entitled The Decoration of Houses. Despite this achievement, Edith was not happy in her marriage and she experienced a nervous breakdown in 1898 (Ibid. 1167). By the following year, she had recovered from her illness and had published her first collection of short stories, which was entitled The Greater Inclination. In 1900, her first novella, The Touchstone, was published (Joslin 14). From that time on, Edith Wharton continued to write short stories, novels, and novellas at a prolific rate. Her most important books included The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), The Reef (1912), The Custom of the Country (1913), Summer (1917), The Age of Innocence (1920), and her autobiography A Backward Glance (1934). During the later part of her career, Edith became friends with the noted novelist Henry James, who encouraged her and influenced her in her work. In 1913, Edith obtained a divorce from her husband so that she could devote more time to her writing. At that time, she moved to France where she continued to live for the remainder of her life (Gilbert & Gubar 1169). During the First World War, she was actively involved in relief efforts for the people of France. After the war, in 1923, she received an honorary degree from Yale University, "the first such honor given to a woman by a major American university" (Joslin 23). Edith Wharton continued to write prolifically until her death in 1937.
A major theme in Edith Wharton's fiction is "a sense of futility of struggle against social circumstances" (Women and Literature 48). The critic Lionel Trilling claimed that Wharton went a little too far in expressing this sense of futility and despair. For example, Trilling called Ethan Frome a "cruel book," because its characters were not given any "reason and choice" in the outcome of their fates (Tuttleton, Whar., Duke, Bry. & Inge 100). In other words, if Ethan had made a wrong moral choice and had then suffered, his fate w...