Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton was an American author, born in New York in 1862. She came from an upper-class background and married young and unhappily, as her husband suffered from terrible depression. Wharton started writing novels and short stories when she left her husband and moved to France at the beginning of the last century. She is now regarded as one of the most important American writers of all time and won the Pulitzer Prize in her lifetime. However, that was not the end of her achievements: she also worked in interior design and fashion and was awarded the French Legion of Honour for her work with refugees in the First World War. She died in 1937. Edith Wharton’s best-known novels include: ‘Ethan Frome’, ‘The House of Mirth’ and ‘The Age of Innocence’. Many of her books concern the ways society looks at women outside conventional morality.