Long before she was known as a novelist, Edith Wharton was known in Newport as a summer resident with firm opinions about rooms. Born Edith Newbold Jones in 1862, she spent her childhood summers at Pen Craig, her parentsโ estate overlooking Newport Harbor.
In 1893, she and her husband, Edward โTeddyโ Wharton, bought Landโs End, a wooden house facing the Atlantic. Wharton thought the house was ugly but loved its views. To improve it, she hired Ogden Codman Jr., a young Boston architect who shared her dislike of cluttered Victorian interiors.
The project led to The Decoration of Houses, which Charles Scribner's Sons published in 1897 after Macmillan rejected it. The book argued that decoration belonged to architecture, not to dressmakers and upholsterers, and that a room should follow the same rules of proportion and symmetry as the building around it.
Wharton was blunter in private. In a letter to Codman she complained that the Vanderbilts were entrenched in "a sort of Thermopylae of bad taste." She had nonetheless introduced Codman to Cornelius Vanderbilt II, who hired him to design rooms at The Breakers, the Newport house Cornelius shared with Alice Vanderbilt.
Newport eventually wore on Wharton. She disliked its damp climate and what she called its โwatering place triviality.โ In 1901, she bought land outside Lenox, Massachusetts, to build a house according to the bookโs principles, from the foundation up.
Codman began the plans for The Mount, but the two fell out, and Francis L. V. Hoppin finished the design. The Whartons moved in during 1902, and there Edith turned seriously to fiction.
The House of Mirth (1905), a novel about the friction between New Yorkโs old families and its new financiers, sold 140,000 copies by the end of the year. Newport remained material for her writing rather than a home. She drew on its summer society in The Age of Innocence, which made her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
She later called her decorating book an odd and unexpected beginning to her literary career.
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