edith Wharton

Wharton’s particular quality is her combination of social precision and moral intelligence: she knows exactly how the system she describes works — who has power, who defers, what gets said and what gets left unsaid — and she makes that knowledge the vehicle for a sustained moral argument about what such systems do to people. Begin with The House of Mirth for her most emotionally devastating novel; with The Age of Innocence for her most formally controlled; with The Custom of the Country for her most satirical. All three repay rereading — what seems like social comedy on first reading reveals itself, on return, as something much darker.