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The Mount Restores Edith Wharton's Bedroom
The Mount in Lenox has received a $100,000 grant from the Richard C. von Hess Foundation to restore Edith Wharton's bedroom suite, the "private sanctum" where she wrote some of her most important works, including the best-selling The House of Mirth.
Over the next several months, master craftspeople will restore the suite of rooms—which includes Wharton's bedroom, boudoir and bath—to the highest historic preservation standards, bringing back to life aged decorative plaster, woodwork, masonry, fixtures and more. Then, a special team of interior design experts will furnish and decorate the restored rooms based on Wharton's original plan and her design theories.
The design team will be led by Edith Wharton Restoration Trustee Pauline C. Metcalf, an architectural historian and interior designer. The Mount will unveil the restored and furnished rooms to visitors when it re-opens for the 2003 season on Saturday, May 3.
Wharton's bedroom is arguably the most important room in the 42-room mansion, because it was where she did her writing. In fact, the 1905 publication of The House of Mirth, written in her bedroom at The Mount, was a major turning point in Wharton's life. The book was an instant best-seller, quickly achieving "the most rapid sale of any book ever published by Scribner," according to her publisher. Its success and critical acclaim gave Wharton the confidence she needed to wholeheartedly pursue her writing career, a vocation that was not considered "proper" for a woman of her background and social class.
While living at The Mount, Wharton wrote five other novels, three nonfiction works and numerous short stories. She went on to write dozens more works and in 1921 became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for her novel The Age of Innocence.
Gaillard Lapsley, a friend of many years, painted a vivid picture of Wharton at work in her bedroom at The Mount each morning: "She would have her writing board perilously furnished with an ink-pot on her knee, the dog of the moment under her left elbow and the bed strewn with correspondence, newspapers and books." As she finished a page, Wharton would drop it to the floor, to be collected later for typing by her secretary.
Edith Wharton was one of America's greatest writers and an influential authority on architecture, landscape gardening and interior design. She designed and built The Mount in 1902 based on the principles outlined in her best-selling 1897 book The Decoration of Houses, which is still in print today. To date Edith Wharton Restoration has invested $9 million to restore much of the mansion and most of the gardens to their original splendor. The bedroom suite restoration will complement The Mount's continuing exhibition of main rooms decorated by leading interior designers, which continues through 2004.
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