Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones into the New York society she spent a career anatomising, and her first book was about interior decoration rather than fiction: The Decoration of Houses, written in 1897 with the architect Ogden Codman Jr. The House of Mirth followed in 1905 and made her, tracking Lily Bart's slow fall through a world that will not let a woman without money keep her place. The Custom of the Country turns the same eye on a woman perfectly willing to do whatever that world rewards. Ethan Frome moves to rural Massachusetts and to poverty. The Age of Innocence took the Pulitzer for fiction in 1921, the first given to a woman. She spent the war years in France organising relief for refugees and was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour for it. Yale gave her an honorary doctorate in 1923, the first it had given a woman, and she crossed the Atlantic to collect it. Madame de Treymes and Hudson River Bracketed are the less-read books.