Anyone know any interesting facts about Edith Whartan?

Question

key word- interesting

Answer 1

She spoke flawless French and many of her books were published in both French and English.

Answer 2

Edith Wharton Facts

Answer 3

I've lived in 5 different States but hawaii the longest. Military Brat. I have been to about 40 cities and towns.

Answer 4

Do you mean Edith Wharton?
If so check out this link.

Answer 5

See the links below. please. Some samples
(Link number 4 is especially "interesting.')

"Born Edith Newbold Jones, to a wealthy New York family often associated with the phrase "Keeping up with the Joneses," Edith combined her insights into the privileged classes with her natural wit to write novels and short fiction that are notable for their humor, incisiveness, and uneventfullness. Wharton was a good friend and contemporary of Corinne Robinson, a sister of Theodore Roosevelt.
In 1885, at 23 years of age, she married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, who was 12 years her senior. They were divorced in 1913 on the grounds of Teddy's repeated public infidelities and declining mental and physical health. For several years at the end of her tumultuous unhappy marriage, she had an affair with William Morton Fullerton (1865 - 1952), an American-born bisexual man-about-town who worked as a journalist for The Times and juggled romances with Lord Ronald Gower, and the Ranee of Sarawak."

"When World War I began Wharton was in North Africa, but soon devoted much of her time in assisting refugees and orphans in France and Belgium. She helped raise funds for their support, and was involved with creating and running hostels and schools for them. She aided women in self-sufficiency by finding them means of employment. With her good friend Walter Berry she toured battlefields and hospitals and tended to the sick which resulted in her diary and essays in Fighting France (1915) and The Marne (1918). For her efforts she was awarded the title of Chevalier (Knight) in the French Legion of Honour in 1916."

"Her last years were spent in two beautiful houses in France, the summers at Pavillon Colombe, in a small village just north of Paris, and the winters at Château Sainte-Claire at Hyères, that was perched overlooking the Mediterranean. In these years she enjoyed the extended stays of friends such as Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark. She continued her daily writing schedule; since 1902 she had produced about a volume a year. She continued to travel and became increasingly attached to her gardens, which she designed herself. These last years brought great rewards, as Wharton was the grande dame of American letters, visited by many. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 for The Age of Innocence, and an honorary degree from Yale in 1923. She crossed the ocean for the last time to receive it. Wharton died in France in 1937. The social and material world in which she lived, and which she depicted in her fiction, has all but vanished, but numerous art objects and literary artifacts have survived. More than one hundred of these have been assembled in the exhibition to bring to life her remarkable personality and the milieu of her cosmopolitan society. The portraits of people and places evoke her world, recovering for us a civilization that even then was passing away, and commemorate Edith Wharton's lasting achievements."

"As the author of such fine but muted writings as Ethan Frame, The Age of Innocence, and The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton had always struck me as a furtive, self-concealing kind of writer. Her memoirs of 1934, A Backward Glance, had all the air of elegant discretion: not a word, for example, about a broken engagement in her youth, though I had heard vaguely of that poignant episode; very little about her marriage to Edward Robbins Wharton and nothing about her divorce from him in 1913. I also knew that as Edith Jones she had been the product of the severelydecorous society of old New York (she was born in 1862), where by her own testimony many things were not fit to be mentioned in public, and no few even in private. And if she did begin to expatriate herself to Paris in 1907, it was to the Faubourg St. Germain, a still more aristocratic environment, presided over by dowdy matrons with long sloping noses who saw to it that the unconventional gesture, the unseemly emotion, was suppressed or ignored.

In fact, however, Edith Wharton turned out to be a fascinatingly ambiguous subject for the biographer. She did destroy some documents, though the ritual burning of 1927 was the only significant episode of its kind. At other times she destroyed items—a nakedly revealing long poem to her lover in 1909, as an example—apparently undisturbed that copies of them would not be hard to come by for any investigator with a modicum of energy and patience. And much more tellingly, she preserved a wide variety of documents—diaries, unpublished poems and fragments of autobiography, unfinished stories—that contain some of her most private experiences, among them her earliest erotic stirrings, the sexual disaster of her marriage in 1885, and the entire course of an extraordinarily uninhibited love affair in Paris during the years 1907–10.

It was not much of a feat to discover most of these things. The difficult was much rather to believe them. Eixed in my mind was the image—chiefly established by Percy Lubbock’s Portrait of Edith Wharton in 1947 but dutifully perpetuated in other books and reminiscences—of Mrs. Wharton as a Victorian bluestocking, repressed and puritanical, whose only relationship with a man that held a seed of the romantic, never mind the erotic, was with the dry-souled patrician American lawyer Walter Berry. I eventually came to see that this image was composed of legend, distortion, and misrepresentation; but it took me the better part of eight years to work free of that legendary envelope, and I may not be fully liberated yet.

If so, it is not the fault of Edith Wharton. She could envision and she greatly resented (as she said in a diary note of 1924) “the things people are going to assert about me after I am dead,” and in a part of her she honestly wanted as much as possible of the truth about herself to be available to her biographer. She alluded frequently to that latter functionary, with a mixture of apprehension and hopeful expectation.

Even so, she didn’t want to make it too easy. There were rules of combat, she appears to have felt, between subject arid biographer; one had to earn one’s way. There was endless digging to do, and interviewing, and incessant travel in this country and across the Europe Edith came to know intimately, especially in the time before the First War. Clues were there to be found, but in scattered places and oddly shaped; they had to be carefully fitted together.

My major discovery about Edith Wharton’s personal life was made on a January morning in 1967, and it took about thirty minutes—though years were required fully to credit and understand it and to explore its ramifications and consequences. I had come to The Hague to spend a few days at the home of William Royall Tyler, American ambassador to the Netherlands. Mr. Tyler is the owner of the Wharton estate and of a large collection of Wharton papers, inherited from his mother, Elisina Tyler, who had been Mrs. Wharton’s residuary legatee. Getting down to work, I attacked what the inventory called “brown leather case,” and I was soon staring at a letter of 1946 to Elisina Tyler signed by one Morton Eullerton. Mrs. Tyler at that time had been contemplating a biography of her old friend Edith Wharton, and Eullerton had words of advice: “Please seize the event, however delicate the problem, to dispel the myth of your heroine’s frigidity.” The letter went on to speak, extravagantly and as though rerniniscently, of Edith Wharton’s unrestrainedly passionate nature and of her generosity and ingenuity as an erotic companion, comparing her in this regard to George Sand."