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“Decidedly, I’m a better landscape gardener than novelist,” Edith Wharton once wrote to a friend. Coming from the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale University, the first woman allowed to claim full membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a writer who produced over 40 books in as many years, that’s quite a claim.
Born Edith Newbold Jones into genteel New York society in 1862, Wharton grew up with a disinterested mother and a “homely” countenance. Her mother decorated Wharton’s childhood homes with the Victorian elements that Wharton would spend much of her life railing against: “lambrequins, jardinieres of artificial plants, wobbly velvet-covered tables littered with silver gew-gaws and festoons of lace on mantel pieces and dressing tables.”
After several unsuccessful courtships in her younger years, Wharton met Teddy Wharton, a handsome and socially prominent Bostonian, whom she married in 1885. Soon thereafter, they bought a Stick-Style house with an ill-fitting mansard roof in Newport, Rhode Island. Free from her mother’s house, she took trips to Europe, read passionately about architecture and decoration, and developed a friendship with architect Ogden Codman that led to her first published book.
Published in 1897 and co-authored with Codman, The Decoration of Houses was filled with photographs and illustrations. But it wasn’t just an historical review – it was also handbook of dos and don’ts. In many ways, the book was also a precursor to the Modern aesthetic: Throughout the tome, Wharton and Codman advocate bright colors, spare interiors and the idea that architectural elements are equally important, indoors and out.
The co-authors called for a return to classic architectural principles “based upon common sense and regulated by the laws of harmony and proportion.” It was a revolutionary idea, and the book’s ensuing impact on the American aesthetic was profound. A few years later, Wharton wrote Italian Villas and their Gardens, which gained her even more influence over the look of the American landscape.
In 1900, Edith began designing and building a new house in the Berkshires, which historians would later call a perfect example of American Renaissance architecture. Patterned after an English country estate, but featuring a French courtyard and an Italianate terrace, The Mount was Wharton’s “first real home.” And although Wharton’s old friend Codman felt that she’d gotten “in over her head” with the house, she was pleased with it. It was, as Henry James described, “an exquisite and marvelous place,” despite the fact that Wharton did not always follow her own decorating advice.
Wharton and her husband had not lived at the Mount even a decade when their marriage began to fall apart. They sold it in 1912 and divorced the following year. Wharton moved to France to escape America’s ostracism of divorced women, where she established several homes and traveled widely. She had once written that “a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms.” In Europe, she continued to write, drawing heavily on her own memory of rooms and houses to explore her characters’ lives and enrich her own.
*For more information on Edith Wharton’s interest in architecture and visual arts, please see, Ogden Codman and the Decoration of Houses, edited by Pauline C. Metcalf.
Katherine Pannill is assistant editor of Design Insider.
All photos courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
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