My Article on Edith Wharton in Today’s WSJ–Part I

I had the pleasure of going back to my English-major roots with this article, appearing in today’s Wall Street Journal, on the return of Edith Wharton’s own books to the library at the Mount, her former Berkshires mansion.
As you know, I can’t link to the WSJ’s subscribers-only site, but I AM allowed to post the text of my article. I’ll again do it in two parts, so as not to tax the short attention spans of hyperactive blog readers. (It’s on today’s “Leisure & Arts” page, D5, for those of you who still turn pages, instead of clicking hyperlinks.)
Lenox, Mass.
For the first time in 95 years, Edith Wharton‘s wide-ranging collection of books has returned to the shelves of her own library at the Mount—the bucolic country estate in the Berkshires that she meticulously designed for her own use, beginning in 1902. Now open to visitors each year from early May to late October, the author’s house and gardens are in the midst of major restoration and repurposing, after years of deterioration and neglect. Wharton (1862-1937) penned her first successful novels, including “The House of Mirth” and “Ethan Frome,” in its bedroom, facing the morning sun and dropping the manuscript pages, one by one, from her bed to the floor. The novelist Henry James, Wharton’s good friend, occupied an upstairs bedroom during his three visits.
But the celebrated author fled the place she loved and the husband she didn’t in 1911. Teddy Wharton, mentally ill and maritally unfaithful, then proceeded to sell the Mount without his wife’s permission. She lived the rest of her days in France, which was more hospitable to divorced women than the conservative New York high society to which she had belonged as Edith Newbold Jones, a scion of the family that reputedly inspired the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses.”
Last year, a highlight for visitors to the Mount was a temporary exhibition, in the unrestored upstairs bedrooms, of tableaux from “The House of Mirth.” Gilded Age fashions were borrowed for this engaging enterprise from the Museum of the City of New York.
This year, the many literary pilgrims wishing to channel Wharton’s spirit can finally see, although from a frustrating distance, the vast array of books from which the celebrated author drew inspiration, pleasure and personal solace. Included are 22 first editions of her own work. Purchased by the Mount last December, they were arranged on its shelves in April.
“We now have the very soul of Edith Wharton,” exulted Stephanie Copeland, president and executive director of the Mount, who had tried for many years to raise the $2.6 million needed to buy the 2,600 books from George Ramsden, the British rare book dealer whose labor of love it was to assemble and painstakingly catalog them, beginning in 1984. Scholars will soon be welcome to peruse the tomes for clues about Wharton’s taste and influences, as well as her intellectual and emotional life.
On a recent summer afternoon, I had the treat of pre-empting those scholars: In Ms. Copeland’s office, I turned pages of an absorbing assortment of volumes from the 17th to the 20th centuries, musing over emotion-charged passages that Wharton had marked in John Donne‘s poetry, Tolstoy‘s “Anna Karenina” (one of her two favorite novels, along with Eliot’s “Middlemarch”) and Robert Browning‘s letter to Elizabeth Barrett: “It is hard to make these sacrifices,” was one passage from Browning that resonated with Wharton. After regular visiting hours, I circumnavigated the library itself — scanning the titles written in the several languages Wharton commanded, and arranged by Mr. Ramsden according to subject: literature, history, philosophy, religion, science.
But other visiting bibliophiles will be disappointed to discover that the library is just a momentary stop on the house tour. They can enter a few feet into one corner of the wood-paneled room, briefly peek in, then move on to the drawing room. A closer look at a few important books is possible, though, in display cases installed in Teddy Wharton’s adjoining study. Among the highlights when I visited: “America and the World War” inscribed to Wharton by its author and her friend, Theodore Roosevelt.
COMING NEXT: Wharton, Part II.