Meet Edith Wharton. She lived from 1862 to 1937, and she was quite an interesting character.
✔️ She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1921,
✔️ and a three time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
✔️ She was a garden designer,
✔️ an interior designer,
✔️ and she wrote several design books.
✔️ In 1996 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame (US).
✔️ And, on top of it all, when she reached her 50s, she moved to France and threw herself into helping people during WWI.
Edith Wharton and The Book of the Homeless
Edith Wharton [Encyclopaedia Britannica].
Edith Wharton was an American author born into a distinguished and long-established New York family. According to the encyclopaedia, she used her insider knowledge of the New York "aristocracy" in her writings to portray the lives and morals of the upper class.
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In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her novel The Age of Innocence. Other of her well-known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories. However, apart from succeeding with her writings, Wharton was also active in helping people without housing (and others) during WWI.
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When Wharton reached the age of c. 51, she divorced her husband, who suffered from an incurable depression. It was 1913, and she decided to leave the US and settle in France permanently.
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As the year shows, she hadn’t stayed in France for very long before WWI broke out. Being a woman of action, Wharton soon started offering help to those who needed it.
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At first, she opened a workroom for unemployed women, which soon flourished into a thriving sewing business. Next, she founded a hostel for refugees in Paris. In 1915, Wharton used her literary contacts to begin putting together The Book of the Homeless, a compendium of essays, art, poetry, and musical scores. The profits she made from the sales were all used to fund civilians displaced by the war.
Page from The Book of the Homeless showing Auguste Rodin’s contribution, 'Two Women'.
The Book of the Homeless is quite an exciting piece of work. It features fifty-seven original works from a diverse array of well-established artists, including the American-British author Henry James, the Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad, the French poet Jean Cocteau, the English novelist Thomas Hardy, the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, the French painter Claude Monet, and the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. Wharton even secured an introduction from the 26th American President, Theodore Roosevelt.
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In the preface to the book, Wharton shares the journey of how it came to be:
Then the thought of this Book occurred to me.
I appealed to my friends who write and paint and compose, and they to other friends of theirs, writers, painters, composers, statesmen and dramatic artists; and so the Book gradually built itself up, page by page and picture by picture.
You will see from the names of the builders what a gallant piece of architecture it is, what delightful pictures hang on its walls, and what noble music echoes through them.
But what I should have liked to show is the readiness, the kindliness, the eagerness, with which all the collaborators, from first to last, have lent a hand to the building.
Perhaps you will guess it for yourselves when you read their names and see the beauty and variety of what they have given.
So I efface myself from the threshold and ask you to walk in.
[Sources: Wikipedia & Encyclopaedia Britannica]
We are all Barbara
Credit: @themisfortuneteller
Thanks for reading!
Until next time - Majken xx
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