Edith Wharton, A Writing Life: Childhood and The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism

The question to be posed is where did Edith Wharton, the great American novelist, come from? How was she formed? What was the source of her creative fire, and how was it ignited? Among the leisured class of old New York, a young woman's intellectual activity was never encouraged and often had to be actively reined in, while the literary life would have been frowned on for anyone, regardless of gender. Still, a boy would have had a proper tutor and eventually gone off to school to seek his place. A girl's education would have been at best makeshift, since her function was to be ornamental, make a good marriage, and devote herself to homemaking, child rearing, and keeping up with the hectic rounds of social life that a position in society demanded.

Edith Wharton's writing career was launched one hundred years ago,

Edith Newbold Jones was born into such wealth and privilege that her family inspired the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses."

The Edith Wharton Society 


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Edith Wharton and Race

...despite the fact that Wharton lived at a time and led her life in such a way that racial difference was an inescapable part of life. Second, it is about the actual, important presence of race as a category in Wharton's work once we pay attention to her inclusion of color and, even more subtle, her representation of whiteness as racial.

To paraphrase Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), my first concern might be expressed: What do we make of Edith Wharton's positing her “writerly self” as “unraced” - without racial signification - in a culture obsessed with racial designation? My second might be phrased: How does our reading of Wharton and of Wharton texts change when we understand whiteness not as nothing, or as an absence, but as the presence of constructed racial meaning?

Invisible Blackness in Edith Wharton’s Old New York
Summaries & Discussion Questions for Wharton's Major Texts

THE PEABODY SISTERS:


The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism  Award-winning author Megan Marshall 
Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody were in many ways our American Brontës. The story of these remarkable sisters—and their central role in shaping the thinking of their day—has never before been fully told