Constellation Similarity Assertions

Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937

Born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, in New York City, Edith Wharton was from birth a part of the wealthy New York society she depicted so vividly in her fiction. Through her father, George Frederic Jones, and her mother, Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, she could claim descent from three families whose names were synonymous with wealth and position: the Stevenses, Rhinelanders, and Schermerhorns.

Educated at home with tutors and exposed at an early age to the classics in her father's large library, Edith Wharton showed early literary precocity. Although it cannot be said that her parents encouraged her writing, Lucretia Jones recognized her daughter's talent and in 1878 had a slim volume of her adolescent poems (titled simply Verses) privately printed and distributed to family and friends. By this time, however, Edith had already completed an unpublished novella of some 30,000 words that she called Fast and Loose.

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