Photo of the Day: View From Terrace, Edith Wharton’s ‘The Mount,’ Lenox MA

Nothing about Edith Wharton ever feels old and tired for me—not her luminous fiction, not the details of her life, and not her the home in which she lived toward the start of the 20^th century, The Mount in Lenox, MA.

While here in this beautiful estate, Wharton wrote the first books that secured her reputation, The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome.

But tonight on TCM, as I watched Martin Scorsese’s 1993 meticulously filmed adaptation of her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence, it was easier to imagine the restless aristocrats played by Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder taking tea inside this beautiful home, gathering in its cozy library to puzzle out their romantic destinies—or, in the photo I took here while on vacation in this Berkshire landmark in late August 2017, strolling about in the garden just off the back terrace, perhaps in a crowd brought together for a wedding or archery contest, but isolated by their powerlessness to reach their elusive country of personal freedom.