Wharton writes what she knows

After reading a few works by Edith Wharton in several of my classes you begin to see what she writes about. The Gilded Age and the life of the rich and famous, she writes about old New York and Europe. There is always a scandal or controversy and a loss of status or monetary inflow such as Lily Bart in the House of Mirth or the Countess Ellen Olenska in the Age of Innocence. Lily Bass desperately searches for money and social rank that ends in her death in the end on the novel, while Countess Ellen Olenska seeks to escape from a horrible marriage with her cheating husband. Now these stories may not fully represent Edith Wharton’s life but there are influences of her life that are represented within each novel.
Edith Wharton was born into a rich family in New York City. She lived the opulent life she wrote about. “To escape the bustling city, the family spent summers at ‘Pencraig’ on the shores of Newport Harbour in Newport, Rhode Island. When Edith was four years old they moved to Europe, spending the next five years traveling throughout Italy, Spain, Germany and France. Back in New York young Edith continued her education under private tutors. She learned French and German and a voracious reader, she studied literature, philosophy, science, and art” (Merriman) You can see some of the similarities in her life style and the lifestyles that her characters live in her books.
One of the biggest similarities that I saw between her and her works was the character of Countess Ellen Olenska and the situation that she was put into. Edith Wharton married banker Edward Robbins Wharton in Trinity Chapel on April 29 1885. They honeymooned in Europe and spent the next few years traveling Europe. They came back to the states and moved to New York on Park Avenue next to the park. Their marriage at first was good he helped her publish some of her works in magazines such as; Scribner’s Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Century Magazine, Harper’s, Lippincott’s and the Saturday Evening Post. “While in Paris, Wharton met journalist Morton Fullerton, who would become a close friend and was instrumental in getting some of her works published in France. They also had an affair that lasted three years. Teddy had a mistress and had been embezzling funds from Edith to support her. They were divorced in 1913.” (Merriman) There are some differences between Edith Wharton on Countess Ellen Olenska yet I feel that Wharton must have drawn on her personal experiences to create the situation between the count and countess in Age of Innocence. The differences in when the novel takes place and the actual events of Wharton’s marriage take place in two different points in time which is why they were treated differently.
In most of Edith Wharton’s writings she is making fun of the society that she grew up and lived in but most good writers write what they know and draw from personal experiences. Which is what I believed made Wharton’s writing so authentic.
Merriman, C. D. "Edith Wharton." Online-literature.com. 2007. Web. 20 Sept. 2009.