"A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions...," wrote novelist Edith Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. "It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness."
Called the "Lady of Lenox," by her friend and fellow novelist Henry James, Wharton was born Edith Jones on Jan. 24, 1862. This past year, staff members at "The Mount," the Berkshire County estate she designed and built, celebrated the 150th anniversary of her birth.
Wharton wrote more than 40 books in 40 years, including darkly ironic novels like "The House of Mirth" (1905) and "Ethan Frome" (1911), which feature privileged cosmopolitans and entrapped rural characters. She was also the first woman awarded an honorary doctorate from Yale.
Students in our public schools should be exploring Wharton's prolific literary achievements. Instead, nationalized K-12 education standards ignore her magnificent legacy.
The idiom "keeping up with the Joneses" describes the upper-class status Edith Jones's family held within Old New York's stifling late-19th century society. But Edith's Victorian mother denied her a formal education and offered only withering disapproval of her daughter's interest in writing.
"My first attempt (at the age of eleven) was a novel..." she wrote about in her memoir, "A Backward Glance" (1934). "Timorously I submitted this to my mother, and never shall I forget the sudden drop of creative frenzy when she returned it with [her] icy comment[s].
In 1885, Edith entered into an unhappy marriage to a mentally ill, alcoholic Boston Brahmin banker, Teddy Wharton. He squandered her money supporting a mistress before they finally divorced 28 years later. Meanwhile Mrs. Wharton's lover, Morton Fullerton, hardheartedly broke up with her, saying she would "write better for this experience of loving."
Edith began her career authoring design books, such as "The Decoration of Houses" (1897) and "Italian Villas and Their Gardens" (1904). "I'm a better landscape gardener than novelist," she once wrote.
However, Wharton's fame came not from her gardens but from novels like her masterpiece, "The Age of Innocence" (1920). This book meticulously chronicles the subtly manicured world of New York City's Gilded Age.
Her characters Newland Archer, May Welland Archer and the Countess Ellen Olenska are caught in a high-society love triangle while being boxed in by rigidly elite social codes. "It seems stupid to have discovered America," the Countess Olenska muses about emulating aristocratic Europe, "only to make it into a copy of another country."
According to F. Scott Fitzgerald's biographer, in 1920 the future author of "The Great Gatsby" heard Wharton was meeting in their publisher's office. In an act of "high-spirited charm" he burst into the room, kneeled at her feet, and declared: "Could I let the author of Ethan Frome pass through New York without paying my respects?"
Anyone who reads "Ethan Frome" or "The Age of Innocence" will not fail to appreciate that Edith Wharton is America's greatest female novelist. But Massachusetts students will be missing out on her carefully crafted depictions of human nature and genteel hypocrisy.
Recently, the amount of great literature public school students read was reduced by 60 percent when the Patrick administration ditched our best-in-the-nation English standards for inferior national standards known as Common Core.
Gov. Deval Patrick's own education was steeped in great literature. A scholarship to Milton Academy transported him from Chicago's South Side. In 1978, he graduated cum laude in English and American literature from Harvard College before heading to Harvard Law School, the Clinton justice department, lucrative corporate appointments and the commonwealth's corner office.
Today, Patrick's $2.2 million, 7,500-square-foot mansion, sits on his 77-acre "Sweet P Farm" in Richmond, which borders Edith Wharton's Lenox. "The gift shop is awesome," joked Lt. Gov. Tim Murray after visiting Patrick's country manor.
"In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world," observes "The Age of Innocence" about its characters, "where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs."
Edith Wharton's novels expose the self-righteous guardians of empty codes. Following her lead, American schools should discard Common Core in favor of the "eternal and irrepressible freshness" of classic literature.
Jamie Gass directs the Center for School Reform at Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based think tank.