Edith Wharton's Lenox

by Cornelia Brooke Gilder

Overview

An insider’s history of how famed novelist Wharton stirred up scandal in the western Massachusetts town.

In 1900, Edith Wharton burst into the settled summer colony of Lenox. An aspiring novelist in her thirties, she was already a ferocious aesthete and intellect. She and her husband, Teddy, planned a defiantly classical villa, and she became a bestselling author with The House of Mirth in 1905. As a hostess, designer, gardener and writer, Wharton set high standards that delighted many, including Ambassador Joseph Choate and sculptor Daniel Chester French. But her perceptive and sometimes indiscreet pen also alienated potent figures like Emily Vanderbilt Sloane and Georgiana Welles Sargent. Author Cornelia Brooke Gilder gives an insider’s glimpse of the community’s reaction to this disruptive star during her tumultuous Lenox decade.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625857880
Publisher:	Arcadia Publishing SC
Publication date:	07/28/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

A lifelong Berkshire resident, Cornelia Brooke Gilder was educated at Vassar College and Cambridge University. She grew up in Lenox and has lived in Tyringham since her marriage to George Gilder forty years ago. Among her books on Berkshire history are two co-authored with Richard S. Jackson Jr., Houses of the Berkshires (Acanthus Press, 2006, revised edition 2011) and The Lenox Club: A Sesquicentennial History (2014). She also wrote Hawthorne's Lenox (with Julia Conklin Peters), published by The History Press in 2008.