Edith Wharton’s Berkshires Home: The Mount, Exquisite House Museum

Over the weekend, I visited the Mount, the lovely Berkshires cottage — read “country estate” — that Edith Wharton designed and in which she lived from 1902 to 1911. Wharton (1862–1937) wrote The House of Mirth there, sitting up in bed, as well as some of Ethan Frome, a tragedy set in the Berkshires. Happy endings weren’t her thing. She was an elegant, canny, razor-sharp writer, and the Mount elevates the mind and soul.

Wharton is best known for her stories about love, hate, struggle, spite, deceit, and betrayal among New York’s old and new monied classes. She won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence in 1921 and was, in her day, the queen of short stories. Most of her 40-or-so books are still in print. Wharton was a grande dame, which makes her seem, here and there, too refined, too arch, for our day. She was, after all though not above all, from New York’s Jones family, so grand that “keeping up with the Joneses” refers to Wharton’s father’s clan.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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Over the weekend, I visited the Mount, the lovely Berkshires cottage — read “country estate” — that Edith Wharton designed and in which she lived from 1902 to 1911. Wharton (1862–1937) wrote The House of Mirth there, sitting up in bed, as well as some of Ethan Frome, a tragedy set in the Berkshires. Happy endings weren’t her thing. She was an elegant, canny, razor-sharp writer, and the Mount elevates the mind and soul.

Wharton is best known for her stories about love, hate, struggle, spite, deceit, and betrayal among New York’s old and new monied classes. She won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence in 1921 and was, in her day, the queen of short stories. Most of her 40-or-so books are still in print. Wharton was a grande dame, which makes her seem, here and there, too refined, too arch, for our day. She was, after all though not above all, from New York’s Jones family, so grand that “keeping up with the Joneses” refers to Wharton’s father’s clan.