Who was Edith Wharton? Edith Wharton. “Oh, there is one, of course, but you’ll never know it,” an English lady tells an eager American couple at the start of one of Edith Wharton’s stories.. Edith Wharton, "The Other Two" - Discussion Questions "The Other Two" is obviously a story about a first-time husband's difficulty in adapting himself to the presence of his wife's former husbands. She got married at the age of twenty to a rich banker, Edward Wharton. Wharton started her relief work for the refugees and worked unstintingly to provide help in whatever that was possible for her. Author of ‘The Age of Innocence’ that earned her a Pulitzer Prize in 1920, Edith Wharton was a multi-talented figure of the early 20 th century. Her married life was very unhappy. She moved to France after her marriage ended. She was very fond of travelling. This was a story about an aristocrat Newland Archer who is engaged to the wealthy and the beautiful member of the elite society, May Welland. The protagonist, the farmer Ethan Frome, is married to a whining hypochondriac but falls in love with her cousin, Mattie. Corrections? Both lovers prove too obedient to conventional taboos to break with their upper-class social surroundings, however, and Newland feels compelled to renounce Ellen and marry May. Edith Wharton (1862 – 1937) Born Edith Newbold Jones, to a wealthy New York family, Edith combined her insights into the privileged classes with her natural wit to write books and short fiction notable for their humor and incisiveness. Edith Wharton was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer who was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. Edith Wharton April 1933 Issue. Equally important, it is also a story about that husband's changing relationship to, and appreciation of, his wife. She was educated by private tutors and governesses at home and in Europe, where the family resided for six years after the American Civil War, and she read voraciously. Her parents, George and Lucretia Jones, had roots in aristocracy dating back three centuries. Edith Wharton, née Edith Newbold Jones, (born January 24, 1862, New York, New York, U.S.—died August 11, 1937, Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, near Paris, France), American author best known for her stories and novels about the upper-class society into which she was … Wharton wrote numerous novels the more famous being ‘The House of Mirth’ (1905), ‘The Reef’ (1912), ‘The Custom of the Country’ (1913) and ‘Summer’ (1917). It prevailed mostly as a reaction to the romanticism that had taken up most of the century in its grip. Her family was fairly wealthy and out of three children, she was the youngest. “The moral order she had grown up with was gone,” Carl said. Her autobiography, A Backward Glance, appeared in 1934. Edith Wharton continued to write until her death, which was a result of a stroke attack that she suffered in 1937. “The Other Two” follows the conflict that arises between wealthy newlyweds Mr. Waythorn and Mrs. Alice Waythorn as unanticipated events force Alice’s two ex-husbands into the couple’s public and private lives. Wharton’s best-known work is the long tale Ethan Frome (1911), which exploits the grimmer possibilities of the New England farm life she observed from her home in Lenox, Massachusetts. With commercial success and critical acclaim, there's no doubt that Edith Wharton is one of the most popular authors of the last 100 years. Wharton’s short stories, which appeared in numerous collections, among them Xingu and Other Stories (1916), demonstrate her gifts for social satire and comedy, as do the four novelettes collected in Old New York (1924). Adapted into a film, Ethan Frome, in New England farm place. 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