Then unfortunately, her executors served her poorly. Though Wharton lived long and well, habits of reticence persisted and she wrote a supremely innocuous autobiography. She was decorated by the French government for her philanthropic initiatives in World War I.
She divorced, relocated to France permanently, wrote more novels, and created beautiful gardens she entertained and proved a loyal friend.
“I have known the thing best worth knowing, I have been warmed through and through never to grow quite cold again until the end…” She thereafter wrote of love from personal experience and went on to live a brave and spirited life.
But she gained from the experience and never forgot: “I have drunk the wine of life at last,” she confided in her diary. Secret and fast in the heart of the whirlwind of travel,…įullerton proved faithless and Wharton, a tough-minded realist, broke off the affair. Who perhaps thus had lain and loved for an hour on the brink of the world, I was glad as I thought of those others, the nameless, the many, …And lying there hushed in your arms, as the waves of rapture receded,Īnd far down the margin of being we heard the low beat of the soul, Out of the experience, she wrote the poem “Terminus”: And as she lay in her lover’s arms, she felt profoundly connected to humanity, to travelers who had also loved in just this kind of place. Forty- five year old Wharton became a “sensual heroine” and made passionate love for perhaps the first time. In dingy Room 91, something rather extraordinary happened. The Charing Cross Hotel had been a place to catch or meet a train and break a journey since Victorian times. Their rendezvous was in an unromantic Victorian terminal hotel, which fronted a London railway station with six platforms. Months of stolen meetings left Wharton euphoric and yet fearful: the cost of opening herself up could be high, and she worried about the possibility of scandal and blackmail, and, no small issue, what the servants would think.įinally, in 1909, Wharton leapt and found an unlikely secret place to meet her lover, in the interstices of her life, while in transit, sans servants. While quite taken with her, Fullerton had a louche nature and moved from woman to woman. He would surface she adored him, but then he would drop out of sight. She read, wrote, travelled adventurously, and collected friends.Įventually, she met an entirely unsuitable man-the elusive, bi-sexual, and philandering journalist Morton Fullerton. While seemingly a conventional Edwardian, often photographed corseted and draped in pearls, fur, and silk, Wharton was quietly rebelling against her family, country, American high society, and empty hours. She fell in love with Europe and the freedom and intellectual stimulation she found there. She gained control of her life, put her husband in another bedroom, and distanced herself from her mother and toxic social environments. And yet, against the odds, the inhibited young woman began to write complex novels and threw off victimhood. Certainly, sleeping in the same room with her husband set off asthma attacks, and sometimes her nerves broke down completely. Her hovering mother, shallow husband, and rigid social life seemed to make her sick. A reluctant and shy debutant, she contracted a passionless marriage of convenience and then spent twelve years chronically nauseous and fatigued. In what was experienced as a fairly wretched childhood, she may have been sexually abused-her unpublished “The Beatrice Palmato “ is a startling explicit account of incest between father and daughter. American Edith Wharton was born a blueblood.
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