ABSTRACT
On Edith Wharton’s library shelves, books explicating religious symbolism in European churches, the geologies of plants, and French urban life kept company with Frances Trollope’s witty Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), Andrew Jackson Downing’s instructive Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, with a View to the Improvement of Country Residences (1859), and Reverend J. G. Wood’s appealing Homes Without Hands: Being a Description of the Habitations of Animals, Classed According to their Principle of Construction (1866).1 Wharton’s lifelong fascination with issues of landscape, architecture, and interior design began with attention to gender and space on the domestic level. This is evident in her co-authorship with architect Ogden Codman of The Decoration of Houses (1897), her books Italian Villas and their Gardens (1904), Italian Backgrounds (1905), A Motor Flight through France (1908), French Ways and Their Meaning (1919), and In Morocco (1920), her occupation of eleven distinct residences, the majority of whose interiors she designed, and the signifi cance of setting and interior to her writing, both fi ctional and non-fi ctional. Interior designer, landscape gardener, architectural critic, novelist, journalist, and charity administrator, Wharton herself epitomized the spectrum of rooms and roles women potentially occupy.
