A HABITATION FOR HERSELF

“The Country Quiet”

Edith and Edward Wharton at The Mount

In Wharton’s day, upper-class New York families often lived in the city from about September to April, spending the summer months in Newport. Wharton and her husband Teddy participated in the seasonal migration to Newport when they owned Land’s End. Yet Wharton disliked the “watering-place trivialities” of Newport in the summer and in 1903 she moved to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, which she refers to in her autobiography as the “real country.”

Along with Italian Villas and Their Gardens, Wharton published other nonfiction works inspired by her travels in Italy, including Italian Backgrounds (1905).

Wharton named The Mount after a residence her great-grandfather owned, creating continuity and a sense of ownership over her new home. She considered The Mount to be her “first real home”—surely a designation she gave the home following her significant contributions to its design. Wharton employed several architects, including Codman and Francis L. V. Hoppin, to draw plans for The Mount, but she directed all the choices that transformed the rocky, hilly property in the image above into her ideal country estate. The architects based the exterior of The Mount on a seventeenth century English country house. Wharton also requested elements inspired by insights on Italian architecture that she gathered during her extensive travels in Italy.

View of The Mount from the garden

Fountain in the garden at The Mount