Remembering The Mount

Apple TV's The Buccaneers has me thinking about Edith Wharton's old house

If there was a harder comedown from anticipation to reality than when I watched the first episode of Apple TV’s eponymous adaptation of Edith Wharton’s unfinished but finely-drawn novel The Buccaneers, I can’t think of one. Ugh. It happened as soon as I heard the music, which made very clear that this was going to be a modernized take on the book, more a response to a prompt asking for “Edith Wharton, but make it Shonda Rhimes and also YA,” than anything resembling its source material.

It got me thinking about The Mount, the home in Lenox, MA where Wharton wrote many of her books and which I had a chance to visit many years ago when my husband and I were in the area for our friends’ wedding. It’s also where Wharton honed her skill for interior and landscape design (the subject of another book of hers, titled The Decoration of Houses). Which is to say that there are few places in the world that so perfectly meet at the intersection of my intellectual and personal interests in the 19th century, Gilded Age literature, complicated women, interior design, and peeking into the lives and homes of disgustingly rich people.

The home’s setting in the Berkshires made it an ideal retreat from the heat and bustle of New York, and for the same reason a comfortable and quiet place for Wharton to write. No wonder inspiration came so easily to her when she lived in the home, where any moments of writer’s block could have been worked out with the help of a walk through the maze of gardens around the property. More than once I found myself wishing I could post up for a few days, myself, to get some writing done. (Thankfully, The Mount now hosts several writers-in-residence each year.)

I’ll be in back Lenox in January (to visit a place you’ll get to hear about in one of next year’s newsletters), which will give me a reason to go back to The Mount. Not just for the sake of retracing my last steps there, but because the museum staff seems to have done something that is increasingly common - and necessary - for tours at similar kinds of residences in places like Newport, RI, which is to center the lives and experiences of the nameless servants who kept these grand homes clean, warm, and in the kind of working order that allowed the wealthy owners to do what they did best: luxuriate.