The Life Apart: The Diaries of Edith Wharton

Abstract

In 1862, six years before Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women was to exert its powerful hold on the minds and imaginations of American women, Edith Newbold Jones, later Wharton, was born into a wealthy New York household. Although in later life, Wharton was to make her home in Lenox, Massachusetts, barely a hundred miles from Alcott’s Concord base, the difference between the two women could hardly have been greater. Whereas Alcott engaged herself fully with the cultural and ethical debates of her age, promoting in her novels images of family life that endorsed the dominant values of her society, Wharton deliberately distanced herself from the world she used as fictional material, offering a view of American culture that was bitterly critical of its progress and its development.

I appear to myself like a new creature opening dazzled eyes on a new world. C’est l’aube.

Edith Wharton. Diary, 7 May 1908