[文学]edith wharton.ppt

* Edith Wharton (1862--1937) The Mount--Ediths home in the Berkshires, western Massachusetts Entrance hall at the Mount-Red Marble Garden to be restored at The Mount American author, best-known for her stories and ironic novels about upper class people. Whartons central themes were the conflict between social and individual fulfillment, repressed sexuality, and the manners of old families and the nouveau riche, who had made their fortunes in more recent years. Wharton was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1920). Edith Newbold Jones Wharton was born in New York, N.Y., into a wealthy and socially prominent family. Wharton was educated privately at home by European governesses, learning French, Italian, and German. Her early years she spent rather with books than participating in the activities of high society. She read widely in her father’s library which contained more history, poetry and classic literature than fiction. She had started to compose poems in her teens and one of her poems was published in the Atlantic Monthly. The father of her tutor, Emelyn Washburn, introcuded Wharton to Emerson, Thoreau and other Transcendentalist writers. In 1885, after a broken engagement to Harry Stevens, Wharton married with no great enthusiasm Edward Wharton, who was twelve years her senior. Edward was a Boston banker and her brothers friend, but they had little in common. The couple bought a large country estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, maintained a town house in New Yourk City as well as a summer place in Newport, Rhode island, and spent some time each year in Luxurious European travel. Mrs. Wharton apparently enjoyed landscaping and furnishing, as well as entertaining in, her elegant homes . Whartons role as a wife with social responsibilities and her writing ambitions resulted in nervous collapse, and she was advised that writing might help her recover. Her early writings did not deal with New York high society, but urban poverty. Wharto