1 - Travel Broadens the Mind

Summary

Edith Wharton, née Jones, was first taken to Europe at the age of 4. Her parents were endeavouring to escape the deleterious effects a slump in property values was having upon their income and it was felt that the family could live more comfortably in Europe. So, in November 1866, the family set sail for England, later moving on to France, but also spending substantial portions of time in Italy, Spain, and Germany. Six formative years in Europe were sufficient to induce what the adult Edith Wharton would describe as her lack of affection for either the rural or the urban American landscape. On her return to Lenox, Massachusetts, site of the Mount, the American home to which she was most committed, she described her feelings in a letter to a friend, Sara (Sally) Norton of 5 June 1903:

My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, & I am not enough in sympathy with our ‘gros public’ to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most déplacé & useless class on earth! All of which outburst is due to my first sight of American streets, my first hearing of American voices, & the wild, dishevelled backwoods look of everything when one first comes home! You see in my heart of hearts, a heart never unbosomed, I feel in America as you say you do in England – out of sympathy with everything. And in England I like it all – institutions, traditions, mannerisms, conservatisms, everything but the women's clothes, & the having to go to church every Sunday. (L. 84)

The course of Edith Wharton's life and work can, in many ways, be understood with reference to the two passions that fuelled this outburst to Sara Norton.