How many times was edith wharton married

Here she would write some of her greatest works, including The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome The Whartons sold The Mount in , and they divorced in In , when World War I broke out, Edith Wharton was wealthy, famous, recently divorced, and living in her favorite city, Paris. Instead of withdrawing to the safety of England or returning to the United States, Wharton chose to stay and devote herself to creating a complex network of charitable and humanitarian organizations.

Wharton established workrooms for unemployed seamstresses, convalescent homes for tuberculosis sufferers, hostels for refugees, and schools for children fleeing war-torn Belgium. As a writer, Wharton was intent on witnessing the realities of war and was one of a handful of journalists and writers allowed on the front lines.

In , Wharton received the French Legion of Honor for her war work. At the end of the war, Wharton moved out of Paris to Pavillon Colombe, a suburban villa in the village of St.

For the rest of her life, she divided her time between these two homes, devoted to her friends and dogs, writing prolifically, traveling, and gardening. Soon after this book, Wharton suffered a nervous breakdown. For therapy her physician suggested she write fiction. In a collection of stories, Edith Wharton.

The Greater Inclination, appeared—the first of her thirty-two volumes of fiction. In , after Wharton began her friendship with writer Henry James — , her first masterpiece, The House of Mirth, laid bare the cruelties of the New York City society.

Her range was apparent in Tales of Men and Ghosts , a collection of chillers, and in the celebrated novella Ethan Frome In the Whartons moved to France, where Edward Wharton suffered a nervous breakdown and was placed in a sanitorium, a hospital for the mentally unstable.

After their divorce in , Edith Wharton stayed in France, writing lovingly about it in French Ways and Their Meanings and other books.

Dwight, Eleanor. Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life. New York: Abrams, Joslin, Katherine. Edith Wharton. New York: St. Martin's Press, Kellogg, Grace. He became her devoted literary advisor and cheerleader at a time when she was insecure about her ability to write.

I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me? I follow you whoever you are from the present hour, My words itch at your ears till you understand them. Edith destroyed all their correspondence when he died, but a few crumbs remain. The most tantalizing is a postcard, in which Walter reminisces about their time together in Maine:.

Forty years of it is you, dear. What should we assume? With these two, there are too many opportunities to think— and yet. Aloof and analytic as she was considered to be on the surface, Wharton was also intensely passionate, keeping a secret diary during her brief affair with Morton Fullerton in , the dapper and seductive scalawag she met through Henry James. Though her marriage was long over, she was not yet officially divorced from Teddy Wharton at the time, and she hid the affair from Berry, likely to avoid his disapproval.

In her diary, she lifted the gate on her stifled feelings of romantic disappointment:.