Edith Wharton - Lenox, Massachusetts

August 17
Monday

Couldn't leave Massachusettes without seeing Guilded Age author Edith Wharton's home in Lenox.  Another of my favorite authors, she wrote 40 books in 40 years, many of them best sellers. Essentially self educated even tho born into the privileged world of old New York in 1862, she was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921 for Age of Innocence.

 

   The home is a five minute walk from the main road thru a secluded wood.

Edith designed and built The Mount in 1902. Why do wealthy people always name their homes?

Could it be they have so many it's a way of telling them apart.

It's designed very symmetrically, with windows and doors matching in all the rooms. This very proper Victorian era influenced the design of her home, but what made her novels best sellers was all the gossip and stories of the way the very proper Victorians really lived with scandals and very unbalanced lives.

This was the first home tour I've taken where we were invited to sit on the furniture because "it's not antique".

 

Intimate dinners for six were her favorite so the dining room isn't very large. 

And always the dog bed was under the table even if Henry James was coming to dinner.

Often her dinner companions were all men, notables of the day.

Two of her most popular books, House of Mirth and Ethan Fromme were written here at The Mount.

Those two in addition to Age of Innocence have been made into excellent films.

Next to her bedroom is this cozy study.

Making myself at home in her bedroom.

Her own life didn't escape the intrigue of her novels. After 10 years here, Edith discovered her husband had been squandering her estate on bad investments and purchasing a home for his mistress. So they divorced, but in her autobiography she glosses over this explaining he had been acting irrationally,  never mentioning the mistress.

The foundation paid several million dollars to get her books back from the dealer who bought them after the house was sold.

After the divorce Edith spent time in Italy which she said was her favorite country, that is until she visited France where she died in 1937.

She continued to write and was very much solvent on her death.

the cad

Leaving Massachusetts, at least for the time being, I stopped at Milton upon entering Pennsylvania.

Hotel Fauchere had had a $6 million reno I had heard about and I thought that was a lot to put into a hotel in a tiny town of 1200 people.  

It turns out this little burg has been a popular resort town only an hour north of NYC since the Gilded Age. Edith Wharton probably stopped here. So it couldn't be too ritzy.

But what really caught my eye was this great photo in the basement bar of Andy Warhol planting a kiss on John Lennon.  The bartender thought it was his birthday.

What a day! 

Afterward I sat and rocked out on the front porch.