The novelist Gore Vidal remarked in "Of Writers and Class: In Praise of Edith Wharton" that "At best, there are only three or four American novelists who can be thought of as 'major' and Edith Wharton is one." He regards Wharton and Henry James as "the two great American masters of the novel." And he remarks that "now that the prejudice against the female writer is on the wane, they look to be exactly what they are: giants, equals, the tutelary and benign gods of our American literature." If that statement is not justice to Edith Wharton, it will be a long time in coming.
Born into the conservative, fashionable, and wealthy society of old New York in 1862, Edith Jones, the daughter of George Frederic and Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, was privately tutored, traveled extensively in Europe as a girl, and was married off on 29 April 1885 to Edward Wharton, a man considerably older than she and with few intellectual or artistic interests. During the early years of her marriage, she seems to have done little more than play the role of society matron and hostess in New York and Newport.
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