Character Study

Edith Wharton's Home, the Mount, Has Much to Say About the Author, And About Modern Curatorial Challenges

LENOX, Mass.

The Mount, Edith Wharton's home in the Berkshires, presents a face to the world rather like the old saying about mullet haircuts: business in front, party in the back. The main entrance is uninviting, set into the dull face of a largish country house. This rather doughty side of the house must have made an even more modest impression when it was new, in 1902, at least by the standards of Wharton's neighbors, the Vanderbilts and Morgans, who were building millionaire "cottages" of marble, with names like Elm Court and Ventfort Hall.

The front of the Mount is deceptive, however, a formal face that hides an Italian villa with a Palladian staircase on the opposite, more private side. From the rear terrace, which is the focal point of the house and accessible only to invited guests, one can see Wharton's recently restored gardens, with a line of linden trees, manicured walks and fountains. Beyond that is a small lake and the mountains. Wharton, who lived at the Mount during some of the most productive years of her life, loved her terrace, where she listened to Henry James and enjoyed moments of solitude. The Mount, she wrote, was a place where one could "read and let things settle down with one, undisturbed."

For all its quiet and leafy splendor, the Mount is a nervous place these days.

After Wharton sold the house in 1911, it passed through various hands, serving as a girls' boarding school for more than 30 years, then as home to a theater company until it was taken over by the nonprofit Edith Wharton Restoration organization, which opened it to the public in 2002. Like other small "house" museums around the country -- homes identified with noted historical figures -- the Mount is suffering financially. It was threatened with foreclosure in February, which led to an intense fundraising effort and a six-month reprieve that ends on Oct. 31.

There are thousands of small house museums across the country, run with varying degrees of financial and curatorial professionalism, devoted to luminaries of widely disparate luminosity. It is a strange and capricious way to preserve history -- a patchwork of buildings, many of them in disrepair, most of them desperately in need of money. Even the National Trust for Historic Preservation's president, Richard Moe, was inspired to ask (philosophically) in a 2002 essay: "Are There Too Many House Museums?"

Susan Wissler, acting director of Edith Wharton Restoration, believes the house still has interest for the public, and that it can be kept open.

"We have mounted quite a successful and robust season," she says, of the Mount's 2008 events calendar of lectures, readings and concerts. "And we've tightened the fiscal belt."

The bank that is holding much of the debt, says Wissler, is "reluctantly playing the bad guy, but they are really rooting for us." If the Mount can raise $3 million before the October deadline, an anonymous donor has promised a matching grant of another $3 million. And that may be enough to get ahead of their debt. But after years of budget shortfalls, the Mount owes some $9.5 million, and tickets to visit the house, which cost $16, cover only half the cost of running the place.

The Mount's supporters are adamant that it must be saved. After $14 million in renovations, at least one floor of the house is looking very fine, and the gardens are magnificent. The house received a Preserve America Presidential Award from President Bush in 2005.

And then there are the Mount's intrinsic virtues: That it was Wharton's home, where she wrote novels such as "The House of Mirth" (in bed, in her third-floor bedroom), where she entertained Henry James and other artists, where she kept her library and built one of the most successful literary careers of any woman ever.

But the Mount is significant not just because the writer lived there. Wharton was instrumental in the design of the house, and her first book, "The Decoration of Houses" (co-written with architect Ogden Codman Jr.), is a classic primer in the subject.