Travels and life abroad
Over the course of her life, she crossed the Atlantic 60 times. In Europe, her primary destinations were Italy, France, and England. She also went to Morocco. She wrote many books about her travels, including Italian Backgrounds and A Motor-Flight through France.
Her husband, Edward Wharton, shared her love of travel and for many years, they spent at least four months of each year abroad, mainly in Italy. Their friend, Egerton Winthrop, accompanied them on many journeys there. In 1888, the Whartons and their friend, James Van Alen, took a cruise through the Aegean islands. Wharton was 26. The trip cost the Whartons $10,000 and lasted four months. She kept a travel journal during this trip that was thought to be lost, but was later published as The Cruise of the Vanadis, now considered her earliest known travel writing.
In 1897, Edith Wharton purchased Land's End in Newport, Rhode Island, from Robert Livingston Beeckman, a former U.S. Open Tennis Championship runner-up who became governor of Rhode Island. At the time, Wharton described the main house as "incurably ugly." Wharton agreed to pay $80,000 for the property, and she spent thousands more to alter the home's facade, decorate the interior, and landscape the grounds.
In 1902, Wharton designed The Mount, her estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, which survives, today, as an example of her design principles. While living there, she wrote The House of Mirth (1905), her best-known chronicle of life in old New York, The Fruit of the Tree (1907), and other fiction. She also gathered material for many of her other works, including Ethan Frome (1911) and Summer (1917). At The Mount, she entertained the cream of American literary society, including her close friend, novelist Henry James, who described the estate as "a delicate French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond". Although she spent many months traveling in Europe nearly every year with her friend Egerton Winthrop (a descendant of John Winthrop), The Mount was her primary residence until 1911. When living there and while traveling abroad, Wharton was usually driven to appointments by her longtime chauffeur and friend Charles Cook, a native of nearby South Lee, Massachusetts. When her marriage deteriorated, she decided to move permanently to France, living first at 53 Rue de Varenne, Paris, in an apartment that belonged to George Washington Vanderbilt II.
Wharton was preparing to vacation for the summer when World War I broke out. Though many fled Paris, she moved back to her Paris apartment on the Rue de Varenne and for four years was a tireless and ardent supporter of the French war effort. One of the first causes she undertook, in August 1914, was the opening of a workroom for unemployed women. Here, they were fed and paid one franc a day. What began with 30 women soon doubled to 60 women and their sewing business began to thrive. When the Germans invaded Belgium in the fall of 1914 and Paris was flooded with Belgian refugees, she helped to set up the American Hostels for Refugees, which managed to get them shelter, meals, and clothes, and eventually created an employment agency to help them find work. She collected more than $100,000 on their behalf. In early 1915, she organized the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee, which gave shelter to nearly 900 Belgian refugees who had fled when their homes were bombed by the Germans.
Aided by her influential connections in the French government, she and her long-time friend Walter Berry (then president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris) were among the few foreigners in France allowed to travel to the front lines during World War I. She and Berry made five journeys between February and August 1915, which Wharton described in a series of articles that were first published in Scribner's Magazine and later as Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort, which became an American bestseller. Travelling by car, Wharton and Berry drove through the war zone, viewing one devastated French village after another. She visited the trenches and was within earshot of artillery fire. She wrote, "We woke to a noise of guns closer and more incessant, and when we went out into the streets, it seemed as if, overnight, a new army had sprung out of the ground".
Throughout the war, she worked in charitable efforts for refugees, the injured, the unemployed, and the displaced. She was a "heroic worker on behalf of her adopted country". On April 18, 1916, Raymond Poincaré, then-President of France, appointed her Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, the fifth class of the country's highest honour, in recognition of her dedication to the war effort. Her relief work included setting up workrooms for unemployed French women, organizing concerts to provide work for musicians, raising tens of thousands of dollars for the war effort, and opening tuberculosis hospitals. In 1915, Wharton edited a charity benefit volume, The Book of the Homeless, which included essays, art, poetry, and musical scores by many major contemporary European and American artists, including Henry James, Joseph Conrad, William Dean Howells, Anna de Noailles, Jean Cocteau, and Walter Gay, among others. Wharton proposed the book to her publisher, Scribner's, handled the business arrangements, lined up contributors, and translated the French entries into English. Theodore Roosevelt wrote a two-page introduction, in which he praised Wharton's effort and urged Americans to support the war. She also kept up her own work, continuing to write novels, short stories, and poems, as well as reporting for The New York Times and keeping up her enormous correspondence. Wharton urged Americans to support the war effort and encouraged America to enter the war. She wrote the popular romantic novel, Summer in 1917, the war novella, The Marne, in 1918, and A Son at the Front, in 1919 (published 1923). An incomplete short story,“The Men Who Saved the World,” believed to have been written no earlier than July 1918, was published for the first time in The Strand Magazine in 2026, after having been discovered among her papers in Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. When the war ended, she watched the Victory Parade from the Champs Elysees' balcony of a friend's apartment. After four years of intense effort, she decided to leave Paris for the quiet of the countryside. Wharton settled 10 mi (16 km) north of Paris in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, buying an 18th-century house on seven acres of land that she called Pavillon Colombe. She lived there, in summer and autumn, for the rest of her life, spending winters and springs on the French Riviera at Sainte Claire du Vieux Chateau in Hyères.
Wharton was a committed supporter of French imperialism, describing herself as a "rabid imperialist", and the war solidified her political views. After the war, she traveled to Morocco, as the guest of Resident General Hubert Lyautey and wrote the book In Morocco, full of praise for the French administration, Lyautey, and particularly, his wife.
During the post-war years, she divided her time between Hyères and Provence, where she finished The Age of Innocence, in 1920. She returned to the United States only once, after the war, to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale University in 1923.
