During her lifetime, and after, Edith Wharton could never escape the attentions of those who wished to label her as a writer whose art was of secondary importance to the other facts of her life. She was often described by a literary establishment wishing to put her and her enormous popularity in a smaller, less eminent place as a grande dame, detached from the real business of American letters, or as a pale imitator of her friend, Henry James. For many of her contemporaries and for succeeding generations, her work often seems to have been considered as secondary to the interest generated by her life and, indeed, her lifestyle. Even where her art is the matter under consideration, the critics have had difficulty in focusing on the work alone. She was berated in her early work for exposing the secrets of old New York to the attentions of the general public and criticized again in her later life for writing about an America that her long residence in France supposedly disqualified her from understanding. She was admonished for writing about working-class Americans, especially in her New England novellas Ethan Frome (1911) and Summer (1917), but also for writing about the leisure-class Americans of the Jazz Age and the manner in which they conducted their lives in the fashionable resorts of both America and Europe. To a certain extent this atmosphere of disapprobation was a central plank of the relationship she built up with the reading public as well as the critical establishment, although it was never one that she was comfortable with; for example, she instructed her publisher, Scribner's, to remove the words ‘for the first time the veil has been lifted from New York society’ from the jacket of her novel The House of Mirth (1905), as she found the claim sensationalist and vulgar.

Edith Wharton could be said to have had a literary life, but this was a life she struggled to achieve for herself: turning her back on the leisure-class New York of her youth and making friends among many of the most cultured men and women of her generation in both Europe and America, keeping up her writing through the most difficult personal and cultural upheavals, and entering with gusto into the magazine and publishing house marketplace.