She began as a Newport cottager.
According to her biographer R.W.B. Lewis, “She knew [Newport] as a still rustic resort; as a community.”
Edith Jones Wharton was born in 1862. She returned from Europe and went to Newport with her family in 1872 when she was 10 years old. In the next 20 years, Newport was transformed into the king of Gilded Age resorts with Lenox as its queen.
Newport was older than the Berkshires; it was founded in 1639. From the Claiborne Pell Bridge you can see the Breakers on Ochre Point, but also you can see the church steeples of New England. It is a sweep of American history written against the sky: from old New England to the nouveau riche, from fishing to survive to racing in the America’s Cup for sport and, for Wharton, from a small, quiet community of shingle-clad summer homes to the grand and clamorous resort of white marble mansions.
“She would detest the Newport of those later days,” Lewis wrote.
It could be said that, ultimately, what Wharton wrote about was the advent of the nouveau riche – those whom the Joneses of New York called pushy and ostentatious. She wrote about how new money overwhelmed Old Society and corrupted old values.
In New York on 23rd Street, the Joneses lived among the First Families, the precious few whose names appeared on Mrs. John Jay’s dinner invitation list. They were the 100 Families before anyone dreamt of the 400.
In the Gilded Age, the 400 eclipsed old money. They pushed up the island: surpassed the old families in wealth and influence as they surpassed them on the ground. It was as if a higher street numbered address meant more prestige; soon, it did. Vanderbilt built on Fifth Avenue in the 50s and Astor leapfrogged. He moved from Fifth Avenue and 34th to Fifth Avenue in the 60s. Carnegie built on Fifth Avenue in the 90s.
The best families were no longer the richest families and the rules of social intercourse and the limits set by decorum changed. Decorum was good taste and propriety; etiquette was merely protocol. For Wharton, those changes signaled a decline in morals.
Girls below 34th Street could weep into their linen hankies or they could marry into the families with the crisp new fortunes – the ones who lived uptown. While it does form the basis for much of what Wharton wrote about, she did not despise the money; she simply preferred the social prescription dear to old money. It was what she grew up with.
In Newport, the Jones estate was called Pen Craig. Her parents built the timber-framed summer cottage overlooking Newport Harbor. In 1900 they sold it to Mrs. Hamilton Fish who added Tudor touches.
In 1901 Wharton escaped Newport and built her own cottage in Lenox.
While she built the Mount in Lenox, she was still an occasional houseguest in Newport. It was a familiar stomping ground and “Old Newport” (at least) formed the backdrop for one or more of her novels, according to Lewis who sites Old Newport as the scene for “The Age of Innocence.”
During her time in Newport, everything changed: Tennis took the place of archery, the simple country dance was replaced by the grand ball.
One dowager said, “In Lenox the flatware is silver; in Newport it is gold.”
The changes so much disliked by Wharton continued unimpeded. She witnessed the genesis of one – perhaps the most symbolic one – the day an Old Newport shingle-clad house gave way to the palace that was symbol of the Gilded Age.
It was November 25, 1892, on Ochre Point, Newport. The New York Times reported that there was a record-breaking snowfall that November. The cold was whipped by the ocean breezes. Cornelius Vanderbilt ordered the heating turned on; he was expecting guests for tea at the Breakers.
This was not the 70-room, Italian Renaissance-style Breakers of today; this was a sprawling, New England shingle-style cottage with an unmatched ocean view. Pierre Lorillard built the original Breakers in 1878 and Vanderbilt purchased it in 1885.
Among the guests that day were Edith and Teddy Wharton. As they sat down to tea, fire erupted. Since the central heating traveled to each and every room, so could the fire. The guests stood on the lawn cold and shocked but alive, witnesses as fire destroyed the house and all the furnishings.
The ground was cleared, literally, for the new Newport cottage. From 1893-95, Richard Morris Hunt and his team built the Breakers. Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt, still reeling from the fire, had one demand: Hunt was to use no wood in the construction. Regardless of the exterior cladding, all houses were framed in wood, but not the Breakers: it was the first steel-framed residential building. When completed it was a palace, the symbol of the Gilded Age and the new Newport from which Wharton fled.
Perhaps she found Lenox more like Old Newport. Perhaps she used it as a backdrop for more than one novel: There were “Ethan Frome” and “Summer” and possibly “House of Mirth”.
At Elm Court, again she sat at tea. There she met Cortland Bishop and Amy Bend (if she had not known them before). They, in turn, were just meeting each other. Amy Bend’s story was not unlike Lily Bart’s, but the real-life edition did not end as tragically.
Whether Lenox was or continued to be like old Newport, Wharton had found her niche: place where she could write, go for drives, and entertain the sorts of people she enjoyed.
When asked whom she meant when she said “Bohemian,” back at Pen Craig, Mrs. Hamilton Fish answered “Edith Wharton.”
