Biography: Edith Wharton

Edith Newbold Jones was born in New York City in 1862. She was the youngest child and only daughter of a socially prominent family. She was educated privately, in which case she spent most of her childhood traveling with her family in Europe, mostly in Italy and France. In 1885 at the age of twenty-three she did what she was expected to do and she married Edward “Teddy” Wharton, an affable Boston banker. The Whartons began their married life in New York and were soon part of the New York social scene, dividing their time between New York, Newport, and Bar Harbor. Later they built a home in Lenox, Massachusetts. But f...