Language and Convention in Wharton’s Hieroglyphic World

The fashionable New York society into which Edith Wharton was born in 1862 included no female novelist in its ranks. Indeed, her society relegated writers and artists to the margins of its world, if it granted them any place at all. In her autobiography, A Backward Glance, Wharton recalled that New York literary society, composed of men who ‘foregathered at the Century Club’,1 maintained the most tenuous connection to the ‘social aristocracy’ to which her parents belonged. During her childhood and adolescence, she found intellectual companionship chiefly in the books in her father’s library. After her marriage, when she began to publish poetry and fiction and won international recognition with her first volume of short stories, The Greater Inclination (1899), she found the spiritual kinship she sought, not in associations with women writers, but in friendships with men of her own class: among her literary mentors and friends were her editors at Scribner’s, William Brownell and Edward Burlingame; later, Henry James; and above all, the New York lawyer, Walter Berry, the lifelong friend and critic who was, she said, ‘an expansion, an interpretation, of one’s self, the very meaning of one’s soul’ (BG, 115).