Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton was born into the closed New York society she would later dissect, and she dissected it from the inside, knowing exactly which rules were never spoken aloud. She was educated by governesses, discouraged from novels, and married at twenty-three into a union that lasted twenty-eight unhappy years. The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence are studies in how a society destroys people politely, by making the alternatives unthinkable rather than forbidden. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She settled permanently in France, ran hostels and workrooms for refugees through the First World War, and was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour for it. She also wrote the definitive book of her generation on interior decoration, which tells you how seriously she took the rooms her characters are trapped in.