The Mount, Edith Wharton's Landmark Estate, Purchases Author's Prized Library from Rare Book Dealer in England

Lenox, MA (December 15, 2005) --

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Stephanie Copeland, President and Executive Director of The Mount, the National Historic Landmark country estate in Lenox, MA, designed and built in 1902 by world famous author Edith Wharton, today announced the purchase of the writer’s 2,600 volume library from rare book dealer and bibliophile George Ramsden, owner of Stone Trough Books, Settrington, Yorkshire, England.

Ms. Wharton left the unique library in her will to her close friend, the historian Sir Kenneth Clark, in trust for his son, Colin Clark, her godson. Colin Clark later sold the library to Maggs Brothers, LTD of London, which in turn sold it to Mr. Ramsden in 1984. The Mount paid $2.6 million for the library and will ship it back to Lenox, MA where it will be on display to the public at her home for the first time beginning in May of 2006. The purchase was made possible by an anonymous benefactor.

Considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Edith Wharton (1862 –1937) was born into wealth in “Old New York,” a rigidly-structured society that discouraged women from achieving anything beyond a proper marriage. She wrote more than 48 books in four decades including such classics as the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and Custom of the Country. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of The House of Mirth, a popular success that launched her career as a major writer.

The library will form the centerpiece of the fund-raising effort to restore The Mount. Wharton herself assembled and edited The Book of the Homeless, an anthology of the most distinguished writers, artists, and composers of her day (including Henry James, Monet, and Stravinsky) to raise money for her refugee relief work during World War I. The Mount will use Wharton’s own books to recognize contributors to its capital campaign. Names of major donors will be permanently associated with titles from the library, in the same way that rooms or bricks are named for donors in a building campaign.

Edith Wharton’s library is a window on her life as a writer and the friendships she forged with other great intellects and artists of her time. In her autobiography, she wrote that “The core of my life was under my roof, among my books and my intimate friends.” Her library belongs to all periods of her life, from when she was a girl of ten up until a few weeks before her death at the age of seventy-five, and reflects both her deep American roots and her life as an expatriate in Europe.

The books have great value for scholarship in what they reveal about Wharton’s thoughts, the influences on her writing, and her intellectual development through the many annotations and firm pencil-strokes she made in the margins. In a letter to Sara Norton where she returned a copy of George Santayana’s Sonnets and other Verses, she wrote: “I send you back the little book with a faint scratch here and there to show you the detached things that struck me…this is the nearest approach to talking over a book together.”

In addition to containing 22 copies of her own works, some of the more important first editions in the collection according to independent appraisers include:

• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1866, first American edition) 1,000 copies printed. Wharton recalled that as a child she knew Alice “by heart.”
  
• The Golden Bowl by Henry James, signed by the author: “To Edith Wharton – in sympathy – Henry James, November 1904.” There are more than 25 works by James in the library including Terminations, Embarrassments, and Wings of the Dove, chronicling their long and intimate friendship.
  
• Ulysses by James Joyce. This is one of 750 copies published by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in 1922.
• America and the World War by Theodore Roosevelt, 1915. Inscribed: “To Edith Wharton from an American – American! Theodore Roosevelt Feb 6th 1915.”
  
• The Education of Henry Adams (Privately printed for the author), 1907. Edition of 100 copies.
  

Sets of books from her father’s library, including his two-volume set of Milton, were joined by the poets she loved, including Arnold, Browning, Coleridge, Donne, Hopkins, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Yeats, and three volumes of Walt Whitman, a personal favorite.

Essentially self-educated, she was fluent in French, German, and Italian, and collected classical literature in translation. She revered the works of Goethe and read all his poetry by the age of fifteen. Works by Italian writers including Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Dante, and Leopardi were side by side on her shelves with French masters Racine, Pascal, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Proust.

Edith Wharton had an insatiable curiosity on a wide range of subjects. She delved into evolution and science through Darwin and Huxley, philosophy with Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and collected works on the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church, Freethought, Mohammedanism, Christian Science, and Mormonism. Wharton herself was a published authority on architecture, interior design and landscape gardening, and included numerous works on these topics in her own collection. Her library also includes books on her craft, including a much-used Roget’s Thesaurus, and travel books that reflect her many tours throughout Europe and the Mediterranean.

The collection even chronicles her brief love affair, at 47, with the American journalist, William Morton Fullerton, who sent her a copy of the great love story, Tristan et Iseut, for Christmas in 1909 with a poem dedicated to her on the flyleaf. There are books from his library included in her collection as well as those from other intellectuals of her day, including Charles Eliot Norton, Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt.

According to George Ramsden’s catalogue, Edith Wharton’s Library: “Edith Wharton’s library, her palace of dreams, the scene of her ‘aloneness’ but the key to her closest friendships, is the expression of a supremely imaginative life.”

Ms. Copeland, President and Executive Director of The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in Lenox, MA, said: “We are thrilled that the empty shelves of the library at The Mount will once again be filled with Edith Wharton’s lifelong collection of books. Nothing informs us more about her extraordinary genius than the books that helped to shape her life and art. Together with her house and gardens, the return of her library to The Mount completes the legacy of this remarkable American woman.”