Jan 2, 2010
Edith Newbold Jones was born into a socially prominent old New York family. It is said that the cliché “keeping up with the Joneses” was coined in reference to her father’s family and its considerable wealth. The genteel society that shaped the young Edith Wharton valued, above all, respectability—or at least its appearance—and mandated strict conformity to social customs and conventions. Wharton’s Old New York was a patrician world of refinement, one that wore its wealth tastefully and quietly, but one that suffocated individual expression....
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