Edith Wharton on Film

Wharton wrote Summer over the course of 1916, in her townhouse in Paris’s Faubourg Saint-Germain neighborhood. She had relocated to France in 1912, just after her divorce from her husband, Teddy, and just before World War I broke out. The war figures prominently in her writing from the late 1910s, and it is among that body of work that we find her first passing references to motion pictures. But though her wartime characters mention the cinema (often dismissively), none of them are portrayed patronizing a movie theater.³ Rather, it is Charity Royall, with her rural American upbringing and her working-class parentage, who becomes the first to do so, in Summer.

But when Charity goes to the movies circa 1916–17, what does she see? Wharton remains vague about the details of the exact film, suggesting that she herself had little experience with the medium at this point, if any at all. She sidesteps discussion of the plot, characters, or actors and chooses to highlight, instead, Charity’s thoughts and impressions as a filmgoer. The film Charity watches causes “everything” to “merge . . . in her brain,” leaving her lost amid “swimming circles of heat and blinding alternations of light and darkness.” Meanwhile “all the world has to show seemed to pass before her in a chaos of palms and minarets, roaring lions, comic policemen and scowling murderers.”⁴ In other words, Charity could be watching any number of silent films produced during this era.

That ambiguity mirrors some of Wharton’s own feelings about film more generally. In her letters and biographical writings, she makes frequent, pejorative references to the medium.⁵ In her fiction, she persists in associating the movies with a series of base, uncultured characters. But while she might not have cared for cinema, she was more than happy to profit from it. Wharton lived to see many of her novels adapted for the screen, beginning with a silent version of her first bestseller, The House of Mirth (1905). That film, directed by Albert Capellani, debuted in 1918, only one year after the publication of Summer, and though it does not survive, researchers have gleaned descriptions of it from published synopses (including one that appeared in Photoplay magazine). From these, we know that the film made considerable alterations to the plot of Wharton’s novel—especially the ending. Wharton has Lily Bart, her protagonist in The House of Mirth, die of an accidental overdose. The 1918 film instead opts for a “happy marriage ending which was the conventional resolution to the nineteenth century sentimental domestic female novel,” as William Burton Larsen explains.⁶

Indeed, one of Wharton’s chief complaints about the early film industry concerned its overreliance on sentimentality. Having achieved critical recognition as an author, she saw herself as engaged in a lifelong battle against sentimentality, which was the dominant mode associated with women’s fiction both at the close of the nineteenth century and at the start of the twentieth. As Wharton scholar Donna Campbell explains, “Wharton was part of a new generation of Americans born in the 1860s and 1870s” who used theories taken from evolutionary biology to “question . . . Victorian orthodoxies.”⁷ That included questioning the Victorian tendency to conflate women’s culture—writing, art, and entertainment made for and by women—with sentimental storytelling. Wharton’s view that sentimentality was inherent to the filmic medium itself ultimately prevented her from taking much interest in subsequent film adaptations of her own work.

For a long time, scholars debated whether she ever saw a movie herself. R. W. B. Lewis, one of her earliest biographers, argues in his Pulitzer Prize–winning account of her life that she did not.⁸ That view was later revised by Shari Benstock, who reports that Wharton and her friend Walter Berry “went to a cinema at Bilbao [in Spain], where they saw a travelogue entitled How to Visit a City at a Gallop, in which panting travelers marched across the screen.”⁹ It remains unclear, though, whether Wharton ever saw any actual feature films, which made up the targets of her complaints about sentimentality. Those movies, she asserted, were like “ice-cream soda”—preferred by uncultured Americans over the “bitter tastes” offered by literary figures like herself.¹⁰

Meanwhile, her novels and stories were repeatedly adapted as “ice-cream soda” films. Following The House of Mirth in 1918, five more movie adaptations appeared during her lifetime: The Glimpses of the Moon (Allan Dwan, 1923), with a screenplay partially written by F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Age of Innocence, which was adapted first in 1924 (Wesley Ruggles) and then again in 1934 (Philip Moeller); The Marriage Playground (Lothar Mendes, 1929), based on Wharton’s novel The Children (1928); and Strange Wives (Richard Thorpe, 1934), adapted from a short story called “Bread upon the Waters.”¹¹ A few years after Wharton’s death in 1937, a sixth film adaptation of her work appeared. The Old Maid (Edmund Goulding, 1939), starring Bette Davis and based on the 1924 novella of the same name, is now one of the few early Wharton adaptations that survives. Also, quite significantly, it is one of the few early film versions of her work that adheres (for the most part) to the original story line.

Wharton’s The Old Maid was originally published as part of the Old New York collection—a suite of four historical novellas set in and around New York City. It centers on the story of an upper-class woman, Charlotte, who gives birth to an illegitimate child. In order to improve her daughter’s marriage prospects and avoid having her turn out an “old maid” like herself, she consents to having her married cousin adopt the child, offering it the security of a family name and lineage but effectively voiding Charlotte’s rights and attachments as a mother.

The filmed adaptation of The Old Maid alters Wharton’s temporal setting (the 1850s) and instead places the action during the Civil War. This change is strategic, since the Civil War gives cover to the story of the young girl Tina’s illegitimacy in the movie. Her father is a lieutenant who ends up getting killed in the conflict, whereas in Wharton’s novella, he simply abandons the pregnant mother (strengthening its connections to the previously mentioned Summer). The alteration in historical setting also helps to bring the 1937 film version of The Old Maid in line with Hays Code, which stipulated that immoral behavior, including sexual relationships occurring outside of marriage, never be portrayed in a positive fashion. In transferring the story’s action to the period of the Civil War, and in killing off Tina’s father, The Old Maid succeeds in punishing both parties responsible for her illegitimacy, whereas Wharton chronicles the suffering of only one of them, Charlotte.

In spite of, or perhaps due to, its reliance on melodrama, The Old Maid became, in her biographer Lewis’s words, “one of Edith Wharton’s most durably popular and profit-making stories.”¹² It was the only early film adaptation of her work that earned praise from critics, and it was the last one of its kind to appear for almost half a century. After Wharton’s death, her popularity began to wane, in part due to interventions of male critics and biographers who took issue with her commercial popularity and portrayed her as a fussy, outmoded relic of the nineteenth century. Her stories, they argued, had no home in the twentieth. What ensued was a fallow period in the history of Wharton studies and Wharton film adaptations. It remained that way up until the 1990s, when period pieces again became fashionable in the film industry and renewed attention to Wharton’s work spurred a spate of fresh adaptations.

The first Wharton film adaptation to break the half-century hiatus that ensued after The Old Maid’s release was a second adaptation, released in 1990, of her novel The Children. It centers on the story of a middle-aged man who engages in childish behavior, first falling for a naive fifteen-year-old girl and eventually spurning the attentions of a woman his own age. The 1990 film version, though it stars high-profile actors like Ben Kingsley and Kim Novak (it was the last film she made), remains difficult to access. Directed by Tony Palmer, it was not widely distributed upon its initial release and was never rereleased via DVD or streaming services, although some libraries retain VHS copies. It was poorly received by critics, garnering comments about “dated” plotting and having a “snail’s” pacing.”¹³ Problems resulted from disagreements with the film’s distributor, Britain’s Channel 4, which oversaw additional edits before its premiere at the London Film Festival. What was shown then was a “completely messed about” version, in Palmer’s words.¹⁴ In 2015, he started a Kickstarter campaign, which aimed to restore his original vision—and edits—for the film’s rerelease, aiming to raise $38,000 but ending up with only $60. Although the campaign had the support of the film’s original stars (Kingsley appears in a promotional video posted to Palmer’s Kickstarter page), the twenty-five years that had passed since its release had all but erased audiences’ memories of it.

A number of other 1990s Wharton film adaptations followed The Children. Ethan Frome, starring Liam Neeson, Patricia Arquette, and Joan Allen, debuted in 1993. Directed by John Madden and shot on location in wintry, snow-steeped corners of Vermont, the film sticks close to Wharton’s original story, which, like Summer, takes place in rural New England. It enacts a tense love triangle between Neeson’s Ethan; his wife, Zeena (Allen); and his wife’s young cousin, Mattie (Arquette). Joan Allen’s portrayal of Zeena, in particular, deserves more credit than it has received from critics, who gave the film a lukewarm reception. Zeena has long been viewed as the antagonist in the novel’s love triangle, blocking Ethan’s attraction toward the much younger Mattie and thus thwarting its love story. But Allen’s anxiety-stricken interpretation makes her appear both more sympathetic and more complicated. As an invalid, Zeena fears that Ethan’s love for Matti will result in him abandoning her. Allen’s performance contributes to a decent, if somewhat understated, adaptation that has not attracted much attention, save among Wharton scholars.

Ethan Frome joined the ranks of other costume dramas premiering in 1993, including Jane Campion’s Palme d’Or–winning The Piano and James Ivory’s The Remains of the Day. It was something of a banner year for historical dramas of this kind. But Ethan Frome had even bigger competition to worry about. Martin Scorsese’s extravagant version of The Age of Innocence was also released in 1993. Compared to that film, with its opulent costumes and set designs, Ethan Frome looks spartan and frugally executed. The Age of Innocence, meanwhile, cost its production company heavily. Though hailed as a critical success and nominated for several Academy Awards, such achievements did not fully compensate for its staggering $34 million production budget, a figure that vastly outweighed its initial box-office profits.¹⁵ Concerns about the film’s runaway expenses caused its first distributor, Fox, to drop it; its second distributor, Universal, followed suit. Columbia Pictures finally agreed to distribute the film after Universal released Scorsese from his exclusive contract, and after two of the film’s stars, Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer, were induced to accept “reduced salaries” in order to minimize costs.¹⁶

With The Age of Innocence, Scorsese exposed some of the hazards associated with big-budget costume dramas—precisely the type of film adaptations that Wharton’s work generally demands. Throughout the latter half of the 1990s, a few more adaptations followed, but they proved to be more modest in scale. A 1995 BBC miniseries version of The Buccaneers, Wharton’s unfinished final novel, was criticized for straying from the text and for inventing a happy ending that viewers felt did not honor Wharton’s legacy. Though formal differences separate films and television series, in the case of The Buccaneers, the complaints were the same: the series recapitulated the problems that dogged the early film adaptations of Wharton’s work dating from the 1910s through the 1930s. Its director, Philip Saville, defended the changes, commenting that “a book is not a script and a script is not a film. . . . And words when you put flesh and blood on them change. And when we did our television production, it became its own voice . . . it had its own life . . . and internal rhythm.”¹⁷ In other words, Saville blamed the medium of television itself for necessitating changes to Wharton’s text that resulted in a sunnier, more sentimental outcome.

The final entry in the lineup of late-century Wharton adaptations came with Terence Davies’s take on The House of Mirth, which was released in 2000. Its cast is suitably star-studded, with Gillian Anderson in the lead and Laura Linney, Eric Stoltz, Dan Aykroyd, and other recognizable names filling out the ranks. But while those names surely figured into its production costs, Davies brought the film to market having spent less than a third of what Scorsese did on The Age of Innocence. The beauty of Davies’s The House of Mirth, compared with The Age of Innocence, is more humble and serene. It also lacks the frenzied pacing of Scorsese’s editing. Instead of swirling cameras and frenetic cross-fades, Davies delivers a restrained, almost motionless film that develops via a leisurely-paced narrative. These techniques provide cinematic analogues to those deployed in Wharton’s novel, which tells the story of Lily Bart’s gradual fall from grace. They also make for a more careful and conservative rendition of her work. Davies spares us the abundance of Wharton’s world, but in doing so, he also ends up subduing much of its intrigue and intensity. His The House of Mirth unfolds like a stage play, with scenic and visual details deemphasized in favor of tight-lipped dialogue.

With its generalized spirit of restraint, Davies’s The House of Mirth paradoxically shows how the trend toward costume drama was perhaps starting to ebb. Beginning in the early 2000s, some of the production companies most associated with the period-drama craze, like Merchant Ivory Productions, began to shift away from making costly fin de siècle historical films.¹⁸ That change spelled another lull in production for Wharton-based films. Where Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence had exposed the financial risks associated with grand Wharton adaptations, Davies’s understated version of The House of Mirth had not proved commercially or critically successful. At the close of the 1990s, concerns about the financial viability of such period films left one Wharton novel—the only one from her “major phase” that had not yet been adapted for the screen—in limbo. This is how The Custom of the Country (1913) became the Wharton movie that never was, despite two famous directors’ attempts to make it.

Since Davies’s The House of Mirth there have been no significant filmed adaptations of Wharton’s work. But this situation is due neither to a lack of interest on the part of audiences—Wharton’s name is still commonly invoked in publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker—nor to a lack of effort on the part of producers, directors, and screenwriters. Rather, it has primarily resulted from financial squeamishness and from distributors’ concerns that Wharton adaptations tend to deliver high costs and unhappy endings, both figuratively and literally. This neglect of Wharton over the last two decades stands in marked contrast to the ongoing Jane Austen–movie industrial complex. Since 2000, there have been numerous feature films based on Austen novels, including Emma (Autumn de Wilde, 2020), Pride and Prejudice (Joe Wright, 2005), and two versions of Persuasion (Adrian Shergold, 2007; Carrie Cracknell, 2022). That’s not counting loose adaptations of Austen’s work, like Bridget Jones’ Diary (Sharon Maguire, 2001) and Bride and Prejudice (Gurinder Chadha, 2004). There have also been serial productions made for television or streaming services like Sanditon (Andrew Davies, ITV/PBS, 2019) and filmed adaptations of originally unpublished Austen titles like Love and Friendship (Whit Stillman, 2016; adapted from Austen’s manuscript Lady Susan). Given the public perception of parallels between the two authors—Terence Davies once described Wharton as being like “Jane Austen with the gloves off”—one might reasonably expect the ratio between adaptations of their work to be somewhat more even.¹⁹ After all, both require costume-drama budgets in order to be brought to life, and both center their stories on the experiences of women whose privileged lives make for lavish aesthetics. So, why so many Austen adaptations, and why so few based on Wharton?

The answer, as a 2024 New Yorker interview with the director Sofia Coppola attests, may have to do with differences between their protagonists. Wharton’s leading women, at least according to the men who control the film industry’s purse strings, have a “likability” problem. Coppola claims that is why her Apple TV+ miniseries adaptation of Wharton’s The Custom of the Country was suddenly shelved in 2021, two years into production. The “mostly dudes” at Apple TV+, she reports, “didn’t get the character of Undine,” Wharton’s protagonist.²⁰ They judged her to be fatally “unlikable” and not worth the exorbitant budget that Coppola had negotiated in order to make the series (which was to have starred Florence Pugh). After Apple TV+ pulled its support for the project, Coppola spent a year searching for alternative funding before abandoning it in favor of another production with more a “likable” woman protagonist. Her Priscilla, a biopic about Priscilla Presley, debuted in 2023.

But what’s so unlikable about Wharton’s women? And does that unlikability really account for the paucity of twenty-first-century adaptations of her work? Coppola’s attempts to turn Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, which is about a social-climbing serial divorcée, into a “glam miniseries” would suggest as much.²¹ Wharton’s character Undine hails from humble origins in the American Midwest, but she uses her beauty and charm as weapons that enable her to climb the ranks of elite society—first at home in America, and then abroad in Europe as well. In her wake, she leaves several forlorn husbands who dared to think they could control her. But if anyone could make Wharton’s Undine relatable to modern audiences, it would be Coppola, who previously did the same for one of history’s most unrelatable female monarchs. In Marie Antoinette (2006), Coppola used “glam” as a vehicle to deliver a complex and tender portrait of a controversial, and similarly “unlikable,” woman—in this case, a real aristocrat who is perhaps best remembered for making unsympathetic comments about starving peasants. If Coppola could show us the vulnerable side of Marie Antoinette, surely she could do the same with Undine, a character whose tragicomic ascent is designed to expose America’s hidden infrastructure of aristocracy, the one that it likes to pretend it doesn’t have.

But unlike Marie Antoinette, Wharton’s Undine Spragg mostly gets away with the crime of being an unlikable woman. That is the central difference between them, and it summons an old anxiety—one that has haunted filmed adaptations of Wharton’s work since the very beginning. Recall how the 1918 silent version of The House of Mirth swapped Wharton’s tragic-overdose ending for a wedding. In doing so, it rewrote the story of Lily Bart’s downfall, turning it into a resurrection narrative along the lines of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (which has been adapted twice since 2000, once as a feature film and more recently as a BBC miniseries). But Undine in The Custom of the Country is not Lily Bart: she never repents or apologizes, and the story wouldn’t make sense if it forced her to.

In her New Yorker interview, Coppola compares Undine to Tony Soprano, the mobster antihero at the heart of The Sopranos (David Chase, HBO, 1999–2007).²² That series ended on a famously ambiguous note, leaving the question of Tony’s comeuppance wide-open. With Undine in The Custom of the Country, as with other works by Wharton, the question of narratological justice and comeuppance does not receive any straightforward resolution. Rather, Wharton’s novels enact complex portraits of women who are judged mercilessly by their own society, but presented to readers not as the architects of malice but as logical outgrowths of a malicious, corrupt world. Whereas Marie Antoinette’s “glam” lifestyle in Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is fated to end via a revolutionary uprising, Wharton allows Undine’s unlikability to remain relatively unchecked. And who wouldn’t be drawn into such a story? The answer? Audiences who came to it expecting to find a guillotine at the end.

Coppola is not the first director who has attempted to film Wharton’s least filmable work. Back in the 1990s, the Academy Award–winning screenwriter and director Christopher Hampton, known for his work on the costume drama Dangerous Liaisons (1988), also sought to bring The Custom of the Country to the big screen. In the spring of 2016, he gave the keynote address at a conference hosted by the Edith Wharton Society held in Washington, DC, detailing his long-ranging work on the project. He alleged that, following Scorsese’s work on The Age of Innocence, and that film’s disappointing initial box-office performance, Hollywood studios became wary of historical dramas, and in particular of adaptations that had Wharton’s name attached to them. In 1993, when The Age of Innocence premiered, Hampton had already written the screenplay for The Custom of the Country and was working to secure funding. The project was summarily dismissed, though, in light of the fallout over Scorsese’s film. In the early 2000s, Hampton resumed his efforts to get the film made, but met with similar frustration. At the 2016 Wharton Society conference (at which I was in attendance), he announced that he had received an initial green light for the project, which had since been converted into a BBC series. But it never appeared.

What has appeared, interestingly, is another serialized adaptation of Wharton’s The Buccaneers, the novel she never finished writing. Perhaps Apple TV+ elected to pursue that project—which, created by Katherine Jakeways, premiered in January 2023—over Coppola’s The Custom of the Country. Because Wharton never finished writing The Buccaneers, it has emerged as an ideal text for conventional adaptation. In it, we get all of the dresses and the balls and the “glam,” but none of the dour naturalism and unhappy endings that are associated with Wharton’s brand. We don’t know how she would have ended the story, had she ended the story. Although Wharton had sketched her plans for the novel’s conclusion, it’s hard to take those notes at face value because they come from an author who was famous for making laborious revisions to her manuscripts.²³ Among literary scholars, The Buccaneers has been regarded as a uniquely problematic title in Wharton’s oeuvre, since it was never completed. Its problems were only heightened by a “complete” edition of the book, with additional material supplied and written by Marion Mainwaring, that was published in 1993. It was that controversial, updated edition that inspired Phillip Saville’s previously mentioned BBC series adaptation in 1995. And it is also a likely source of inspiration for Jakeways’s most recent one, too.²⁴

The show proudly displays Wharton’s name in the opening credits, but aside from that attribution, it can claim very little relationship with her or her work. Its characters go by the names that Wharton originally gave them, but its plot arcs incessantly toward the kind of sentimentality that she despised. Perhaps, then, the reason that the twenty-first century has seen no significant film adaptations of Wharton’s works is that producing them demands a dedication to harshness. The calculus of winning and losing does not always add up neatly in Wharton stories. Newland Archer does not get the girl in The Age of Innocence, and Undine Spragg never receives her comeuppance in The Custom of the Country. In this way, Wharton’s stories often work against popular expectations, some of which are as old as the Hays Code itself. They position her as something of a saboteur, one who continues to undermine popular culture’s interest in toxic positivity.