Wharton, Edith [Newbold Jones]
Wharton, Edith [Newbold Jones]( 1862–1937),member of a distinguished New York family, was privately educated in the U.S. and abroad. Her short stories, The Greater Inclination (1899), were followed by The Touchstone (1900), published in England as A Gift from the Grave (1900), which showed the influence of Henry James both in its form as a novelette and in its occupation with ethical values. It is concerned with a man torn between his desire to obtain money to marry the woman he loves and his reluctance to sell the love letters written to him by a celebrated woman. The Valley of Decision (1902), her first long novel, is notable for its depiction of an 18th-century Italian aristocrat of liberal sympathies. After another novelette, Sanctuary (1903), she wrote The House of Mirth (1905), the story of a New York girl whose attempts to make a brilliant marriage lead to ostracism because she breaks conventional...
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