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In 1901 Wharton inherited another $90,000 on the death of her mother, bought a 100-acre property in Lenox, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, and began to build her grand estate, The Mount. Henry James—a longtime correspondent, frequent visitor, and major influence on her work—called it “a French château mirrored in a Massachusetts pond.” The critic Edmund Wilson visited The Mount, after Wharton’s death, in the 1940s. He described its “white façade with rather small windows ... and a little gray cupola with a weather vane—all in imitation of a French château.... Stable-garage ... and gatehouse to match: winding drives, rolling lawn with terraces, views of the hills and the little lake ... rich grassy tree-grown country, so luxuriously upholstered, richly lined.”7 Wharton, who shared the auto-eroticism of Mr. Toad in The Wind in the Willows, bought her first car as early as 1904. She motored extensively, sometimes with Henry James perched in the back seat, and wrote travel books on Italy, France, and Morocco.

In 1905 Wharton dined with President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House, and in October published her first important book, The House of Mirth. Though her heroine Lily Bart dies instead of marrying Lawrence Selden in a conventionally happy conclusion, the novel sold an astonishing 140,000 copies by the end of the year. Readers were riveted by the beautiful, charming, and sacrificial Lily as well as by the satiric but authoritative portrayal of American high society, seen for the first time from the inside. Attempting to capitalize on its success, Wharton wrote a stage version of the novel. It opened in 1906, was condemned as “dreadful” by the New York Times, and promptly closed. A French translation, Chez les heureux du monde, appeared in 1907.

The publication of the novel made Wharton famous and even richer than she already was. In 1908 she began a three-year affair with the Paris-based bisexual American journalist Morton Fullerton and experienced for the first time in her life real sexual passion. Rapturously describing their bed after an encounter in the decidedly unromantic Charing Cross Hotel, on the Strand in London, she exclaimed in Whitmanesque lines:

perchance it has also thrilled

With the pressure of bodies ecstatic, bodies like ours,

Seeking each other’s souls in the depths of unfathomed caresses.8

Though she had not met Fullerton when she created the character of Lawrence Selden, they were remarkably similar. Wharton, like Lily Bart, seems to have been drawn to the type of man who “was curiously insubstantial on the human side; he seems to have had almost no impulse to engage another person to the full depths of the other’s being.”9

In 1909, during Edith’s affair with Fullerton, Teddy Wharton embezzled a substantial amount of her money, and bought a Boston apartment for his mistress. Increasingly abusive, often violent, and wildly manic depressive, he was finally placed in a mental institution in 1912. Henry James, in a fine phrase, called Teddy “cerebrally compromised.” The following year Edith divorced Teddy and returned to Europe. In The House of Mirth Edith gives two minor villains—the old lecher Ned Van Alstyne and Bertha Dorset’s lover Ned Silverton—her husband’s name.

In 1912 Edith began her close friendship with the influential art historian Bernard Berenson. When the Great War broke out in France, she devoted herself to relief work for French and Belgian refugees, provided medical supplies, and took care of more than 600 war orphans. She was the first woman to be awarded the Legion d’honneur. After the war she had splendid houses with magnificent gardens, outside Paris and in Hyères on the French Riviera, and employed nineteen servants of various nationalities to run them. But she was less fortunate with men. After her unhappy marriage and ultimately unsatisfactory love affair, she formed a lifelong friendship with the Paris-based American lawyer Walter Berry. According to Edmund Wilson, Berry