Photo Gallery

A tour of Edith Wharton's The Mount

Enlarge photos
View thumbnails

LENOX, Mass. — Edith Wharton didn’t like parties, at least not those big formal affairs with hundreds of people milling around the house and grounds enjoying tea, crumpets and their place in polite society.

But, after visiting The Mount, Wharton’s home for nine years from 1902 to 1911 and the place where she wrote “Ethan Frome” and “The House of Mirth,” it seems almost a shame she wasn’t more predisposed to entertain. The three-story home, designed by Wharton herself in the fashion of a 17th century Palladian-style English Country home, would have been a great place to host parties during the last days of the Gilded Age, but Wharton wasn’t so inclined. She was much more concerned about writing.

“She was a very disciplined person who woke up every day at 6 in the morning and would write up in her bedroom until 11 a.m.,” said Laurie Foote, a tour guide at The Mount. “She did that seven days a week, and that’s how you produce 40 books in 40 years. What she wanted when she came here was privacy, and if she had a party it was a small intimate affair — never with more than four to five close personal friends.”

Optimistic about future

Nestled in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, The Mount opened for the season on May 9. For a while this year, the future of the home was in doubt, threatened by foreclosure. Those financial concerns have, at least for the time being, been assuaged.

“At this point our campaign to raise money is building momentum and we did get a formal extension that will allow us to stay open for the entire season,” said Susan Wissler, acting executive director at The Mount. “We’re very optimistic about the future.”

Visiting The Mount isn’t something done without a little prior consideration. The admission fee for adults is $16, and the walk from the parking lot to Wharton’s home overlooking Laurel Lake is nearly a quarter of a mile. The stroll, however, is part of the experience. Visitors strain to get a look at The Mount through the Berkshire forest as they walk down a drive lined with Maple trees, (there is handicapped parking right at the house), and once they arrive at the main entrance, their time and financial investment seems well worth it.

The white exterior of the forecourt and entrance hall is the first thing visitors see, although signs tell them to walk around to the right and enter the home through its bookstore and gift shop, which was originally the laundry room. A 10-minute video gives you a quick history of Wharton and her home, and then the self-guided tour begins.

Intimate space

The main floor gallery is based on other galleries Wharton admired while traveling through Italy, and the space allows access to each of the surrounding rooms, including the forecourt and entrance hall, husband Teddy’s den, Edith’s library, and finally a drawing room and dining room. Edith’s library and drawing room are the two most lavishly decorated rooms in the house, although even those spaces don’t demonstrate the excesses of the Gilded Age so prevalent in other mansions of that day.

“Edith Wharton’s family was well off, but they didn’t have the same money as those people that were building mansions in Newport and the Hudson Valley,” said Wissler. “It does look rather grand from the outside and maybe somewhat overwhelming, but people are surprised once they get inside at how comfortable they feel. There was an emphasis on symmetry and proportions and finding that intimate space. It was designed as a writer’s retreat with only two guest rooms in it. It’s not the extravagant mansion you might think it is at first glance.”

While the rooms on the main floors have been restored to match what they looked like when Wharton owned the home, the second floor, also called the bedroom floor, is mostly empty except for a handful of interpretive panels and other artifacts chronicling Wharton’s story. The final part of the tour takes you out to the terrace on the East side of the home, overlooking the beautiful gardens, also designed by Wharton, and Lake Laurel.

Aptitude for design

“Edith Wharton may be well known as a great literary figure, but she was also a genius, self-taught, who conceived and designed all of the property herself,” said Wissler. “She had great aptitude as a landscape designer and she had the architectural instincts to build The Mount. She had architects working with her, but she was constantly changing the design and working with them. It was obvious she who was in control.”

Edith Newbold Jones was born in New York City in 1862 and in 1885, at the age of 23, married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, a member of a well-established Boston family who fancied himself a bit of a sportsman. He was 12 years older than his wife but not nearly her intellectual equal. It was during their nine years at The Mount that their marriage began to deteriorate. Having traveled throughout Europe with her family as a child, Wharton once again headed overseas and made Paris her home, gaining a divorce from her husband in 1913. She never returned to The Mount.

“She said it would have been too painful to come back,” said Wissler. “She also really loved Europe and got involved in mounting these huge relief efforts during World War I in France and was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, one of that country’s highest honors. There’s so much more to know about Edith Wharton than just her writing. She really was an amazing individual.”

She returned to the U.S. only once, to get an honorary doctorate from Yale University in 1923, two years after becoming the first women ever awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her novel, “The Age of Innocence.” She died in France in 1937.

View of Gilded Age

The Mount, meanwhile, was boarded up for a few years and then sold as another private residence before becoming a girls’ dormitory for the Foxhollow School. It was also used by the theater group Shakespeare & Company as a performance venue and for lodging before the Edith Wharton Restoration assumed sole ownership in 2002.

“This house not only gives us a view of the Gilded Age, but also a view of an exceptional person from that time,” said Wendy Gash, another tour guide at The Mount. “It’s a monument to a woman writer, the only one we have for Edith Wharton, and this was her dream house. It’s a beautiful house, not at all ostentatious like the palaces that were being built elsewhere in the Berkshires and in other parts of the country. Edith Wharton had her own ideas about beauty and balance, and they were all absorbed into The Mount.”

The Mount is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and guided tours will be provided on the weekends beginning June 15.

“We hope that people leave here with an Edith Wharton book under their arm and the appreciation of just how wonderful a place this is to spend an afternoon,” said Wissler. “We hope they leave with a greater appreciation of its creator, and what a marvelous person she was.”

Share story:   print   email

+digg +fark

+reddit +facebook

+del.icio.us +stumbleupon