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Edith Wharton, "Roman Fever"

BIOGRAPHY

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[From The Norton Introduction to Literature]

(1862–1937)

Edith Jones was born into a distinguished New York family. Educated by private tutors and governesses, she published a book of her poems privately but did not begin to write for a public audience until after her marriage, to Edward Wharton, in 1885. The author of more than fifty volumes of poetry, essays, fiction, travelogues, and criticism, she was the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale University, in 1923.Although she emigrated to France in 1907 (and later was awarded the Legion of Honor for her philanthropic work during World War I), she continued to write about the New England of her youth in novels such as the popular Ethan Frome (1911). Among her many works are The Valley of Decision (1902), The House of Mirth (1905), A Son at the Front (1923), Twilight Sleep (1927), the autobiographical A Backward Glance (1934), and The Buccaneers (1938).She received a Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence (1920).

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