This post is written by Rachel Unkovic, an aid worker, artist and oral historian. This is the second post in a serial, you can read the first post here.

A Series of Facts about Edith Wharton, for Aid Workers.

Part II

16.) Edith published The House of Mirth in 1905. Picture it: 1890s New York City. Lily Bart, 29 years old and beautiful, becomes embroiled in romantic scandal. She spirals into a tailspin, descending from New York City elite to the margins of society, where she dies, impoverished, in a delirium of drugs, suicidal, clutching an imaginary child to her breast—drowned by beauty and cruelty.

~

17.) The House of Mirth has been called “a vicious indictment of a morally corrupt upper class”. It was the world that Edith had been born into. Her rage flashed and scorched.

~

18.) The House of Mirth was very successful.

~

19.) Edith divorced her husband in 1913. She left for Europe to wash him off her skin.

~

20.) June 1914. World War I erupted. As other Americans fled, Edith stayed in Paris. She joined up, first as a funder, later as an organizer, with a group of aid workers. In August, they opened up a house where war-affected women could access food, work and cash.

~

21.) Towards Christmas, as refugees poured into the Paris, Edith and her friends arranged shelter—meals—clothing—and set up a bespoke employment agency.

~

22.) Edith made five trips to the front by car, driving through bombed-out villages, seeing broken bodies, going to the trenches and volunteering in the frontline field hospitals. Edith got used to artillery fire.

~

23.) Edith arranged concerts that provided work for refugee musicians. With the tens-of-thousands of dollars she raised, her organization hired refugee doctors and nurses to staff a tuberculosis hospital.

~

24.) On 14 July 1919, Edith stood beside her friends on a balcony on the Champs-Elysées and watched the victory parade.

~

25.) Edith finished writing The Age of Innocence in 1920. Picture it: 1870s New York City. Post-Civil War, pre-World War I. Countess Ellen Olenska, 30 years old and beautiful, has returned from Europe after scandalously separating herself from her abusive, repulsive, rich-as-fuck husband. In New York City, as is easy to do, she becomes embroiled in more romantic scandal. Ellen spirals—but just a little—and then she picks herself up, brushes herself off, and heads back to Europe, where she sets up a kickass single life in a Parisian apartment and entertains her artist friends.

~

26.) Some critics have labeled the book an “apology” for The House of Mirth.

~

To continue reading, click here….