Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray, realistically, the lives and morals of the Gilded Age.

She rejected the standards of fashion and etiquette that were expected of young girls at the time, which were intended to allow women to marry well and to be put on display at balls and parties.

[15] She was 15 years old when her first published work appeared, a translation of a German poem "Was die Steine Erzählen" ("What the Stones Tell") by Heinrich Karl Brugsch, for which she was paid $50.

Consequently, the poem was published under the name of a friend's father, E. A. Washburn, a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who supported women's education.

In that year, Wharton began an affair with Morton Fullerton, an author, and foreign correspondent for The Times of London, in whom she found an intellectual partner.

Wharton agreed to pay $80,000 for the property, and she spent thousands more to alter the home's facade, decorate the interior, and landscape the grounds.

At The Mount, she entertained the cream of American literary society, including her close friend, novelist Henry James, who described the estate as "a delicate French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond".

[37] When living there and while traveling abroad, Wharton was usually driven to appointments by her longtime chauffeur and friend, Charles Cook, a native of nearby South Lee, Massachusetts.

[40][41] When her marriage deteriorated, she decided to move, permanently, to France, living, first, at 53 Rue de Varenne, Paris, in an apartment that belonged to George Washington Vanderbilt II.

[45] In early 1915, she organized the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee, which gave shelter to nearly 900 Belgian refugees who had fled when their homes were bombed by the Germans.

[46] Aided by her influential connections in the French government, she and her long-time friend, Walter Berry (then president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris), were among the few foreigners in France allowed to travel to the front lines, during World War I.

She and Berry made five journeys, between February and August 1915, which Wharton described in a series of articles that were first published in Scribner's Magazine and later as Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort, which became an American bestseller.

[50] On April 18, 1916, Raymond Poincaré, the then-President of France, appointed her Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, the country's highest award, in recognition of her dedication to the war effort.

In 1915, Wharton edited a charity benefit volume, The Book of the Homeless, which included essays, art, poetry, and musical scores by many major contemporary European and American artists, including Henry James, Joseph Conrad, William Dean Howells, Anna de Noailles, Jean Cocteau, and Walter Gay, among others.

Wharton proposed the book to her publisher, Scribner's, handled the business arrangements, lined up contributors, and translated the French entries into English.

Theodore Roosevelt wrote a two-page introduction, in which he praised Wharton's effort and urged Americans to support the war.

[52] She also kept up her own work, continuing to write novels, short stories, and poems, as well as reporting for The New York Times and keeping up her enormous correspondence.

Wharton settled 10 mi (16 km) north of Paris in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, buying an 18th-century house on seven acres of land that she called Pavillon Colombe.

She lived there, in summer and autumn, for the rest of her life, spending winters and springs on the French Riviera at Sainte Claire du Vieux Chateau in Hyères.

[55] Wharton was a committed supporter of French imperialism, describing herself as a "rabid imperialist", and the war solidified her political views.

The three fiction judges – literary critic Stuart Pratt Sherman, literature professor Robert Morss Lovett, and novelist Hamlin Garland – voted to give the prize to Sinclair Lewis for his satire Main Street, but Columbia University's advisory board, led by conservative university president Nicholas Murray Butler, overturned their decision and awarded the prize to The Age of Innocence.

In the view of Judith E. Funston, writing on Edith Wharton in American National Biography, What is most notable about A Backward Glance, however, is what it does not tell: her criticism of Lucretia Jones [her mother], her difficulties with Teddy, and her affair with Morton Fullerton, which did not come to light until her papers, deposited in Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, were opened in 1968.

[62] Wharton was buried in the American Protestant section of the Cimetière des Gonards in Versailles, "with all the honors owed a war hero and a chevalier of the Legion of Honor ... a group of some one hundred friends sang a verse of the hymn 'O Paradise'..."[63] Despite not publishing her first novel until she was forty, Wharton became an extraordinarily productive writer.

In addition to her 15 novels, seven novellas, and eighty-five short stories, she published poetry, books on design, travel, literary and cultural criticism, and a memoir.

One of her earliest literary endeavors (1902) was the translation of the play Es Lebe das Leben ("The Joy of Living"), by Hermann Sudermann.

"[25] In her memoir, A Backward Glance, Wharton describes her mother as indolent, spendthrift, censorious, disapproving, superficial, icy, dry and ironic.

Maureen Howard argues "Edith Wharton conceived of houses, dwelling places, in extended imagery of shelter and dispossession.

She was allowed to read Louisa May Alcott but Wharton preferred Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby.

"[70] Instead Wharton read the classics, philosophy, history, and poetry in her father's library including Daniel Defoe, John Milton, Thomas Carlyle, Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Jean Racine, Thomas Moore, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, John Ruskin, and Washington Irving.

[71] Biographer Hermione Lee describes Wharton as having read herself "out of Old New York" and her influences included Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, T. H. Huxley, George Romanes, James Frazer, and Thorstein Veblen.