Edith Wharton Goes to War

On July 1, Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian novelist and war correspondent, died of injuries sustained when a Russian missile struck a crowded pizza restaurant in the city of Kramatorsk. That senseless attack not only removed a bright literary light; it also called attention to the prominent role women have played in reporting on the war’s atrocities. From high-profile reporters like the BBC’s Lyse Doucet and CNN’s Clarissa Ward to ordinary Ukrainians writing on social media, women have been courageously covering the conflict since it began in February 2022.

Women reporting on war may be taken for granted today, but this wasn’t always the case. An unlikely pioneer emerged during World War I: Edith Wharton, an impromptu war correspondent far better known for her novels about Gilded Age passions.

Wharton was no stranger to conflict, beginning in the salons of New York. Born into a prominent family in 1862, she chafed at the conventions of Victorian society. Her fiction dissected the decorous combat of the drawing room, waged by gestures as subtle as a lover’s narrowed eyes or a snub in a corridor. In the wake of a failed marriage, she decamped to Paris in 1911. Three years later World War I broke out.

Wharton launched a series of humanitarian projects, including refugee shelters and workshops to support what she called ”unemployed work-girls.” In February 1915 the French Red Cross asked her to survey the needs of military hospitals at the front. Energized, she proposed additional trips to write a series of magazine articles. “Foreign correspondents were still rigorously excluded from the war zone,” she recalled, but she was aided by a friend in the French diplomatic corps, who persuaded the High Command to make an exception.

“Even if in my ignorance I should stumble on some important military secret,” Wharton wrote, “there would be little risk of its betrayal in articles which could not possibly be ready for publication until several months later; while the description of what I saw might bring home to American readers some of the dreadful realities of war.” She traveled to the front five times between February and August 1915, publishing her reports in Scribner’s Magazine and a book called “Fighting France.”

Wharton had long been an enthusiast of motor tours, usually accompanied by her friend Walter Berry. Now they set off for the front, equipped with their customary picnic basket as well as cigarettes, chocolates and medical supplies “laden to the roof.” Wharton wrote to her editor Charles Scribner, “We were given opportunities no one else has had of seeing things at the front. I was in the first line trenches, in bombarded towns.” Her dispatches were charged with adrenaline and fashioned with a novelist’s eye.

She was frequently the first reporter on the scene, often with little competition. French, Russian and German correspondents were barred from the front, and the French government limited accounts of battles on its own soil. In June 1915 the British government approved a small corps of correspondents but required them to wear British uniforms, be accompanied by military officers and submit all professional and private correspondence to the censors.

Even the legendary American reporter Richard Harding Davis, who had covered the Spanish-American War, was frustrated. When he made his way to the front from Brussels, he was captured by German troops and court-martialed as a spy, narrowly escaping execution. Female journalists struggled as well. The British correspondent Dorothy Lawrence disguised herself as a male soldier to report from the front but was arrested as a spy 10 days later and confined to a French convent.

Wharton enjoyed several advantages. A woman in her 50s, inclined to stoutness and draped in fur, she cut an unthreatening figure. Traveling in her own motorcar, a Mercedes named “Her,” gave Wharton freedom of movement, and her “good friends” in the French military supplied interviews and lodging.

She was denied permission to travel to the embattled region of Verdun in February 1915 until the officer in charge asked, “Are you the author of ‘House of Mirth’? If you are, the General says you shall have a pass.” As a result, Wharton wrote, “We actually witnessed the victorious assault from a cottage garden at Clermont-en-Argonne,” with “the rush of French infantry up the slopes, the feathery drift of the French gun-smoke lower down, and, high up, on the wooded crest along the sky, the red lightning and white puffs of the German artillery.”

Wharton saw her war reporting as an extension of her humanitarian work. It was a far cry from “The House of Mirth.” “The great army of refugees,” she wrote, included “men and women with sordid bundles on their backs…children dragging at their hands and tired-out babies at their shoulders.” They wore a “stare of dumb bewilderment—or that other look of concentrated horror, full of the reflection of flames and ruins.” Shell-shocked soldiers, she wrote, were “unwounded but battered, shattered, frost-bitten, deafened and half-paralyzed wreckage of the awful struggle.”

Wharton proudly described herself as a “propagandist,“ a label that would have fit most World War I reporters on every side. She made little effort to appear neutral, calling the Germans “beasts, “brutes” and “monsters.” Surveying a valley ridden with German sharpshooters, she wrote, “For a minute I had the sense of an all-pervading, invisible power of evil, a saturation of the whole landscape with some hidden vitriol of hate.”

In 1916, Wharton’s young relative Philip Newbold Rhinelander joined the American ambulance corps in France. She wrote to his father, “I am so glad you have given him this opportunity of seeing this great moment of history, and lending a hand in the cause. I agree with you that such an experience ought to last throughout life, and I am sure Newbold is the kind to make the most of it.”

But Newbold’s experience didn’t last long. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, he joined the Army Air Corps and was killed during his first sortie, at the age of 23. His plane was shot down by a squadron commanded by 25-year-old Hermann Göring, the future Nazi leader.

Wharton’s two works of fiction about the war, “The Marne” (1918) and “A Son at the Front” (1923) were not her most successful efforts. It was “The Age of Innocence,” a return to the drawing room skirmishes of her youth, that won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. It fell to the French to recognize her wartime contributions, with the Legion of Honor and the Prix de Vertu from the Académie Française. “Well, it’s not a bad thing to have—at 58,” she dryly noted.

Perhaps now, a century later, we should read beyond Wharton’s most celebrated novels and their society skirmishes. In France she pursued the real thing. Her war reporting reveals a surprisingly modern sensibility, a bold woman who shrugged off Victorian conventions to engage with the burning questions of her—and our—time.

Anne Nelson is a research fellow at the Salzman Institute for War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, and the author of Red Orchestra: The Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler, a new edition of which will be published by Bloomsbury on August 24.