A tribute to Wharton's timeless theme of love in a cruel society

AMERICA:Across the US, fans celebrate the 150th birthday of Edith Wharton, the first woman to win a Pulitzer

EDITH NEWBOLD Jones was born in Manhattan on January 24th, 1862, into monied Old New York. The Astors were her cousins, and her father’s wealthy family were allegedly the origin of the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses”. Edith spent much of her childhood touring Europe with her parents. At age 23, she married Teddy Wharton of Boston. The two had little in common and the marriage was not happy.

That Edith Wharton’s 150th birthday is celebrated with such enthusiasm is a tribute to her timeless theme of impossible love in a cruel and unforgiving society. The national commemoration committee includes Laura Bush, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick and senator John Kerry, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, author Joyce Carol Oates and Martin Scorsese.

Wharton became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, for The Age of Innocence,in 1921. Scorsese made a film of it in 1993, with Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder.

At best, love in Wharton's novels is a sweet and unheard melody. At the end of The Age of Innocence,Newland Archer sits beneath Ellen Olenska's windows in Paris, saying, "It's more real to me here than if I went up."

At their most tragic, Wharton's love stories end in suicide, as in The House of Mirth, or the living hell of finding one's soulmate while shackled to an unloved spouse, in Ethan Frome.

Wharton had a lifelong passion for design, decoration and gardens. She published The Decoration of Housesin 1897, and five years later built the Mount estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, which her friend Henry James described as "a delicate French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond".

Most of the year-long commemorations of Wharton’s birth will occur at the Mount, which hosted a cocktail party for 450 people last weekend. Events will continue there throughout the year, as well as in New York, Toronto, Palm Beach and Florence.

The New York Timeslinked the Wharton anniversary to the US craze for the British mini-series Downton Abbey,which is set in Edwardian England. When Wharton was dying, she worked in bed, Proust-like, dropping the pages of her last novel, The Buccaneers,on to the floor as she wrote them.

The Buccaneerstells the story of five American heiresses who set out to marry British aristocrats and end up in "awful English marriages" that "strangle you in a noose when you try to pull away".

Julian Fellowes, who wrote Downton Abbey,estimates 350 American heiresses made such marriages between 1880 and 1920.

Wharton’s friendship with Henry James began in 1900, when she wrote to seek his advice on one of her first short stories. James said he liked it but that she shouldn’t write about Europe unless she lived there.

"Be tethered in native pastures, even if it reduces [you] to a back-yard in New York," he said. As a result, Wharton wrote the The House of Mirth, her first big success.

James and Wharton loved Europe as only disaffected Americans can. He eventually settled in London and took British nationality in 1915, the year before his death. She moved to Paris in 1911 and lived in France until her death in 1937.

With the outbreak of the first World War, Wharton "fell in love with the spirit of France", her biographer, Hermione Lee wrote. In French Ways and Their Meaning, Wharton praised the French for "applying to daily life the same rules as to artistic creation". Wharton was allowed to visit the frontlines, which she described in a series of articles entitled Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort.She organised benefit concerts and set up sewing workshops for women, tuberculosis hospitals and hostels for refugees.

For these efforts, the French government made her a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (knight of the Legion of Honour). After the war, Wharton became an ardent defender of French imperialism. She returned to the US only once, to receive an honorary degree from Yale.

Wharton's autobiography, A Backward Glance, recounts her complicity with her "dear master" Henry James. But it does not mention her difficult relationship with her mother, her unhappy marriage or the one great love of her life, the American journalist Morton Fullerton, to whom James introduced her in Paris.

Wharton’s passionate letters to Fullerton were preserved only because he refused to return them when their affair ended.

“And I’m so afraid that the treasures I long to unpack for you, that have come to me in magic ships from enchanted islands, are only, to you, the familiar red calico and beads of the clever trader . . .” Wharton wrote to her lover.

“You can’t come into the room without my feeling all over me a ripple of flame . . . wherever you touch me, a heart beats under your touch.”

Fullerton, the correspondent for the London Times, was bisexual and promiscuous. Their affair began when Wharton was in her mid-40s, and lasted three years. It came to light only when Yale opened her papers, 31 years after Wharton's death.