Wharton, Edith — The Age of Innocence [3]

The publication of The House of Mirth in 1905 marked Edith Wharton’s coming of age as a writer. An immediate bestseller, this brilliant chronicle of upper-class New York society helped secure her reputation as America’s foremost woman of letters. By then Wharton was living at “The Mount,” a grand home she had built in Lenox, Massachusetts. — Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence, 3

Note

The biography’s account of the turning point: The House of Mirth both secured her reputation and was written from The Mount—the physical embodiment of the decorated interiors that underwrote her view of that society.