The Mount, Edith Wharton's Estate
Near Lenox, Massachusetts
On the rise ahead stands The Mount, the estate that novelist Edith Wharton designed and called her first real home. Wharton built it in nineteen oh two, and she shaped nearly every element herself, drawing on the principles she had laid out in her first book, The Decoration of Houses, published in eighteen ninety seven. The result is a gleaming white stucco mansion with dark green shutters, inspired by an English country house of the sixteen hundreds called Belton House, set above formal gardens and terraces that Wharton also planned.
She lived here with her husband Edward from nineteen oh two until nineteen eleven, and these were her most productive years. In the quiet of The Mount she wrote her breakthrough novel, The House of Mirth, published in nineteen oh five, and the stark New England tragedy Ethan Frome, published in nineteen eleven. Wharton entertained literary friends here, most famously the novelist Henry James.
After a bitter divorce she left for France and never returned. The house was declared a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy one, and today it is a cultural center welcoming tens of thousands of visitors a year who come to walk the rooms and gardens of one of America's great writers.
