Wharton's Mount restored and refurbished
Edith Wharton's magnificent Berkshires estate restored in time for its centennial

By Julie Michaels, Globe Correspondent, 06/02/02

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LENOX - The writer Henry James once proclaimed that the two most beautiful words in the English language were "summer afternoon." Chances are, some of his favorites were those spent visiting his good friend Edith Wharton at The Mount, the Berkshire estate that was her home from 1902 to 1911.

Recognized in her lifetime as one of America's greatest writers, Wharton (1862-1937) earned equal fame among her peers as the Martha Stewart of her day. She was the consummate hostess, a woman with decided opinions about architecture and design, landscape, and the art of living. Even before Wharton had published her first novel, her 1897 book, "The Decoration of Houses" (coauthored with architect Ogden Codman), was the talk of the tea table. In it, she argued for a return to the classical principles of proportion, simplicity, and harmony, urging her contemporaries to reject the gaudy excesses of the Victorian age.

Wharton's masterpiece was the home and garden she created for herself at The Mount. Shimmering on a hill overlooking Laurel Lake, the white Italianate villa, with its green cp9,13shutters and striped awnings, realized Wharton's dream of a home of her own where she could write and entertain. It was in her second-floor bedroom, overlooking the formal gardens (which she once described as "an Oriental carpet floating in the sun"), that Wharton wrote "The House of Mirth," the book that would launch her career. And it was to her broad terrace, with its Palladian staircase descending to her cherished lime walk, that Wharton invited James and her other literary friends to gather for champagne, read poetry aloud, and study the stars.

"It is an exquisite and marvelous place," James wrote to a friend about visiting The Mount, ". . . a monument to the almost too impeccable taste of its so accomplished mistress."

Now, just in time for The Mount's 2002 Centennial, Wharton's home and gardens have been restored and will open to the public on Tuesday. The exterior has been completely refinished, correcting everything from the leaking roof to sagging cupola. The entry courtyard and main reception rooms have also been refurbished. They will enter the next century with furnishings provided by the nation's top interior designers, who will decorate them "in the style of Edith Wharton." Thus they will remain for the next three years as the nonprofit Edith Wharton Restoration Inc. raises money to re-create the interiors as they looked in Wharton's day.

Just as dramatic is the restoration of the gardens. Devoted to the formal style of Italian gardens, Wharton created a series of rooms along major and minor axes. These she furnished with fountains and water features, niches, and statues. But rather than limit herself to the narrow pattern planting one might find in Italy or France, Wharton embraced the English passion for exuberant flowerbeds. "My garden is a mass of blooms," Wharton wrote in 1905, "ten varieties of phlox, snapdragons, lilac and crimson stocks, penstemons . . . white petunias, and the intense blue of delphinium . . ."

Though no plans were left, Boston landscape architect Susan Child was able to re-create these rooms using photographs, letters, and the services of an archeologist. Although the perennial borders await a generous donor before plants can be installed, the results are nevertheless breathtaking, as the gardens link the house to the landscape and its distant view of the lake and hills beyond.

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The pendulum of fame

For the English majors among us who have long read and admired Wharton's work, for the feminists who know of her wrenching struggles to escape from a domineering and narrow society, for the architects and decorators who still study her views on design, and for the gardeners who yearned to see her landscaping vision restored, one nagging question begs an answer. What took so long?

By way of explanation, Stephanie Copeland, who has worked for a decade as the determined president and CEO of the nonprofit Wharton foundation, offers this story about her own introduction to Wharton.

"When I was 16," Copeland recalls, "my English class was assigned to read `Ethan Frome.' I thought the book was so astonishingly well-written that I asked my teacher, `Who is Edith Wharton?' I'll never forget her reply. `Oh, she was just a rich woman. This book is a fluke.' "

Copeland is still shocked by the remark. "A fluke? Here was a woman who wrote more than 40 books, several of them masterpieces. She was the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Yale, her books on architecture and design are still read, and yet she was so stunningly dismissed. And I went to an all-girls' school!"

In fact, Wharton was eclipsed by modernism. By the time of her death in 1937, Americans were turning away from her rich, 19th-century narrative style and toward Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. The social milieu that Wharton had described in her books - and so brilliantly skewered - seemed distant. Why save a writer's house if you've never bothered to read her work? In 1942, Wharton's home, which had changed hands several times, was sold for $18,000 to a girls' school for use as a dormitory.

The Mount was eventually saved by the rising popularity of Wharton as an author. This was accomplished first by the 1985 publication of R. W. B Lewis's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Edith Wharton: A Biography." Eight years later, Martin Scorsese's film of "The Age of Innocence" caused millions of readers to return to their bookshelves. ("The House of Mirth" was made into a movie - for the third time - in 2000.) Add the women's movement, the current vogue in gardening, and you have all the potential for the restoration of a historical landmark.

Now the only obstacles were the $35 million required to rescue the house - and an intransigent tenant. Edith Wharton, meet Shakespeare & Co.

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Hamlet vs. Lily Bart

When Tina Packer brought her troupe of Shakespearean actors to the Berkshires in 1978, she immediate realized the potential of linking her cause to Wharton's. `I really wanted this house," she said several years ago. "It had a real identity."

The house Packer and her players rented for the season was by this time so run-down that it was condemned by the local building inspector. A quick bit of fund-raising resulted in some needed repairs (like functioning toilets and electricity) and the company moved in.

Anyone who visited The Mount during its Shakespeare era will remember just how good a balcony Wharton's formal terrace made for the Bard's plays. Outdoor performances may have added romance to the crumbling estate, but they did little for its salvation. Although Packer and Company had established a separate entity - Edith Wharton Restoration Inc. - to purchase The Mount and raise money for its restoration, the needs of the two organizations were diametrically opposed. "You could not properly restore a historic home while it was functioning as a working theater," Copeland said.

However, Packer did begin to spread the word. Her company organized and gave early tours of The Mount; they also created a series of popular, one-act plays based on Wharton's life and work.

It took 10 years and a court order to dislodge Shakespeare & Company, which finally ended its residence last fall. They are now happily ensconced down the road, at yet another former estate, where Packer is raising money to build an Elizabethan-style theater. Copeland, meanwhile, had been doing her homework.

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A millennial opportunity

A nation often pauses at the turn of a century to reconsider its history. So when the Clinton administration and Congress announced a $30 million millennium program to "Save America's Treasures," Copeland was ready. She had the historical data, the building plans, and the marketing program. In 1998, Congress gave The Mount a $2.9 million challenge grant, its largest award, which the Wharton Restoration immediately matched with $1.4 million from the state. Thus far, the group has raised and spent $9 million and plans to raise $26 million more. "And we will," says Copeland, who now has her most powerful fund-raising tool ever. She has The Mount. "We're finally far enough along so people can see where we're going."

Like Jefferson's Monticello, Wharton's Mount is an autobiographical house. "The arrangement of rooms, the placement of trees, the choice of molding - all of these things Wharton did deliberately," says Scott Marshall, who has been the Wharton Restoration's historian for 20 years. Wharton's library, for example, is probably the first one every designed by a woman for her own use. Remarkably, her literature collection is still intact, complete with marginalia, though now owned by a London bookseller. Purchasing it is just one of the items on Copeland's wish list.

In the coming years, money will be raised to restore The Mount's bedroom floor and servants wing and re-create a tiered kitchen garden, with grape arbor and espaliered pear trees. Woodland trails will be recreated and plantings reintroduced.

So that young women will never again lose sight of Wharton as a role model, Copeland is determined that The Mount will have a present-day purpose. The 1902 stables will be renovated as a conference and visitors' center dedicated to the lives of prominent women. There will be conferences, seminars, and an annual poetry series, as well as lectures on Wharton's life and work. This summer, The Mount is hosting two lecture series, one on Wharton's definition of the good life, and another on women of distinction.

Wharton was forced to sell The Mount in 1912, as her husband, Teddy, lost his health and their marriage foundered. Soon after, she left the United States and lived for most of the rest of her life in France. Yet Wharton's love for this Berkshire estate never diminished. "It was my first real home," she wrote, "and its blessed influence still lives in me."

Henry James agreed. "No one fully knows our Edith who hasn't seen her in the act of creating a habitation for herself," he wrote. Now, with the reopening of The Mount, we can view this remarkable woman in all her complexity.

Julie Michaels is a freelance writer based in Great Barrington.