A gift from the grave. By

Edith Wharton ( born Edith Newbold Jones; January 24, 1862 - August 11, 1937) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. Wharton combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight. She was well acquainted with many of her era's other literary and public figures, including Theodore Roosevelt. Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones to George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander at their brownstone at 14 West Twenty-third Street in New York City. She had two much older brothers, Frederic Rhinelander, who was sixteen, and Henry Edward, who was eleven. She was baptized April 20, 1862, Easter Sunday, at Grace Church.To her friends and family she was known as "Pussy Jones".The saying "keeping up with the Joneses" is said to refer to her father's family.She was also related to the Rensselaer family, the most prestigious of the old patroon families. She had a lifelong lovely friendship with her Rhinelander niece, landscape architect Beatrix Farrand of Reef Point in Bar Harbor, Maine. Edith was born during the Civil War; she was three years old when the South surrendered. After the war, the family traveled extensively in Europe.From 1866 to 1872, the Jones family visited France, Italy, Germany, and Spain.During her travels, the young Edith became fluent in French, German, and Italian. At the age of ten, she suffered from typhoid fever while the family was at a spa in the Black Forest. After the family returned to the United States in 1872, they spent their winters in New York and their summers in Newport, Rhode Island.While in Europe, she was educated by tutors and governesses. She rejected the standards of fashion and etiquette that were expected of young girls at the time, intended to enable women to marry well and to be displayed at balls and parties. She thought these requirements were superficial and oppressive. Edith wanted more education than she received, so she read from her father's library and from the libraries of her father's friends. Her mother forbade her to read novels until she was married, and Edith complied with this command. Edith began writing poetry and fiction as a young girl. She attempted to write a novel at age eleven. Her first publication was a translation of the German poem, "Was die Steine Erzählen" ("What the Stones Tell") by Heinrich Karl Brugsch, which earned her $50. She was 15 at the time. Her family did not wish her name to appear in print because the names of upper class women of the time only appeared in print to announce birth, marriage, and death. Consequently, the poem was published under the name of a friend's father, E. A. Washburn. He was a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson and supported women's education. He played a pivotal role in Edith's efforts to educate herself, and he encouraged her ambition to write professionally.In 1877, at the age of 15, she secretly wrote a 30,000 word novella "Fast and Loose". In 1878 her father arranged for a collection of two dozen original poems and five translations, Verses, to be privately published. In 1880 she had five poems published anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly, then a revered literary magazine. Despite these early successes, she was not encouraged by her family nor her social circle, and though she continued to write, she did not publish anything again until her poem, "The Last Giustiniani", was published in Scribner's Magazine in October 1889. Edith was engaged to Henry Stevens in 1882 after a two-year courtship. The month the two were to marry, the engagement abruptly ended. In 1885, at age 23, she married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, who was 12 years her senior...