Edith Wharton on Film

The American writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937) disliked film. She saw movies as a cheap, sentimental form of entertainment that threatened to dethrone literary realism. Despite her feelings toward the medium, though, there is no denying the role that it played in spreading and securing her legacy over the course of the twentieth century. Between 1918 and 2000, more than a dozen feature films were made based on Wharton’s work. The last two decades, though, have seen almost none. This essay considers the history of Wharton’s relationship with cinema in order to figure out why that is, arguing that Wharton’s fiction resists blockbuster-style sentimentality, and it addresses multiple filmmakers’ failed attempts to adapt her celebrated novel The Custom of the Country.