Edith Newbold Jones, who grew up to become the writer Edith Wharton, was born on January 24, 1862, in her parents' spacious brownstone at 14 West Twenty-third Street, just off Fifth Avenue and the fashionable Madison Square. At her daughter's birth, Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, a society matron in her late thirties, had been married for eighteen years to George Frederic Jones, a gentleman of leisure. They had two sons--Frederic, aged sixteen, who in autumn 1862 would enter Columbia College, and Henry, aged eleven, known to his friends as "Harry." A handsome, worldly woman very certain of her social place as the Mrs. Jones among an extended family of Knickerbocker descendants, Lucretia had long since left behind nursery duties. Indeed, the Twenty-third Street house had no nursery and one had to be improvised. We know nothing of Lucretia's feelings about her third pregnancy, but it broke the pattern of an otherwise predictable existence. Late and unexpected, the pregnancy also betrayed her active sexuality, a possible embarrassment for a woman who could be priggish about such matters. The baby's birth gave rise to gossip about Lucretia's private life and speculation about Edith's paternity.

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Edith's birthplace, a five-story, chocolate-brown town house, so marked her childish imagination that years later, she could recall every detail of its setting and furnishings--the low steps leading to a front vestibule painted in Pompeian red and trimmed with a frieze of stenciled lotus leaves; the heavily draped white-and-gold drawing rooms where straight-backed chairs cushioned in purple brocade stood at attention like sentinels along the walls; the central staircase, carpeted in red velvet, spiraling toward the upper regions of the tall house. From this vantage point, Edith observed the comings and goings of her parents and their friends. She watched her mother, a figure of best-dressed womanhood, welcome dinner guests or sweep down the staircase to her waiting carriage, "resplendent in train, aigrette and opera cloak."

The 1860 national census gives an interior view of this household prior to Edith's arrival. Of more than twenty George Joneses living in the borough of Manhattan, only one is listed as a "gentleman"--George Frederic Jones, owner of a town house valued at $20,000 and personal property at $6,000. (He spent far more money on his Newport cottage, built in 1861 and valued at $60,000.) Like similar establishments, the house was staffed primarily by Irish immigrant women, hired cheaply, as were the black cook and coachman. The comparative understatement of the Joneses' style of living marked them as "Society of Birth" with inherited social standing, people who kept to their circle of peers and shunned nouveau riche pretentiousness. Although Lucretia strictly adhered to rules of correct speech and behavior, she did not adopt the formal English model of house management (as her daughter would), perhaps because she was not as fastidious as she expected others to be. A perfectly regulated household required a good deal of discipline on the part of its mistress, and Lucretia was indolent by nature. A woman settled comfortably into her worldly security, she did not put herself out for others. Following the customs of her class, she chose inertia over activity, except when it came to shopping, for which she had an inexhaustible reserve of energy. Edith later recalled that her mother expected much of her servants but gave them no consideration.

The most important and imposing figure among the seven-member staff was Maryland-born Mary Johnson, aged forty-two in 1860, an exraordinarily talented cook who prepared delicious southern fare. Edith emembered her as a "gaunt towering woman of a rich bronzy black," with golden loops in her ears and brightly colored kerchiefs on her head. Illiterate, she cooked from memory and inspiration. Lucretia Jones, writing in a "script of ethereal elegance," recorded Mary's special dishes alongside Rhinelander-Stevens family recipes. George Frederic, a gastronome whose mother, Elizabeth Schermerhorn, was reputed to have been the best cook in New York, presided proudly over his table and served excellent wines from the family cellar. Three Irish domestics--Mary Kiernan and two young sisters, Margaret and Ann Flood--kept the house in order. George Watts, a thirty-year-old black man from New York, served as coachman, and William Strong, aged twenty, was warder. Also listed on the census roll was a James Blake, possibly the tutor to Frederic and Henry Jones. Although their friends used students from Columbia College or called into service elder bachelor cousins to tutor their children, the Joneses--who placed a high priority on the quality of their sons' education-engaged an Englishman as tutor. He may have resided in the Jones household; in any case, his name was linked amorously with that of Lucretia Jones.

The central figure in Edith's infant world was Hannah Doyle ("Doyley"), her red-cheeked and humorous Irish nurse. Formerly Harry's nursemaid, Doyley had been kept on in the household as a seamstress. Called back into nursery service at age forty-two, she lovingly tended red-haired, blue-eyed Edith through those first winter months. When spring arrived, Doyley wheeled the baby in a high-framed black carriage to Madison Square Park for afternoon outings. She was the "warm cocoon," the "rich all-permeating presence" in which infant Edith lived "safe and sheltered." "How I pity all children who have not had a Doyley," Edith wrote some seventy years later, "a nurse who has always been there, who is as established as the sky and as warm as the sun, who understands everything, feels everything, can arrange everything, and combines all the powers of the Divinity with the compassion of a mortal heart like one's own!" Doyley's loving smile was the one constant in a childhood world that for all its comforts was sometimes lonely and darkened by illness.

Mysteries of Love and War

Edith entered a world divided by the Civil War, its rancor and deadly slaughter forming the distant background of her first three years of life. On the raw and bleak Friday of her birth, New Yorkers looked south to Cincinnati, Ohio, where Federal army troops, shin-deep in mud after days of rain, attempted to break the Confederate line. "Our Artillery Operating Within Sixty Yards of Enemy's Lines," proclaimed the New York Times, its front pages filled with special reports and regional dispatches of some half-dozen battles. Three months later, on Easter Sunday, Union forces were engaged in the most dramatic naval engagement yet in the war, the battle for New Orleans, which would secure the Federal naval blockade of southern ports. Bursts of shellfire filled the sky with black smoke, and before the week was out, the city was in Union hands.

In New York that spring morning, Easter Sunday, the Joneses prepared for their daughter's baptism. Swaddled in white lace and christening cap, Edith squinted in the sun as the family brougham made its way south to Grace Church, the white marble Gothic Revival structure on the corner of Broadway and Eleventh Street. George Frederic and Lucretia were not members of this congregation, nor would Edith ever be, but entering its baptismal rolls guaranteed one's place in the social hierarchy of the city. Edith was duly enrolled, the only official notice of her birth. (No record exists in the New York City Department of Records.) In the church registry, her name appears on the same page as a child born to George Frederic Jones's cousin Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, wife of William Backhouse Astor; the Mrs. Astor, she was the acknowledged leader of New York society. Entered just beneath the name "Edith Newbold Jones" is that of a baby girl born to Thomas House Taylor, fourth rector of the church, who baptized all three of the Jones children.

Standing before Dr. Taylor on April 20, 1862, were Edith's parents and her sponsors--Lucretia Jones's favorite sister, Mary Elizabeth Rhinelander, and her husband, Thomas H. Newbold (for whom Edith was named), and a cousin, Miss Caroline King. No sponsor represented the Joneses, although members of George Frederic's family had sponsored Edith's brothers. Following the name "Jones" on the registry pages for each child is the notation "George F & ." On Edith's record, a clerk later penciled in the name "Lucretia Rhinelander." These clerical oversights (unique in the Grace Church baptismal registry) might be explained as a too strict enforcement of the code of feminine propriety by which a woman's name was to appear in print only three times--at birth, marriage, and death--were it not that Edith seemed to suffer from a lack of mother love. The paid guardianship of nurses and governesses covered over this absence of the maternal. The father's name, properly recorded in the official book, covers over another gap--the mystery of paternity.

Two rumors circulated about the circumstances of Edith's birth. One version claimed that she was the daughter of her brothers' tutor; in the other, she was the daughter of a Scottish lord. The first story was by far the better-known tale; Edith heard it long after the principals were dead. Cultivated in the hothouse climate of a narrow and inbred society, these tales emerge against the backdrop of two highly publicized scandals in the Jones and Stevens families in the 1860s and 1870s. The events that befell Lucretia's cousin Mary Stevens Strong and George Alfred Jones (George Frederic's cousin) mixed tragedy and farce as they exposed the "sins of society," passionate intrigue enacted behind heavily draped windows of Manhattan brownstones.'

Mary Stevens Strong, daughter of a prominent banker and littérateur, made the front pages of New York newspapers when in the early 1860s, her husband, Peter Remson Strong, sued her for divorce. Married in 1853, they had three children and apparently lived together happily until Peter's brother came to live with them after his wife's death. He and Mary entered into an "illicit intimacy" that, "in a fit of remorse," she confessed to her husband in January 1862. Word of the couple's separation spread through New York society the week of Edith Jones's birth, but three years passed before the spectacular divorce and child custody trial opened in Superior Court on November 25, 1865. Key testimony came from the children's governess, who provided "damaging revelations" about her mistress. City newspapers offered editorial opinions, the New York Herald claiming that the tragedy indicated "deep social demoralization... due to the influence of the Academy of Music and theaters. "

The second scandal broke in October 1872, when the financial misdealings of George Alfred Jones became public. To support a mistress, he had defrauded some of the most revered society families--the Auchmutys, Chadwicks, and Costers, among others. Under threat of criminal proceedings, he and his wife were forced to surrender their real estate and personal property, raising a sum covering about 40 percent of his defalcations. They then retired to Bristol, Connecticut, where he manufactured clocks, lamp parts, and dolls to pay off his liability. New York diarist George Templeton Strong noted that Jones had earlier been led into "evil courses" by losing some $60,000 (almost $1,000,000 at today's rates) in a mechanized "walking-doll" enterprise.

These were not isolated instances of immoral behavior in old society, but newspaper accounts of the court trials made them difficult to ignore. We do not know Lucretia's feelings about her cousin, Mary Stevens Strong, but Edith remembered that her mother "always darted away from George Alfred's name after pronouncing it." When, as a married woman, Edith at last found the courage to ask what he had done, her mother's "muttered" response combined scorn with "excited curiosity." "Some woman," she answered. "Thank heaven she was not responsible for him--he belonged to my father's side of the family!" The family washed its hands of George Alfred; except as a "nursery hobgoblin" to scare children, he ceased to exist.

In Edith's opinion, Lucretia maintained an "incurably prosaic" view of life, yet the two stories that circulated about her were anything but commonplace. In their tragicomic eccentricity, these tales exceeded anything Lucretia might have discovered in the popular novels she read on afternoons when her husband attended services at Calvary Church or strolled along the avenues. The English tutor was said to have gone West subsequently and been killed by Indians in the Badlands, or perhaps with General Custer in the battle of the Little Big Horn. If pedantic and proper Lucretia seemed an unlikely adulteress, even less does Edith's brief mention of her brothers' "extremely cultivated English tutor" fit a frontiersman felled by Indians. Yet, the rumor, which persisted beyond Edith Wharton's death, joined illicit love to frontier adventure.

Many foreigners went West in the late 1860s, and some joined Custer to fight Indians and secure lands in the westward expansion. But these men were usually immigrants with little or no education, not English public school graduates who could work for private wages. The Civil War created Custer, making him a major general while still in his mid-twenties. After the war, he became the darling of East Coast society and gained financial support from captains of industry and financiers such as August Belmont, who invested in frontier exploration. Custer may have met the tutor through New York society connections; in autumn 1866, the tutor would have been looking for work, the Joneses having left for Europe to wait out the postwar economic depression. Boat passenger and visa records reveal no "James Blake," or anyone else serving as teacher for Harry Jones (then sixteen years old), among the George Frederic Jones entourage.

The tutor might also have been among the Civil War veterans who comprised Custer's first troops of Indian fighters. War experience would explain his fighting capabilities; if he did father a child by the wife of his employer and thus needed to disappear from New York society, the Union forces would have offered a ready answer to his problem. According to the rumor, the tutor paid for his Indian adventures with his life. But his name is not included on the roll call of 262 men who died with General Custer on June 26, 1876, at the Little Big Horn River in Montana, in a battle with Lakotas led by Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Rain in the Face that lasted but twenty minutes.

A second, and in some ways more intriguing, story about Edith Wharton's birth combines May-December romance with society high life. In this whispered tale, she was said to be the daughter of Henry Peter Brougham, who gave his name to the elegant horse-drawn carriage. The first baron of Brougham and Vaux, redheaded Henry Peter was a learned, high-strung, passionate, and witty Scotsman who was appointed to high positions in the British government, first as attorney general and later as lord chancellor. An erudite and fiery lawyer, a political liberal who abhorred slavery and fought for educational and legal reform, he was also a lifelong student of the physical sciences, founder of the famed Edinburgh Speculative Society, and regular contributor to the Edinburgh Review.

When, in 1820, he successfully defended Queen Caroline against her husband's accusation of infidelity, Brougham became the most popular man in England, his portrait appearing on pub signs and in shop windows. Endowed with an excellent memory and a seemingly boundless command of language, he loved literature and good conversation and was a facile writer and powerful orator who accented his speech with angular motions of his arms. His oversized hands and awkward movements made him a frequent subject of caricature, but he was known for his strong "animal spirits" and said to have been a womanizer even in late old age. Restless and easily excited, he had a broad sense of humor and a keen grasp of the ludicrous. His qualities of mind and shared physical and psychological traits with his presumed daughter give the tale a certain comic truth value.

By 1860, when he was appointed chancellor of Edinburgh University, Lord Brougham lived most of the year in Cannes. Entertaining lavishly at his Villa Eléanore, he succeeded in transforming the little fishing village into a society capital. Like other wealthy Americans, George Frederic and Lucretia Jones often wintered in Cannes and were probably there in spring of 1861, when Lucretia became pregnant with Edith. The most improbable element of the paternity story, however, was Lord Brougham's age: when he was supposed to have bedded Lucretia and fathered Edith, he was nearly eighty-two years old.

That two such stories (and perhaps others we do not know of) circulated about Edith's birth suggests that neither was true, or at least not provable. They were efforts to explain a late pregnancy and the birth of a child so unlike other offspring of New York society as to seem a changeling. But each tale strikes a blow at Lucretia Jones's carefully guarded respectability. The first rumor cuts her down to size; in her womanly desires, she is weak, silly, even pitiable, taking whatever is closest at hand to satisfy herself. In the second tale, she is an object of outright ridicule. That haughty Mrs. Jones should have given herself to an ancient Scottish lord! The whispered tales speak volumes about the feelings Lucretia engendered in New York-Newport society--jealousy, resentment, envy, bitterness. They also support Edith's views of her mother as a closed and clannish woman who held to the narrowest definitions of "nice people" and "polite society," but who took for herself all the privileges of her social standing. An acknowledged mondaine, she may have given herself a margin of indiscretion she would not have allowed others. In both stories, George Frederic Jones plays the foolish cuckold, pretending not to notice his wife's infidelity, thus avoiding scandal.

If high society resented Lucretia's aloofness, it was openly curious about Edith, whose difference from young women of her circle and others of her family soon revealed itself. She was too precocious, too well read, too introspective, too firm in her opinions. The rumors purported to explain the source of Edith's talent while also undercutting her social status (the tutor story) and mocking aspects of her temperament and demeanor (the Lord Brougham story).

Edith did not learn of the rumors about her birth until later in life, but her fiction--especially during the extraordinarily prolific period of the 1920s--contains many tales of illegitimacy and secret love affairs, children given away or hidden away to avoid social scandal, and marriages of pretense. Two close women friends of Edith provided anecdotal evidence about the first rumor of her parentage and her reactions to it. Matilda Travers Gay, daughter of a prominent New York lawyer and man-about-town, William R. Travers, knew Edith as a child and maintained that she was the "image" of the tutor. George Frederic knew the circumstances of his wife's pregnancy, she said, and had agreed to love and care for Edith as though she were his own, even providing a substantial legacy for her in his will. Another friend, Margaret Terry Chanler, said that Edith not only had reason to believe she was the tutor's daughter, but also had once tried to trace him, only to learn that he was long dead.

Prior to World War I, when Edith was in her late forties, she had an extramarital affair hidden from her husband and their closest friends, and even from her servants, whose respect she did not want to lose. Her brothers, Frederic and Harry, had fewer scruples in this regard. When in the early 1890s Frederic was caught in an affair with a New York nouveau riche, he left the United States for France, where he lived with the woman for a time under an assumed identity. Late in life, Harry fell in love with a European woman who pretended to be a countess but was in reality a gold digger. He may have fathered a child by her, his "niece," a young woman he supported financially. To provide for his "niece" and the countess (whom he married just before his death), he disinherited both his sister, Edith, and Frederic's daughter, Beatrix Jones.

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Edith Newbold Jones was born into a family rife with secrets and fearing scandal. Except for one, their secrets were sexual in nature. In 1863, Congress passed the National Conscription Act, declaring that all men between ages twenty and forty-five were eligible to serve in the "national forces." George Frederic Jones, forty-two years old, was required to register for the draft. In general, men of his class did register. They then paid commutation fees to keep their names out of the draft pool. (In the first year of the draft act, the U.S. Treasury collected nearly $12,000,000 in fees.) Others hired substitutes, usually bounders and fugitives, to take their places in the Union ranks. Grover Cleveland, future president of the United States, and Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., a member of the Joneses' social set, bought substitutes. Roosevelt suffered lifelong guilt for his action, guilt that his son Theodore, Edith's friend in adulthood, also felt. The New York City draft riots in July 1863 dramatized the rage against social and economic prejudice legalized under the draft act. George Frederic and his family were in Newport on Saturday, July 11, when violence erupted at 766 Third Avenue, the registry office where officials drew the first names for the draft. George Frederic had nothing to fear--he had not registered for the draft. For a gentleman, the risks of skirting the draft law were minimal; if caught, George Frederic would have paid a fine. He was not caught, and he apparently never revealed to anyone what he had done.

Edith was three years old when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. Grant would later become one of her great heroes, and among her favorite sayings was his answer when Lee asked if the Confederate cavalry should hand over its horses to Union forces: "No, you will need them for autumn ploughing," Grant said. These words, she told a friend years later, "are the expression of a whole world of feeling." In adulthood, she read widely on this period of American history, yet the war itself merits only a single mention in her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934): the war resulted in an economic depression that forced her father to economize by taking his family to Europe, where they could live more cheaply. This "happy misfortune" gave Edith six years in Europe during a formative period of her youth. The Civil War figures in only two of her fictional works, but they provide revealing glimpses into the social climate of that time. "The Spark," one of the Old New York tales (1924), describes New York's Seventh Regiment marching off to battle in the glory days of 1861 to the sounds of marching bands and cheering crowds of bystanders on Broadway, soldiers' pockets stuffed with sandwiches made by Charley Delmonico, the society restaurateur.

"The Lamp of Psyche," written in 1893, the thirtieth anniversary of the draft act, is usually read as a tale of love inspired by the myth of Cupid and Psyche. It concerns a Boston gentleman who cannot explain how he avoided going to war. Edith projects a version of herself onto Delia, his wife, described as a "much-indulged" daughter of "incredibly frivolous" parents, a woman who "had never been very pretty" and who took herself with "a dash of contemptuous pity." When she asks her husband why he did not serve in the Union army, he first says, "I don't know," and then admits "the truth": "I've completely forgotten the excellent reasons that I doubtless had at the time for remaining at home." His response destroys his wife's "ideal" of him. She sees that the "long-past action was still a part of his actual being; he had not outlived or disowned it; he had not even seen that it needed defending." This statement captures the attitude of many society gentlemen who found ways to avoid military service, and it might be read as Edith's belated commentary on her father, a member of the Republican party but someone who had little sense of civic responsibility and felt no call toward political activism. "The Lamp of Psyche" suggests that she had pondered (although perhaps never openly inquired about) his activities during the Civil War.

Among Edith's forebears was a military hero, her maternal great-grandfather, Major General Ebenezer Stevens. Drafted into the artillery during the Revolution, he captained a regiment that besieged Quebec and later fought under General John Burgoyne at Ticonderoga and Saratoga. On a trip to Washington, D.C., as a girl, Edith visited the Capitol Rotunda and saw her great-grandfather portrayed in John Trumbull's Revolutionary War paintings. She had a "secret partiality" for him, admiring his "abounding energy and joie de vivre" (known as the "Great Progenitor," he fathered fourteen children). More importantly, she considered him a "model citizen," a man who lived a life of purpose. In his courage and resolve, he stood quite alone among her ancestors, and she proudly took him as a guide for her own behavior."

Beginnings

Our first glimpse of Edith is a miniature by an unknown artist made when she was three years old. Pale blue eyes peer wide-eyed from a squarish, chubby-cheeked face. Her lips are drawn in a bow, eyebrows sketched by two curved lines, the red hair pulled into big sausage curls at the temples. Later pictures emphasize her high, wide forehead and undershot jaw. In only one portrait, made in Europe by Edward Harrison May when she was five years old, could she be called beautiful. Posed in half-profile in a pale-blue taffeta dress trimmed in gray fur, her hands clasping a vase of flowers and her red-gold hair cascading gloriously down her back, she appears as a Renaissance child whose soft eyes and gentle smile might have engaged a court painter.

This is a rare view of Edith Jones, who more often is shown behatted and beribboned, a young lady of fashion frozen in place, devoid of spontaneity or personality. In stylized studio portraits of her adolescence, she tries to meet the camera's expectations, rarely smiling and often staring sad-eyed into the distance. By contrast, a little-known childhood photograph shows her dressed in a plain pinafore, her hair uncurled and bangs badly cut. No Renaissance princess or fashion mannequin, she looks tired and somewhat forlorn--but recognizably a real child. These visual images of young Edith dramatically expose the contradictions between the "safe, guarded, monotonous" little-girl world described in her memoirs and the lived experience of an impulsive tomboy who grew into a "self-conscious child."

"Much governessed and guarded," Edith said she had little awareness of her parents' activities. Yet, she sensed that her mother felt burdened by George Frederic's taste for New York and Newport society and by the responsibility of overseeing two large houses. "Society is completely changed nowadays," Lucretia would say. "When I was first married we knew everyone who kept a carriage." If a carriage signified social status in the 1840s, by the 1870s--when Edith heard her mother sigh over the changed standards--men with new, industrial wealth provided carriages for their "fashionable hetaera." Lucretia Jones was shocked by this open defiance of social propriety and embarrassed when her young daughter impertinently pointed out on Fifth Avenue a smart canary-yellow brougham with a coachman and high-stepping bays. Edith should turn her head when the dark-blue Jones carriage passed the yellow one, her mother said. The shiny carriage that caught Edith's eye belonged to financier August Belmont, purchased for his lover, a woman he "kept" in a Madison Avenue apartment.

By the standards of the later Gilded Age, the Joneses lived a simple life centered on social and church activities. They entertained at small dinners and luncheons with close friends and relatives--except on January 1, the official opening of the winter season, when Lucretia gave an open house. In the Dutch tradition, the master of the house prepared a special punch from the family Madeira (which had "gone round the Cape") and then joined his men friends in making New Year's morning calls. At each house, they drank "bumpers of Madeira" and tasted baked goods and other delicacies served by the mistress of the house. Diarist George Templeton Strong recalled that Lucretia Jones's open house on New Year's Day 1860 was particularly festive.

George Frederic enjoyed strolling along New York streets, and by the time she was four, Edith regularly accompanied him. She dated the birth of her identity from a promenade up Fifth Avenue on a bright, sunny midwinter day in 1866. Dressed in a warm wool coat and pretty satin bonnet trimmed in tartan plaid, she looked out on the world through a filigreed veil of Shetland wool covering her eyes and cheeks, her small, mittened hand lying inside the "large safe hollow" of her father's warm hand. Along the way, they met her cousin Daniel Fearing. An outgoing little boy, he lifted her veil and planted a bold kiss on her cheek. She was thus "wakened to conscious life by the two tremendous forces of love and vanity." A web of sensations formed around this event--the feel of winter cold, the slanting sunlight seen through the filigreed veil, the little boy's kiss, her father's large, warm hand, and the wide avenue lined with brownstones. Possessing an acute visual memory and a delicate sensitivity to customs, manners, and emotional atmospheres, Edith later re-created Old New York in stories and novels by drawing on her earliest experiences. Walking with her father up Fifth Avenue that winter morning, she was already seeing the world through the eyes of a storyteller.

Edith descended from prosperous English and Dutch merchants, bankers, and lawyers: on her mother's side, the Stevenses, Ledyards, and Rhinelanders; on her father's, the Schermerhorns, Pendletons, and Joneses. George Frederic and Lucretia were distant cousins (related through the Gallatins), and although theirs were not aristocratic colonial families, they traced their New World roots back nearly three hundred years. When young George Frederic and "Lu" met in the early 1840s, they had everything in common but wealth. Edith recounted her parents' courtship and the first years of their marriage as a romantic tale of a tall, handsome young man born of a prestigious and wealthy family who at age twenty fell in love with the eldest (and least pretty) of the "poor Rhinelander girls," whose father had died young, leaving his wife, daughters, and son in diminished circumstances.

Although Rhinelander men were renowned for business enterprise, Frederick William Rhinelander (Lucretia's father) preferred literature to his account books. The family fortunes fell further after his death, when his brother, charged with managing the properties, made himself rich at the expense of the widow and children. The theme of indolent men with inherited wealth and little business sense who died young and left their wives and children without adequate support would become a staple of Edith Wharton's fiction. She herself was victimized by cousins who managed her trusts ineptly; she fought her brother Frederic, who profited through inheritances meant for Edith and Harry, and she provided financial support for her disadvantaged sister-in-law and niece.

Wishing a better match for their son, and thinking him too young to marry, George Frederic Jones's parents forbade him to see "Miss Rhinelander of Hell Gate." His father even denied him the sailing boat that would have carried him easily from what is now East Eighty-first Street up Long Island Sound to the "pretty country house with classic pilasters and balustraded roof" where Lucretia lived. Wily as Odysseus, George Frederic early one morning turned the oar of his rowboat into a mast and made his bed quilt into a sail. Thus rigged out, he hurried to his lady love. Devotion eventually overcame parental objection, and in 1844, George married Lu. Like other fashionable young couples, they honeymooned in Cuba, traveling in volantes to visit plantations. Returning to New York, they set up housekeeping at 80 East Twenty-first Street in Gramercy Park.

A graduate of Columbia College, George Frederic had received an "Honorary Testimonial" degree in 1841, one of only two graduates in the first class of the "Literary and Scientific Course." His studies prepared him for the career of gentleman of leisure that he pursued for the rest of his life. His bride, who with her sisters had learned needlework, music, drawing, and "languages" (drawing room French, Italian, and German), took her place among the young society matrons of the day. She looked forward to a life of hospitality and foreign travel, and in these ways "avenged" the indignities of her social debut two seasons earlier in 1842. The reduced family fortunes and her position as the eldest and least beautiful of the Rhinelander daughters had meant that Lucretia appeared at her coming-out ball dressed in a homemade white tarlatan gown and her mother's hand-me-down satin slippers. Suffering martyrdom in pinched shoes that impeded her dancing, she "never ceased to resent the indignity inflicted on her." As Mrs. George Frederic Jones, she adorned herself in furs, feathers, and satin bonnets; her ball gowns came from the rue de la Paix and her jewels from Cartier. She discovered the capital of fashion on her first trip to the Continent in 1847, three years after her marriage, when she and George Frederic traveled for a year in Europe with their infant son, Frederic.

Paris was the pièce de résistance of that long voyage by boat, train, and diligence from England to France, Holland and Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy. George Frederic loved Paris--a city of theater, opera, flower markets, museums, and restaurants--and he and Lucretia made two visits on this tour, first in spring 1847 and again in winter 1848. It was an adventuresome undertaking for a young couple, and "a very strenuous journey for people with a small child," as George Frederic remarked in his travel diary. Lucretia and the baby were often ill. The trip came to an unexpected end in spring 1848, when revolution broke out in Paris and the monarchy fell. Riots began on February 22, and two days later, from the balcony of their rue de Rivoli hotel, the Joneses witnessed the abdicated King Louis Philippe and Queen Marie Amélie escape across the Tuileries Gardens. (Lucretia, with her "inexhaustible memory" for fashion details, noted in the royal family's brief and dramatic passage the special features of their court dress.) George Frederic recorded in his diary that mobs then "pillaged the palace," throwing from its windows furniture and clothing that were later burned in the garden.

Despite such scenes, and the presence of 100,000 troops in the city, the Joneses did not leave Paris immediately. For three more months, they kept up their daily routine: while Lucretia was fitted for her first Paris wardrobe, George Frederic took afternoon strolls. Four weeks to the day after the riots began, while walking with his two-year-old son, Frederic, in the Tuileries, George Frederic noted that the gardens were now "too democratic to be pleasant." By March, the spirit of revolution had spread to Vienna and Berlin, cities they had visited the previous year. Although worried about general unrest, George Frederic and Lucretia maintained their rounds of theater and opera until they encountered serious difficulties getting money through letters of credit. On May 25, after weeks of Paris street demonstrations that ended in the dissolution of the National Assembly, they left for England. George Frederic detested London ("certainly the most wretched place under heaven"), and within days of their arrival he fell into a deep depression. "All the style in London [is] to be found in the horses and carriages," he noted in his diary, "the men and women have certainly very little of it." He admitted to being desperately homesick, and by June 1, 1848, he and his family were on their way back to New York.

George Frederic had enjoyed introducing his bride to places he had seen on his Grand Tour in 1838, when he crossed the ocean with his father on one of the last sailing passenger ships. Edith, who made the transatlantic voyage by steamship some sixty times in her life (despite her fear of the ocean), and who traveled extensively in Europe and North Africa, caught the romance of travel from her father's stories. George Frederic's Grand Tour abroad, however, was his father's last journey. Edward Renshaw Jones died in 1839, leaving his son a small fortune in Manhattan and Brooklyn real estate that supported Lucretia and her three children long after George Frederic's death in 1882.

The answer to many problems in Old New York, whether the threat of social scandal or a drop in the family fortunes, was travel abroad. Thus, in 1866, with property values falling, the Jones family rented out their New York and Newport houses and booked passage for France, where Edith (nearing her fifth birthday) caught her first glimpses of the "background of beauty and old-established order" that would define her aesthetic tastes and sensibilities. On November 17, 1866, as the country struggled with the social, political, and economic realities of Reconstruction, George Frederic Jones swore his allegiance to the Constitution and government of the United States of America, paid $5, and received a passport to travel abroad.

He sailed to Europe with his wife, daughter, and two sons, accompanied by Hannah Doyle, who doubled as Edith's nurse and Lucretia's personal maid. Except for Frederic, who had graduated from Columbia College in 1865 with a "gentleman's degree" in beaux-arts and later completed a master of arts degree, the Jones family remained in Europe until June 1872. During their first two years abroad, Harry finished his preparations for university, and on April 10, 1868, was admitted as a pensioner to Trinity Hall, Cambridge University. Monseigneur Gardiner, chaplain of Paris, sponsored him and certified his private studies. In 1872, Harry received his bachelor of arts degree. In these same years, George Frederic taught Edith to read, and she gained fluency in French and Italian, and began to study German.

European Awakenings

Edith's love of Europe, and especially of Italy, began in the family's first year abroad, which they spent in Rome. Bathed in spring sunshine, the city of romantic ruins awakened her senses to the perfume of violets and daffodils heaped on the Spanish Steps, the sounds of locanda music echoing from Trastevere, and the feel of "springy turf" underfoot on the grounds of great Roman villas, where she walked with her mother among statues and stone pines. Relieved of entertaining and household management duties, Lucretia spent time with her daughter. Together they searched the Palatine slopes for porphyry and lapis lazuli fragments, relics of the palace of the Caesars that Lucretia turned into paperweights and inkstands. In good weather, Hannah Doyle accompanied Edith to the Monte Pincio high above the city and watched as Edith rolled hoops and skipped rope with one of her earliest childhood playmates, Margaret Terry ("Daisy") and her little brother, Arthur. They were the children of Louisa Ward (sister of writer Julia Ward Howe) and Luther Terry, an expatriate American artist who made his living painting portraits of his compatriots. The two girls would not become real friends until many years later, after they both were married, but in her mind's eye, Daisy recalled "Pussy" Jones's "quantity of long red-gold hair" and her "smart little sealskin coat, the first I ever saw."

Although adventurous in few other ways, Edith's parents next took her on an arduous (some would say foolhardy) journey across central Spain to the southern cities of Córdoba and Seville. Under the spell of Washington Irving's Alhambra, George Frederic wished to see the Moorish courtyards and fountains of Granada's ancient palace fortress. Of her months in Rome, Edith recalled the scent of box hedges and the texture of "weather-worn sun-gilt stone," but the Spanish trip produced in her jumbled sensations--jingling diligence bells, cracking whips and yelling muleteers, jabbering beggars, squalid posadas, a breakdown on a windswept sierra, and the taste of chocolate and olives. "From that wild early pilgrimage," she wrote years later, "I brought back an incurable passion for the road." Letting her passion take its lead, as an adult she crisscrossed Europe in chauffeur-driven luxury cars, accompanied by friends, members of her household staff, and pampered lapdogs. Spain, which changed less during a half-century than any other of the European countries that Edith knew well, drew her back four more times, three of the trips taking place in the final decade of her life. Although the extremes of temperature and the dirt and noisy confusion of Spain did not hold the same charm for her then as they had in her early childhood, she loved the country in her last years primarily for its links to the Middle Ages--the period in art, architecture, and literature that she loved best. Still searching for her spiritual roots, she was twice willing in the last years of her life to brave foul weather, bad roads, questionable food and lodging to visit Santiago de Compostela.

Edith's parents eventually tired of traveling and settled in Paris for two years (1868-1870), taking an apartment at 61 avenue Joséphine on the Right Bank. A member of the international Paris community, George Frederic was well known to the American Legation and to local religious and government offices, whose combined services he used to establish credit, arrange housing, and find doctors, dentists, and legal assistance. A founding member of the Anglican Holy Trinity parish, he cultivated the society of transplanted New Yorkers and Newporters, and joined in the rounds of dinners and evenings at the opera and theater."

Two events of this period directed Edith toward literature. She discovered "making up," a form of storytelling that combined intense imaginative and sensual pleasures, and she learned the alphabet. Henry Bedlow, a mustached elderly family friend from Newport, shared her "secret story-world." After Sunday dinner, he would draw her onto his knee and tell her tales of the Greek gods and goddesses. Edith recast these mythic figures, envisioning them as the ladies and gentlemen she saw riding in the Bois de Boulogne or along the Champs Elysées, the ladies in flounced taffetas lounging indolently in open daumont carriages flanked by escorts of handsome outriders. Telling these stories out loud to herself, she experienced a rush of pleasure at the sounds of her words.

She discovered other pleasures in the physical properties of certain books. The Galignani Press edition of Washington Irving's Alhambra--with its closely printed pages, heavy black type, narrow margins, and rough-edged yellow sheets--made her fancy swell, burst, and overflow, sweeping her off "full sail on the sea of dreams." (Books sometimes produced in her powerfully erotic, even frightening, responses that only later in life did she recognize as sexual.) When overcome by the urge to "make up," Edith shut herself in her mother's bedroom and paced the floor, Alhambra in hand (often upside down, as she did not yet know how to read), turning its pages in rhythm to her own voice. Curious about her activities, nurses and parents spied through cracks and keyholes. Lucretia tried to copy down Edith's words, but they flowed so quickly she could not capture them. At first amused by this strange ritual, the Joneses became increasingly concerned about the compelling power the imagined world exerted over their daughter, a power she later called a "devastating passion" and a "perilous obsession."

To "make up," Edith had to move about and pace the floor. Reading, however, required that she sit immobile. Telling stories triggered physical urges, movement and speech, but reading induced a motionless and fixed concentration. Finding her in this trancelike pose one day, her parents discovered she was reading Ludovic Halévy's Fanny Lear, a play about a prostitute that was having a succès de scandale in the late 1860s. Edith, age six, now divided her time between improvising tales and reading books that her mother judged appropriate for her. When her maternal grandmother, Mary Stevens Rhinelander, came for an extended visit, Edith read Tennyson's Idylls of the King aloud to her. Lacecapped and wrapped in black moiré silk, Grandmamma was very deaf, but she dutifully held up a japanned ear trumpet as her granddaughter shouted out the verses. Edith felt her body tingle in "rhythmic raptures" at words she did not understand.

Discovery of this sensual and dramatic "other" world separated Edith from children who did not know how to enter her "labyrinth." Her parents worried about her self-absorption. Reflecting on these events many years later, Edith dismissed their concerns. In her external life, she said, she had all the "normal instincts" of her sex-enjoying pretty dresses, puppies, and romps with little boys in the tree-lined allées of the Champs Elysées. Girls did not interest her, nor did she like to play with dolls, and she reluctantly (but obediently) attended parties and dancing classes, such as the one conducted by Mlle Michelet, a stern, mustached ex-ballerina. Although a tomboy, Edith was already familiar with feminine arts, and she displayed her gifts to best advantage. Playing ball or skipping rope with the Harrys, Willies, and Georgies, she shook out her long red hair "so that it caught in the sun!" A few years later, she amused herself by stealing the handsome German fiancé of a daughter of the Livingston family. He was attracted to her "sense of fun," and she enjoyed keeping his "poor fiancée on the rack for a few weeks." It was, she admitted, the only adventure she ever embarked on with "malice prepense."

Edith's account of her awakening to written and spoken words leaves no doubt that they produced in her ecstatic, almost orgasmic, responses. Possessed by a "furious Muse," a "Pythoness-fury," she answered their call with "accumulated floods of ... pent-up eloquence." Such moments transported her "body and soul" into a state of exultation, and she experienced "exquisite relief" from her struggle to "be like other children." Her desire for language--whether Holy Writ, Renaissance sonnets, or everyday vernacular--transgressed the boundaries of convention. Even at this early age, she was pulled between conforming to social codes and giving free rein to her powers of expression.

Edith noticed that her father was also moved by language, especially the King James Bible and the long sweep and strong beat of Tennyson's verse. "I imagine there was a time," she wrote, "when his rather rudimentary love of verse might have been developed had he had any one with whom to share it." But his wife's matter-of-factness "shrivelled up any such buds of fancy" in him. Edith wondered what kind of man her father was meant to be, what desires had been stifled in him. She first pictured him in her mind's eye as the "tall splendid father who was always so kind." Later, she saw him in his ground-floor study in the West Twenty-third Street house, bent over his household account books, diminished by economic worries and marital strains into "my poor father." At the end of his life, he stared mutely from his deathbed, a victim of paralytic stroke, who struggled in vain to convey a good-bye message to his twenty-year-old daughter, who sat at his bedside.

Edith sensed that her father was "lonely" and "haunted by something always unexpressed and unattained." She hinted that nearly forty years of marriage to Lucretia had reduced George Frederic, the handsome, blue-eyed suitor, into a broken and disappointed man. He had sailed up Long Island Sound to meet his beloved at dawn on a summer's day. But it was a "false dawn," as his beloved apparently had no poetry in her soul.

As an adolescent, Lucretia Rhinelander read and copied out into a black notebook sentimental Victorian verse by John Jacob Guerney and the moral inspirations of Lydia Sigourney. Except for William Wordsworth's "A perfect creature nobly planned," Lucretia's choices were ones that her daughter--into whose hands the notebook eventually came--would hardly call poetry. A typical example is Rosa Patience McNevan's "My Childhood's Hours," copied by Lucretia in 1838, when she was fourteen. It describes an ideal mother's love, one that in Lucretia's upbringing was perhaps more longed for than achieved.

My childhood's hours! my childhood's hours!
How oft my thoughts fly back
To that sweet time when brightest flowers,
Seem'd strew'd on Life's dull track....

And when a teardrop filled my eyes
Caused by my infant woes
A mother's voice would calm my sighs
And still me to repose.

Brimming with nostalgia and regret, composed in singsong rhythms and banal images, the poem is maudlin Victoriana. It illuminates a vulnerable, pathetic side of the young Lucretia Rhinelander that by adulthood had hardened into orthodoxy. Spontaneity and girlish enthusiasms had, apparently, been early killed. She was only twelve years old when her father died in 1836, aged forty. As the eldest child, Lucretia would have felt the loss more keenly than did her siblings, not only the economic deprivations that required her to wear her mother's hand-me-downs at her debutante ball, but also in bearing the emotional demands of her mother and in assuming greater responsibility for her younger sisters and brother. As an adult, Lucretia attended to her widowed mother out of filial duty (as Edith would do for Lucretia), but she never forgave Mrs. Rhinelander for the indignity of her "coming out." Edith never forgave Lucretia for failing to give her the love and affection she showered on her sons.

Truth, Fiction, And Terror

Lucretia ruled that her children should be polite; George Frederic, that they be kind. Between these two forms of social conduct lay a vast uncharted territory of moral conscience that Edith and her brothers had to map for themselves. Sensitive, responsive, and desiring to please her parents, she developed a severe code of truth-telling and moral probity far more demanding than her nurse, governess, or parents would ever have imposed on her. Moral self-discipline, joined to the word, empowered her imagination, and her heightened sensitivity to visual impressions caused her to suffer intensely from ugliness. These elements conjoined in a humiliating incident that Edith recalled from her Paris dance classes with Mlle Michelet, whose "shrivelled, bearded" mother accompanied the children on the piano.

Edith confided to a little boy she was then in love with that the old lady looked like une vieille chèvre (an old goat). The image was no doubt all too appropriate, but having said something about the old woman that she would not have said to her, Edith felt compelled to confess openly her indiscretion to avoid punishment by the "dark Power" she called God. Gathering her courage, she confessed in front of the dancing class; instead of praising her honesty, Mlle Michelet rebuked her "impertinence." This response left Edith in a state of "moral bewilderment"; she also knew that Lucretia would have disapproved of her indiscretion and her method of making amends for it.

Transgression and confession were indissolubly linked in Edith's mind. When she wanted to be a very bad child, she would upset Doyley's workbasket and then run to her to confess. One afternoon in 1871, while the Joneses were living in Florence, Lucretia went out shopping, leaving instructions that Edith should not eat any of the apricots from a dish on the table. Disobeying, Edith ate three of them. When her mother returned, she ran to confess what she had done. Lucretia replied, "I did not expect it of you." Lying on her deathbed almost seventy years later, Edith exclaimed, "Oh, the shame of it! I feel it still."

The great divide between Edith's self-evolved standard of truth-telling (which she ascribed to "God") and the code of politeness demanded by her mother induced in her a painful moral confusion she could not admit to anyone--certainly not to her mother, who, of the two "absolutely inscrutable beings" that she tried to please, was by far the more unfathomable. From Edith's childhood perspective, Lucretia was illogical and capricious. Could God also be inconsequent? Perplexed, she tried to calm her fears by applying reason: "If the servants did anything to annoy Mamma, it would be no satisfaction to her to kill Harry or me." The cause of Lucretia's anger might be her servants, but her potential victims were her children--or so Edith feared. Alone, bewildered, desiring to understand "what it was all about," she saw God and her mother as "dark fatalities." In a notebook from her adolescent years, she wrote, "If I ever have children I shall deprive them of every pleasure in order to prepare them for the inevitable unhappiness of life!"

Sometime after the Mlle Michelet incident, Edith underwent another kind of psychic torment that left her prey to new terrors. The Joneses concluded their Paris visit in summer 1870, and by July 15, the day France declared war on Prussia, they were at Bad Wildbad, a "primitive watering-place" in the Black Forest where George Frederic and Lucretia took a cure. At age eight and a half, Edith was no longer cared for only by her beloved Doyley, but she also had a German governess, who taught her German using the New Testament and instructed her in the arts of knitting, tatting, and making wildflower garlands from blossoms they gathered on woodland walks. On one such walk, Edith was suddenly seized with terrible pain and collapsed with what was eventually diagnosed as typhoid fever. She was near death by the time her parents found a physician, the czar of Russia's doctor, who correctly identified her illness. The long siege of typhoid fever, with its high temperatures and chills, became the dividing line between Edith's "little childhood" and the next stage of life.

She begged for books to help pass the long weeks of her convalescence, but finding something appropriate for her proved a difficult problem. Edith disliked children's stories, her attitude doubtless a relief to Lucretia, who worried that the authors of children's books might unknowingly use "bad English." Although Lucretia herself apparently only read novels and horticulture publications, she prized well-spoken English, having grown up in a family that prided itself on speaking the language flexibly but fastidiously. Moreover, in a world governed by codes of politeness, speaking English poorly was a "supreme offense" of "bad manners." Edith later admitted that by monitoring her reading, Lucretia had kept her from "wasting ... time over ephemeral rubbish" and indirectly led her to the "great classics," which gave her mind a "temper which my too-easy studies could not have produced."

From a contemporary perspective, Lucretia's attitudes seem to verge on pedantry, if not undue exercise of parental authority. But they were based on European practices intended to maintain the cultural system by molding children to the expectations of society. Monitoring children's reading both for the appropriateness of subject matter and reading level was a responsibility French parents, for example, took very seriously. French children were not given free run of the family library (as in America), and young ladies especially were to be shielded from harsh realities and crude forms of expression. Preparing her daughter to become a matron in old guard New York, Lucretia Jones unwittingly directed Edith's steps toward Europe and French ways. Appreciating long-held traditions and regularized habits, Edith was drawn (even in childhood) to cultural conservatism that valued preservation over innovation.

A crisis in Edith's convalescence from typhoid fever was occasioned by a book--a children's tale brought by two friends as a get-well token. The "robber story" so affected her fevered imagination that she relapsed and again came close to death. When she emerged from the ensuing fever, it was to a world "haunted by formless horrors" in which for several years a "dark undefinable menace" dogged her steps, "lurking and threatening." She feared daylight and darkness, houses and open streets, and suffered hallucinations. Returning home from walks in the company of her maid or governess, she felt the unnameable thing following at her heels, pressing on her. Waiting on the doorstep to be let into the house, she was seized with a "choking agony of terror" followed by a "rapture of relief" once she was safe on the other side of the threshold. These events, she later claimed, obliterated the "torturing moral scruples" of her early childhood, but transformed her from a fearless child to one who lived in a chronic state of anxiety, prey to a "physical timidity."

Although she believed herself to have been a fearless child before the bout with typhoid fever, she had already demonstrated extreme sensitivity to words and environments. Behind the "menace" was a previous incident associated with a certain book, a particular house, and visual impressions of ugliness. Sometime before she was three years old, Edith visited her father's stern, unmarried sister, Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones, at Wyndcliffe, her eighty-acre estate on the Hudson River. Elizabeth, too, had suffered a terrible illness in childhood, but her parents saved her from the tuberculosis that had killed two of her siblings by shutting her away for nine months in the Mercer Street family house in Lower Manhattan. They sealed the windows of her bedroom and kept the fireplace lit; by these drastic measures, Elizabeth Jones survived into hardy adulthood and became a "ramrod-backed old lady compounded of steel and granite." In 1852, she built a twenty-four-room turreted villa, the most expensive house ever before built in Rhinecliff, New York. Such display of wealth, it was said, gave rise to the expression "keeping up with the Joneses."

Edith found the Victorian-Italian villa dark, immense, and intolerably ugly. Overcome with "inarticulate misery," she envisioned stern Aunt Elizabeth as the house: her "battlemented caps" were the turrets of the mansion, her "granite exterior" was like the "grimly comfortable home." She also became convinced that a wolf was under her bed. This was the first of several terrifying childhood events Edith later described as "hauntings by tribal animals." From this moment on, she could not be alone while looking at pictures in her "Little Red Riding Hood" storybook. Dragging her nursery stool behind her, she sought out Doyley or her mother.

Ugly houses and scary books, their terrors exacerbated by life-threatening childhood illnesses, produced in Edith fears and phobias that haunted her for years. She survived the typhoid fever with a weakened immune system. Her lifelong battle against "chronic tonsillitis" and bronchial illnesses began in this second stage of childhood. When the weakness and fever that accompanied each attack passed off, she usually experienced a sense of bien-être--well-being and renewed energy.

In these same years, young Teddy Roosevelt suffered severe asthma attacks, describing their after-effect as a strong sense of well-being. Teddy's childhood diary reveals that his acute attacks were often preceded by the fear of being scolded or by depression (feeling "doleful"). Like Edith, who was four years younger, he was especially sensitive to language, and his fear of certain words could induce an asthma attack. Her fears of certain words and stories had brought her to the threshold of death during her fight against typhoid fever. Trying to disperse the ghosts and goblins that haunted her late childhood by turning them into fiction, she came to believe that her creative animus was aligned with these dark powers. To exorcise them (had she been able) might have meant sacrificing her talent and the emotional pleasures that storytelling and writing gave her. Mastering the art of writing through long years of apprenticeship became a means of conquering her fears. She could call up ghosts at will, rather than being surprised by them at the doorstep.

Yet the woman who would become a renowned writer of ghost stories could not, until she was twenty-seven years old, sleep in a room that contained such a tale. She admitted even to burning books: "It frightened me to know that they were downstairs in the library!" One cannot pass lightly over such acts or discount the extremity of suffering that brought her to destroy what she loved best. The psychological effects of the typhoid fever and the attendant illnesses that followed it lasted for years. During the months of her physical recovery and through all the nightmare fears of childhood, her parents, she recalled, were indulgent and understanding. They did not scold or ridicule or try to "harden" her by making her sleep in the dark. Their kindness, she later averred, allowed her to grow into "a woman hardly conscious of physical fear." In her childhood, however, irrational powers laid claim to her imagination: "Fear of what? I cannot say--and even at the time, I was never able to formulate my terror."

Retrospectively, Edith described these dramatic incidents as the experiences of a highly imaginative child susceptible to images and words whose "fancy" held the power both to frighten and elate her. Her experiences reveal the cost of striving to preserve an equilibrium between "sociable instincts" and "solitary intellectual sympathies." She was governed by two "ruling sentiments": "the desire to learn and the desire to look pretty." Neither of these, she claimed, received encouragement from her parents. The world of learning beyond the usual drawing room accomplishments of young ladies was culturally marked "for men only," a message that resounded all the louder for Edith because she was given, almost, free access to her father's library. It was unlike any other room in the house, a retreat for George Frederic from the excesses of the French Second Empire that dominated the West Twenty-third Street brownstone. The sixteen-foot-square ground-floor study housed his gentleman's library, a younger son's "meager portion" of a much larger family collection. Hung in handsome dark green damask, the room had a medieval motif, its crowning ornament a huge mantelpiece supported by visored knights. She spent many childhood hours in a "secret ecstasy of communion" in this room, stretched out on the rug, her chin resting on cupped hands, reading her father's books and watched over by the visored knights, guardians of a man's world.

In later life, she resented her parents for failing to give her an education that challenged and directed her natural interests. She described her childhood and youth as an "intellectual desert" (something of an overstatement, as we shall see), but the feminine world also held dangers. To "look pretty" and thus achieve the goal of being "adored" was to court vanity and place herself in direct competition with Mamma. Edith knew she was no match for her mother. Feeling not only "different" from her family but also lesser than they, she was "humiliated":

I was laughed at by my brothers for my red hair, and for the supposed abnormal size of my hands and feet; and as I was much the least good-looking of the family, the consciousness of my physical short-comings was heightened by the beauty of the persons about me. My parents--or at least my mother--laughed at me for using "long words," and for caring for dress (in which heaven knows she set me the example!); and under this perpetual cross-fire of criticism I became a painfully shy self-conscious child.

By age ten, Edith began to withdraw within herself, seeking relief from "outward miseries," the shame and confusion of her failures as daughter and sister.

The Return

When the steamer docked in New York in June 1872, Edith's American exile from the European scenes of her early childhood was at hand. "How ugly it is!" she thought. Dreaming that her family was on their way back to Europe, she would awake in a state of exhilaration that turned to "deep depression." As time passed and her longing for Europe increased, she asked her father when they might return--"Whenever we can afford it," he answered. Six years of "economizing" abroad had not solved George Frederic's financial problems, which were caused in part by mismanagement of his inherited properties. On September 19, 1873, "Black Friday," a panic hit Wall Street: forty banks and brokerage houses in New York City went bankrupt. This disaster was part of a Euro-American economic depression, the worst the century had yet experienced. In America, its causes included easy credit and international inflation, leftover debt from the Civil War, the costs of rebuilding Chicago after the 1871 fire, overspeculation in railroads, and trade dislocations. The post-Civil War boom was over, although Chemical Bank--in which George Frederic held stock; his forebear Joshua Jones had co-founded the institution--survived this prolonged depression intact. But the return on George Frederic's safe investments and rents from his real estate could not keep up with rising inflation.

Edith spent her first summer back in America, like all those to follow, in Newport. She retained no memories of her first visits there as a baby, and she saw it now as for the first time. After six years of hotel and apartment life, she delighted in the spacious family home on Harrison Avenue with its honeysuckled veranda, clover and daisy meadows to run in, cove to swim in, and kitchen garden full of pears and strawberries. She romped with her dogs, climbed trees, and fished for "scuppers" and "porgies" from the landing pier. Lucretia and George Frederic reestablished their American life, seeing old friends and accustoming themselves to Newport's new faces and new wealth. Newport was coming into its own as the most fashionable seaside resort in America, a place with few lodging houses. Visitors came on invitation only, and usually stayed with friends who owned the towering, sprawling "cottages" dotted around the rocky coastline.

The entire Jones family gathered at Newport that summer. Harry, home from England with his degree from Cambridge, courted a young woman named Caroline Hunter, who lived with her family on K Street. They became engaged a year later, but their marriage plans ended in tragedy on November 22, 1873, when Caroline and her parents, en route to France, died when the ship on which they were traveling, the Ville de Havre, was struck by a sailing vessel and sank. Also drowned were Lucretia's youngest sister, Eliza Edgar, and her daughter. A popular bachelor and man-about-town, Harry did not fall in love again for many years.

In 1872, Frederic, established in New York as a bookbinder, was married and the father of a newborn baby. On March 24, 1870, in a ceremony performed by the Right Reverend William H. Odenheimer, Episcopal bishop of the diocese of New Jersey, he had wed Mary Cadwalader Rawle ("Minnie"). A slim, spirited, dark-haired young woman with dramatic looks, a quick wit, and laughing voice, she was the daughter of William Henry and Mary Binney Rawle of Philadelphia and a descendant of prestigious colonial families. The newlyweds spent their honeymoon in Europe, where they visited the Joneses, and on their return to New York, Frederic and Minnie moved into a small house. In summer 1872, they were established with their newborn daughter, Beatrix, at Pencraig Cottage, a two-story dwelling opposite the winding drive that led to the "friendly gables" of Pencraig, the Jones estate. Lucretia and George Frederic, only a decade earlier new parents themselves, were accustoming themselves to being grandparents.

In the sunshine of these Newport summers, Edith was a child of "shouts and laughter" and constant physical activity. The morbid, selfscrutinizing, and sometimes unhappy child who had appeared with the onset of typhoid fever retreated to the shadows. A little girl who could hear in her imagination the "choiring of spheres" now came alive to rocky landscapes and ocean breezes. She trembled at the sight of "wind-warped fern" and brier rose and began to experience her body in new ways. Life rang in her ears and hummed in her blood, its messages felt in "vague tremors" when she rode her pony, swam in the bay, or danced and tumbled with the boys from next door, the sons of astronomer Lewis Rutherfurd--one of whom was in love with her, while she had fallen in love with his brother. Puzzled by these new, strangely pleasant sensations, she asked her mother one day what they meant. Lucretia had two answers ready for such questions--"You're too little to understand" and "It's not nice to ask about such things." The presence of adored baby Trix may have contributed to Edith's curiosity about girls' bodies and babies, but when an older cousin volunteered the information that babies come from people, not flowers, Edith felt a vague sense of "contamination." She ran to tell her mother the news and to confess that she had come by the information accidentally. She received a severe scolding: "I was left with a penetrating sense of 'notniceness,'" she later wrote, "which effectively kept me from pursuing my investigations farther."

Soon after returning to America, the Joneses sent back the German governess they had engaged to educate Edith; she had proved "unsympathetic and unsatisfied." She was replaced by Anna Bahlmann, a nineteen-year-old German girl who had taught the Rutherfurd daughters prior to their entrance into society. Like Doyley, Anna would become Edith's lifelong friend. When Edith married, Anna came to live with her and work as her secretary, serving in this position until her death in 1916. As a "finishing governess," she took seriously her duties to prepare Edith for the life of a society matron and preserve her from corrupting influences. Never marrying, she retained a virginal air. When Edith once asked her about the "passion of love," Anna responded, "Why, my dear, there's nothing in it," adding, "All my married friends tell me so." Anna also restricted Edith's intellectual curiosity. She refused to read Johann Wolfgang von Goethe with her, even though the poet-scientist was one of the great stylists of the German language. Indeed, he was a controversial figure: his writings on natural science and the theory of evolution (which presaged the work of Charles Darwin) were considered by some as irreligious, his lyric poetry and dramas too impassioned and too dangerously under the spell of German Romanticism.

Emelyn Washburn, daughter of the scholarly rector at the fashionable New York Calvary Episcopal Church, where the Joneses attended services, was a student of German literature and an avid reader of Goethe. She asked Lucretia to allow Edith, then thirteen years old, to read the German poet. Lucretia agreed, and Edith discovered in his writings a mind whose sensibilities matched her own. From poetry, drama, and autobiography to natural science and philosophic inquiry, Goethe had a greater influence on her than any other thinker. She later ordered a set of his complete works, had them bound in leather, and read everything but his enormously popular novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Lucretia had made her daughter promise never to read a novel without first asking permission. In exacting this pledge, she repeated her own mother's injunction. Apart from the first volume of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley, Lucretia had never read a novel until after her marriage, when, following the example of her mother and sisters, she began to "devour" fiction.

Edith later condemned Lucretia for denying her knowledge about essential but "forbidden" topics, like human sexuality. Hungry for knowledge and longing to escape childhood ignorance, Edith turned to Anna, whom she loved but who never "struck a spark" from her, she said. She claimed never to have known in these years anyone who cared for "les choses de l'esprit" (intellectual things) and wondered whether "any child possessed of that 'other side' was ever so alone in it as I." Not until she was past twenty did she "exchange a word with a really intelligent human being." Had she forgotten Professor Lewis Rutherfurd, the renowned astronomer, who led her and other neighborhood children on hikes along the Newport cliffs, entertaining them with lively commentaries on the natural world? Certainly, Edith's lifelong interest in astronomy developed from his early teachings. Dr. Washburn and Emelyn also fostered her intellectual and artistic development. But these people were exceptional among the Joneses' friends.

For American women of Edith's social class, education reined in rather than expanded their natural curiosity, cultivating in them a charming, but false, naïveté. A metaphor for shrouded innocence appears in her account of archery club contests in Newport, a town given to an almost "pagan worship of physical beauty." Lovely young women like Margaret and Louisa Rutherfurd displayed their archery skills before an audience of family and friends. Dressed in floating silk or muslin, their faces hidden from sun and sea air by veils as thick as curtains, they glided slowly across the August Belmont lawn, unable to see clearly where their steps led them. Poised before the target and ready to take aim, they threw back the veils and revealed their identities. The onlookers thrilled to this moment, and even to Edith's childish eyes "the effect was dazzling when the curtain was drawn, and young beauty shone forth"--a beauty untouched by paint or powder."

The idea that physical beauty could spoil, like an apple too long in the sun, had its intellectual counterpart. A young lady might destroy her health and mental well-being by learning too much. Edith's bout with typhoid had frightened her parents; anxious about her health and afraid of fatiguing her brain, they forbade her learning anything that required mental effort. She reasoned that their solicitousness was due, in part, to her being a late-born child and was also a reaction against the severity of their own early training. But parental solicitude prevented Edith from concentrating even on subjects in which she had a "restless" interest. There was no danger of overworking her brain, because the subjects that might have disciplined her mental faculties--Greek, Latin, logic, philosophy, mathematics, and natural science--were not on the menu of courses served up to young girls.

In 1875, when Edith was on the threshold of adolescence, she met Emelyn Washburn, a young woman six years her senior, who both befriended and tutored her. Studious, religious, and musically gifted, Emelyn was a rather odd person who suffered from a variety of illnesses, including weak eyesight. (Edith later described her as a "queer, shy invalid" in whom she suspected "strong traces of degeneracy"--meaning, apparently, latent lesbianism.) Emelyn quickly recognized that Edith, a "nervous child," was "starving for mental nourishment" and had not been taught proper study habits. The Washburn family first learned of Edith when she sent them a handmade outfit intended for the young daughter of an Episcopal missionary. The workmanship of the clothing was so remarkable that Mrs. Washburn sent a note to thank her, not realizing that "Miss E. N. Jones" was a girl of thirteen.

The two families began to exchange visits, and from 1875 to 1879, Edith sat beside Emelyn on Sunday mornings in the rector's pew. His richly modulated voice and dramatic delivery cast a spell over her, and, unaware of her restlessness, she picked at the fabric of Emelyn's camel hair coat. Recognizing that Edith needed to occupy her hands, Emelyn gave her a large pearl button that she had sewn onto a string. Edith pulled the button back and forth through her fingers as she listened to Dr. Washburn. She never outgrew this physical restiveness; in adulthood, she knitted, tatted, or fussed with a cigarette while others talked.

Edith's days now followed a predictable routine, divided between morning study with Anna (she prepared her lessons while Doyley brushed her hair) and afternoons spent driving with Lucretia in Central Park or accompanying her father to church services. Sometimes she joined Emelyn in the rector's library, where she wrote notes to the Rutherfurd boys and her brother Harry's friends on Dr. Washburn's new typewriter. A cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson's, Dr. Washburn had since his youth participated in the New England intellectual group that included Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. Although he had a marked dislike of clever women, especially those like Fuller who he felt talked too much, he encouraged his daughter's intellectual interests and hired a German tutor to give her a "gentleman's" education. In these years, Emelyn studied Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, Old Norse, and Old and Middle High German. She encouraged Edith's interest in ancient sagas and tutored her in languages. On warm spring days, they sat on the library roof reading Dante's Divine Comedy or Goethe's poetry.

Enjoying Emelyn's companionship, Edith did not share all her interests. She was not musical and only occasionally attended concerts, nor did she wander about the city, as Emelyn did. In a vain effort to cure her eyes, Emelyn rode ferries around the island, gazed at the tall ships at South Street pier, and observed Italian life on Mulberry Street. She regretted that Edith knew only one portion of the city and only one side of society. "I wish Edith had had some streetlife," she wrote years later, "and known all sorts and conditions of men as I did--and learned to love New York." But Edith was not allowed on the streets alone, nor can one imagine her holding conversations with deckhands and sailors as Emelyn did. Doyley chaperoned her even the five short blocks from West Twenty-third Street to the rectory.

Emelyn took great interest in younger friends, and on one occasion organized a Christmas party, just so that Edith (age fourteen) could have a Christmas tree of her own. "I should like to have a tree once in my life!" Edith had exclaimed. Delighted by the idea, Lucretia went with the girls to choose decorations and share the expenses. When the day of the party arrived, four-year-old Trix Jones was ill with scarlatina. To cheer her, Emelyn and Edith decorated a little tree and placed a doll under it that Trix named "Emelyn Christmas." Edith loved entertaining small children and making them laugh at her invented stories, Emelyn recalled, just as she loved listening to adult conversation and contributing weighty or witty remarks. "Sometimes she looked like a little, most loveable child," Emelyn said, "and again she seemed years older." Edith's various nicknames reveal something of her mercurial character. The servants and Anna Bahlmann addressed her as "Edith." Doyley called her "Sweet" (Harry was "Darling"). Harry referred to Edith as "John," as did his friend Teddy Wharton, whom Edith would later marry. She was "Lily" to the Rutherfurds and "Puss" to Lucretia. Others called her "Pussey," but Emelyn referred to her as "the child" and addressed her in writing as "E.N.J."

That same year, 1876, Edith wrote a thirty-thousand-word novella entitled Fast and Loose, its title taken from the popular English novelist Robert Lytton's Lucile: "Let woman beware/How she plays fast and loose thus with human despair/And the storm in man's heart." Signed "David Olivieri," it was a comic send-up of English romances. Edith kept it secret from all but Emelyn, who enjoyed its satire of contrived plots and stylized narrative modes. She was especially amused by the mock reviews Edith appended to the text, which recounted the author's failures, parodying the language and attitudes of contemporary critics. A "review" from the Nation mimicked the authoritative, judgmental tone adopted by critics: "Every character is a failure, the plot a vacuum, the style spiritless, the dialogue vague, the sentiment weak, and the whole thing a fiasco." Edith had developed an acute sense of self-judgment, and although the reviews were meant as a joke, they played on her fear of failure.

Fast and Loose was her second effort at writing a long narrative. The first, begun in 1873, when she was eleven, was derided by her mother. A novel of social observation, it belonged to the genre that would become Edith's special provenance, and its domestic subject matter and opening dialogue suggest the influence of stories from local newspapers, such as the Newport Mercury:

"Oh, how do you do Mrs. Brown?" said Mrs. Tomkins. "If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawingroom."

On hearing these sentences, Lucretia remarked, "Drawing rooms are always tidy." With this acerbic comment ringing in her ears, Edith turned from fiction to poetry.

When she confessed to Emelyn in 1877 her desire to write professionally, her friend suggested she begin with translation, an idea Dr. Washburn supported. They chose "Was die Steine Erzahelen" (What the Stones Tell) by German poet Heinrich Karl Brugsch, who sometimes signed himself "Brugsch Bey," adding the Turkish title of honor, as he did on this poem. Emelyn supervised the work, Dr. Washburn looked it over and made slight changes, and they sent it off to a new magazine. Edith's parents did not want her name to appear in print, so the translation was signed with Emelyn's initials, "E. W. Washburn," but published over the signature of Emelyn's father, "E. A. Washburn," who was well known in New York literary circles. The magazine sent a check for $50, which Dr. Washburn gave to Edith, who was very proud of having earned money for her first publication. Soon, her father arranged to publish some of her poetry in a "little booklet" that appeared before Christmas 1878.

The chapbook of two dozen original poems and five translations from German poets--three songs by Emanuel Geibel, "Longing" from Friedrich Schiller, and "A Song" from Friedrich Rückert--was privately printed by C. E. Hammett, Jr., of Thames Street in Newport. Unsigned, and printed under the generic title Verses, its frontispiece carried a quotation from Bettine Brentano, a friend of Goethe's: "Be friendly, pray, to these fancies of mine." This book is a rare and valuable item (only nine copies exist); its poems date from 1875, when Edith was thirteen years old, to late 1878. Composed on narrow sheets of vellum, the writing crabbed and childish and wandering across the pages, the poems' subject matter and diction belie the youth of their author.

Among songs in honor of spring and summer, nightingales and daisy chains, and alongside a ballad entitled "May Marian," a remembrance of a fancy-dress ball danced on the lawn of Swanhurst at Newport in August 1878, are dark poems about death, old age, and lost "first love"--"That dreamflower rare and white,/That puts its magic blossom forth/ And dies in a single night." A dramatic monologue entitled "The Last Token--A.D. 107" tells of a Christian maiden facing death in an amphitheater filled with lions, her Roman lover looking on from the stands, his face "aquiver" for her sake. Some poems suggest that Edith had already suffered the pain of broken romance, and several mourn a lost, happier past. An undated poem called "October" invokes:

A cold grey sea, a cold grey sky
And leafless swaying boughs.
A wind that wanders sadly by,
And moans about the house.

And in my lonely heart a cry
For days that went before;
For joys that fly, and hopes that die,
And the past that comes no more.

Some manuscript sheets include marginal doodles. "Raffaelle to the Fornarina," about a woman who sat for one of Raphael's Madonna portraits, begins: "Knot up the filmy strands of golden hair,/That veil your breast, yet leave its beauties bare." On the backside of the sheet, Edith drew heads of ladies, their hair pulled into buns, and pairs of dancing shoes grouped together below the heads; she sketched a sailing ship and wrote "Him" above it, the letters drawn to resemble sailors' knots.

The occasion of Verses is less life than literature and art; except in one or two cases, the lyrics either parody or copy standard subjects and poetic forms. Her next publication, however, was drawn from a real incident, which she read about in the newspaper. The seventy-two-line poem, "Only a Child," appeared in the New York World newspaper on May 30, 1879. Signed with the pseudonym "Eadgyth," it was accompanied by an explanatory editorial: "The Press of May 27 published an account of a suicide in the House of Refuge at Philadelphia of a boy who was only twelve years old. He was locked up in solitary confinement. They found him hanging by the neck dead and cold. Tired of waiting for a release that never came, he had at last escaped--from the House of Refuge!" (The subject appealed to a "morbid strain" in her nature, Edith later admitted.) Composed in rhymed couplets that repeat the refrain "poor little hands," the poem tells the story of the boy's last hours, inculpating the religious and social institutions Edith considered responsible for the child's death. The poem's high moral tone screens Edith's compassion for innocent beings, children and animals, that she retained throughout her life.

Death was often the occasion of her early poetry, and she excelled in writing religious elegies. On April 4, 1876, she composed a poem commemorating the death of Pauline Foster Du Pont's daughter. A meditation on lines from St. Mark ("She is not dead, but sleepeth"), it uses a fixed stanzaic form and in sentiment and style gives the impression of having been written by someone far older than a fourteen-year-old. From childhood on, Edith employed elevated poetic diction and spoke in an arch conversational style that changed little as she matured. The temperament of her fiction also remained stable, although she later modulated the third-person omniscient mode by eliminating adjectives that overstated satiric or dramatic effects.

As a child, Edith spoke like an adult, as do the children in her stories; her letters resemble eighteenth-century fiction in the mode of Samuel Richardson or Henry Fielding. The earliest known letter in her hand, written to Pauline Du. Pont in 1874, is a breathless account of life at Pencraig during the week that Pauline's younger sister Anna became engaged to Dr. Beverley Robinson, the Jones family physician. "My dear Pauley, Feeling myself bound to report the exact mental and moral condition of Anna, since Doctor Robinson's flying visit last Saturday, as well as everything which occurred during that eventful period of her existence, I think I can do no better than write to you, for I am the only good correspondent of our family and you really ought to know something about the general excitement, besides what Anna writes to you." These lines reveal a recognizable Edithian verve. But little wonder that a curator of manuscripts in the library that houses this letter thought "Edith Newbold Jones" may have been a paternal aunt rather than a twelve-year-old girl.

In spring 1880, five of her poems appeared anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly, having found their way to this most revered of American literary magazines by a circuitous route. A Newport neighbor and close friend of Harry Jones's, Allen Thorndike Rice (later owner and editor of the North American Review), read Verses and asked to see other examples of Edith's writing. Impressed, he sent some of the poems to the venerable Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His letter to the aging poet describes the poems as remarkable for a young woman of "a most estimable New York family," who had been "brought up in fashionable surroundings little calculated to feed her taste for the Muses." Longfellow enclosed the poems with a letter of praise to William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic.

The poems disclose several sides of Edith's authorial persona. In one, the poet learns patience, personified as a mother whose "strong arms/ Uphold my footsteps on the path of pain." The speaker experiences deep suffering ("I long to cry ... I seek to fly"), caused apparently by her lost lover:

O my Beloved, life's golden visions fade,
And one by one, life's phantom joys depart;
They leave a sudden darkness in the heart,
And patience fills their empty place instead.

A poem entitled "Wants" rehearses the stages of women's lives, from early loves to the desire for children ("And when they go, we're fain to love/Some other woman's for their sake"), to duty as a balm for failed love and friendship, to the final desire for the sleep of death. The dramatic monologue "A Failure," however, reveals something of Edith's psychic situation in this period. One might read it as an address to a lost lover; more likely, it addresses a mentor figure, whom the young woman strives to please but fails.

I meant to be so strong and true!
The world may smile and question, When?
But what I might have been to you,
I cannot be to other men.
Just one in twenty to the rest,
And all in all to you alone, --
This was my dream; perchance 'tis best
That this, like other dreams, is flown.

For you, I should have been so kind,
So prompt my spirit to control,
To win fresh vigor for my mind,
And purer beauties for my soul.
Beneath your eyes, I might have grown
To that divine, ideal height,
Which, mating wholly with your own,
Our equal spirits should unite.

To others I am less than naught;
To you I might have been so much,
Could but your calm, discerning thought
Have put my powers to the touch!
Your wisdom made me thrice as wise,
And read new meanings in my eyes.

Ah, yes, to you I might have been
That happy being, past recall,
The slave, the helpmeet, and the queen--
All these in one, and one in all,
But that which I had dreamed to do
I learned too late was dreamed in vain,
For what I might have been to you,
I cannot be to other men.

Reverend Washburn was Edith's primary mentor in these years, and soon after her poems were published, she was asked to dine at his house. She brought all her poetry. After reading it, he advised her to continue writing but not to publish anything "for a while more." Perhaps hurt by his advice, seeing it as rejection or failure (Dr. Washburn may be the "you" of her poem), she took it too much to heart. Nine years passed before another poem, "The Last Giustiniani," appeared in the October 1889 issue of Scribner's Magazine.

Mothers and Fathers

In Life and I, Edith explains that she made her debut into New York-Newport society prematurely (at age seventeen) because her parents were "alarmed at my growing shyness, at my passion for study, and my indifference to the companionship of young people of my own age." This may have been their stated reason (if so, it signaled their worry about her solitary intellectual habits), but Lucretia confided to Emelyn Washburn that Edith's early launch into the social whirl was occasioned by the precipitous decline of George Frederic's health--brought on, in part, by financial worries. Emelyn "learned to love" Lucretia Jones "very dearly" and served as her confidante; the years 1879 and 1880 were anxious ones for her, Emelyn later recalled, but Edith was never aware of her mother's worry. The economic boom that followed the post-Civil War depression had changed New York. The old families were eclipsed financially by the industrialists and stock market speculators who had invaded Wall Street. Called "bouncers," "silver gilts," and "climbers," they were scaling the walls of the Fifth Avenue society fortress: the Gilded Age was at hand.

While Old New York registered its horror at the excesses of the nouveau riche, patriarchs also felt a certain pressure to keep up. In the winter of 1872-1873, Ward McAllister organized the Patriarchs Ball patrons, twenty-four men of unquestioned rank, in an effort to fix the limits of society. But some of the oldest families thought McAllister and Mrs. William Backhouse Astor, his partner in this enterprise, had cast their social net too far. The Assembly Balls, an even more exclusive group, began a few years later, the membership of its nominating committee shrouded in secrecy. Minnie Jones served on the Committee of Management and recalled that they kept Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt (wife of Cornelius Vanderbilt II) waiting two years for admission. By the time Edith made her debut in 1879, the Astors and the Vanderbilts outnumbered the old guard and were among the most powerful members of society.

George Frederic Jones had nothing like the wealth of these newcomers; suffering economic losses from the real estate depression, the Joneses tried to keep up appearances. Lucretia confided to Emelyn that she feared losing the West Twenty-third Street house (which was mortgaged); and Edith later recalled that the conservatory next to the billiard room had been left unfurnished: "the money gave out with the furnishing of the billiard-room." Lucretia hoped that "Puss" would have one social summer in Newport and one winter in New York society before they were forced to alter their living style--a change that would affect Edith's chances on the marriage market, as Lucretia remembered from her own experience.

Declaring the absurdity of the usual debutante entertainments, a huge "tea" and expensive ball, Lucretia arranged an understated, elegant party, choosing guests from the extended Rhinelander-Jones families. She counted on her practice of keeping open house and Harry's popularity to help Edith make wider social connections. Renting the ballroom at Delmonico's, as other mothers might have done, was out of the question: "My mother would never have consented to my making my first appearance in a public room," Edith recalled. (Snobbery may have accommodated economy in this decision.) Instead, Lucretia turned to her friend Mrs. Levi Morton, the former Anna Livingston Read, wife of Levi Parsons Morton, a leader in New York society and a cosmopolitan with a wide experience of Europe. At age forty-five, he was a recognized financier of great genius and a man with a political future, who became vice president under President Benjamin Harrison (when Edith's brother-in-law, William Wharton, was assistant secretary of state). He later served as minister to France and governor of New York. The choice of the Mortons' Fifth Avenue mansion for Edith's debutante ball perfectly suited Lucretia's desire to situate her daughter within the prestigious family network that was Edith's by birth and to suggest that by experience and association, Edith Newbold Jones had an affinity with Europe.

Edith might have resented the calculated restraint of these proceedings, feeling that she had not gotten her due. More likely, she felt relief at not having to face a room filled with several hundred people. Dressed in a pale green brocade décolleté gown with dropped shoulders and a white muslin skirt trimmed in rows of ruffled Valenciennes, her red-gold hair piled high on her head, she clasped a large bouquet of lilies of the valley. Edith wrote two accounts of the evening, and they vary widely from each other. In A Backward Glance, she portrays the evening as a "long cold, agony of shyness" in which she "cowered" beside her mother in "speechless misery." But in Life and I, the draft version of her autobiography (first published in 1990), she describes the ball as a "pink blur of emotion" in which--after her initial hesitation--she danced both with her brother Harry's friends (all of whom were ten to twelve years older than she) and also with young men her own age. In both versions, she admits that the weeks following that ball were happy ones. She gives a rather flat summary of this time in A Backward Glance, whereas Life and I captures her emotional state in breathless, almost rhapsodic prose: "Oh, how I loved it all--my pretty frocks, the flowers, the music, the sense that everybody 'liked' me, and wanted to talk to me and dance with me!" Lucretia's hope that Edith would have at least one gay "season" in New York was fulfilled.

Harry's social connections served her well, as did Minnie and Frederic Jones's hospitality. She attended dinners, Sunday lunches, and aftertheater parties with the "older girls" and young married women, soon finding herself at ease in a "charmed circle" of people ranging in age from eighteen to fifty. That summer, Pencraig filled up with friends who swam, fished, raced boats, and took excursions on steam yachts. This group lacked intellectual interests, but Edith responded to their good humor and gaiety. She wanted "brilliant adventures," however, and none came her way. "I led, I dominated," she later recalled. "I was conscious of 'counting' wherever I went--but I inspired no romantic passions!"

A year passed, and in summer 1880, Edith tasted romance with Harry Leyden Stevens, a handsome, sociable, and clever young man of twenty educated at St. Mark's School and in Europe, where he had taken a mountain cure for incipient tuberculosis. His mother was a widowed socialite, Mrs. Paran Stevens, who had recently made a brilliant match for her daughter, Mary Fisk, with Arthur Paget, son of Lord Clarence Paget. Their marriage scandalized the English aristocracy because neither the late Paran Stevens nor his wife had social credentials, but it gave Mrs. Stevens entrée into Newport and New York society through the Court of St. James's.

"Auntie" Stevens, as she came to be known, was born Marietta Reed, daughter of a greengrocer in Lowell, Massachusetts. She grew up to be a schoolteacher, and at nineteen married Paran Stevens, a man more than twice her age. A successful Boston businessman, he owned the Parker House and Tremont hotels and, later, the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City. He preferred breeding racehorses to hobnobbing with society, but after his death in 1872, his widow moved to New York and set out to establish herself as a society hostess at her home at 244 Fifth Avenue. In 1880, when the Joneses traveled to Bar Harbor to visit Frederic and Minnie, who were busy designing their cottage on Mount Desert Island, Harry Stevens came along. He was Edith's "shadow," Louisa Rutherfurd reported to her sister, Margaret, who was in Paris on her honeymoon. Louisa pondered whether "Lily" Jones would actually marry young Stevens. She did not think so, although "they are perpetually together." "Lily" was drawn, pale, and looking "wretched," she said, yet she still had success with handsome young men. A rumor circulated that Miss Jones "let men take liberties with her." Edith recovered her health during her weeks in the invigorating air of Bar Harbor, a suggestion that Newport dampness aggravated her bronchitis and asthma. Her father's health, however, did not improve. In autumn, the Jones family closed up Pencraig and went to Cannes, where they hoped the mild Riviera climate would aid George Frederic's recovery."

***

Edith Jones and Emelyn Washburn lost their fathers within a year of each other, both men dying of strokes. In Fontainebleau in spring 1881, Emelyn received the message that her father had died in New York. On hearing the news, Edith sent Emelyn several memorial verses. Only one of these now exists, an untitled poem comprised of two sonnets based on a prayer of St. Chrysostom's: "In this world the knowledge of Thy Truth, and in the world to come Life Everlasting." Edith must have recognized by this time that her own father was extremely ill. Aged beyond his years, George Frederic was gaunt and bent over, his illness manifesting itself in extreme nervousness. Stricken in early spring 1882, he died at the Bellevue Hotel in Cannes on March 15, at age sixty-one, and was buried in the Jones family vault in Cannes. In early summer, Edith, Harry, and Lucretia returned to Newport.

George Frederic's death radically changed Lucretia's life. She never again lived in the house on West Twenty-third Street, which was rented out when they left for Cannes, nor did she return to Calvary Church, where she and George Frederic had attended services for thirty-eight years. In winter 1882, Lucretia took a house on Washington Square. A short time later, she inherited a large property, her portion of a Rhinelander estate, and was suddenly freed of the financial worries she had carried for so long and that had contributed to her husband's illness and death. Keeping the West Twenty-third Street house as a rental property, she purchased another at 28 West Twenty-fifth Street, which she set about remodeling.

Lucretia Jones no longer entertained or went out into society. Her name never appeared in a New York City directory, although she was listed as "Mrs. George Frederic Jones" in the Social Register. Frederic lived nearby at 312 East Eighteenth Street, and visited his mother daily. His daughter, Trix, now ten years old, remained devoted to her grandmother. Pencraig in Newport, which had been so full of friends and laughter only two summers earlier, was now silent.

Daughters and Sons

When the George Frederic Jones family left for Cannes by way of London in November 1880, gossips conjectured that Edith and Harry Stevens were already engaged. They were not. During her first Riviera winter, Edith made friends with Americans who had married into European aristocracy, including daughters of Lucretia's childhood acquaintances. Joining them in picnics, tennis parties, and dinners, she also explored the scented pine forests high above the coastline, a pleasure she retained into late old age. As Mrs. Stevens regularly wintered on the south coast of France, Harry and Edith may have been together again that first winter, but they apparently met up in Venice in late summer 1881. Her poetic satire, "Intense Love's Utterance," recorded her reading during these months John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice and Walter Pater's Renaissance Studies (gifts from her father)--and ends by according art a higher place than love's temporal pleasures. The unpublished lyric testifies to Edith's priorities and provides clues to the directions the romance with Harry would take.

Harry followed the Joneses back to Cannes and stayed on through George Frederic's final illness and death. Lucretia noted in a letter to Emelyn Washburn that his devotion to Edith was a comfort to her. A few months later in Newport, he was still earnestly courting Edith. On Thursday, August 19, the Newport Daily News reported several social notes in which Mrs. Paran Stevens figured prominently, and one that featured her son:

The engagement of Mr. Harry Stevens, only son of Mrs. Paran Stevens, to Miss Edith Jones, daughter of the late George F. Jones, has been announced.

A similar notice appeared in the Newport Journal and Weekly News; the gossipy society weekly Town Topics also noted the engagement. Oddly worded, the notice announces the man's engagement rather than the future bride's; it was undoubtedly the work of Mrs. Paran Stevens--or her hired publicist. She missed no opportunity to have her name appear in newspapers and society columns, whereas Lucretia Jones abhorred the idea of her name appearing in a newspaper. Nonetheless, Lucretia should have announced the engagement, but the requirements of formal mourning may have prevented her from fulfilling this duty.

The previous Sunday, August 15, she had sent Edith around to her uncle and godfather, Fred Rhinelander, with a handwritten note. Lucretia had wanted to come herself with "Pussie" to announce the engagement to Mr. Stevens, she wrote, but the heat had caused her to feel "wretchedly": "I shall hope soon to be able to tell you how pleased we all are, notwithstanding this other loss to me within these last months, which naturally is hard for she has always been so very, very dear to me in all the years we have had together, friend and loving child in one." This rather muddled expression of her sentiments hints that Lucretia was saddened by the prospect of her daughter's leaving the parental home. Her son Harry, now thirty-two years old, lived a quite independent life, and she would be alone.

Edith would not remember her mother as an affectionate person, nor recall their relationship as a particularly loving one. Her memories were colored, however, by events still in the future. What Lucretia really thought of her daughter's impending marriage, one can only guess. Although everyone agreed that Harry Stevens was charming, he had an ambitious, showy, and headstrong mother. Emelyn Washburn knew the family at Calvary Church, and she commented years later that Mrs. Stevens would have been an "impossible mother-in-law."

Whatever Lucretia's worries or Edith's desires, the wedding was not fated to take place. Two months later, on Thursday, October 28, Town Topics reported: "The marriage of Mr. Henry Stevens, Mrs. Paran Stevens's son, to Miss Edith Jones, which was announced for the latter part of this month, has been postponed, it is said indefinitely." Again, one senses Marietta Stevens at work. Edith told Emelyn she had been forced to break her engagement, and Lucretia later said that Mrs. Stevens engineered the breakup. Gossip went round that Mrs. Stevens was angered because members of the Rhinelander-Jones families still refused to speak to her, even though she had gained social standing. But she may have had second thoughts about the timing of her son's marriage. By the terms of Paran Stevens's will, his wife had sole control of her son's property--an estate amounting to more than $1,000,000--until he married or reached the age of twenty-five. He was now twenty-three. Thus, his mother may have broken up the romance to protect her financial interests; she was known for her litigiousness, and had already sought legal means to divert part of her son's trust.

Whatever the reasons for the broken engagement (and they are not self-evident), Edith was made to take public responsibility for it. Town Topics gave as "the only reason for the breaking of the engagement hitherto existing between Harry Stevens and Miss Edith Jones is an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride. Miss Jones is an ambitious authoress, and it is said that, in the eyes of Mr. Stevens, ambition is a grievous fault." This arrow, undoubtedly launched by Marietta Stevens, hit its mark--turning back on Old New Yorkers the very accusation of ambitiousness that had been used against her when she tried to secure a foothold among them. Her place in society now secure, and new industrial wealth in the ascendancy, she could afford to launch a dart or two. Other bright and ambitious daughters of Old New York society were not always condemned for their industry. The brilliant and energetic Margaret Rutherfurd, for example, worked tirelessly to further the diplomatic career of her husband, Henry White, and was praised for it. Furthering a husband's career and carving out a social place for oneself (as Mrs. Paran Stevens had done) were acceptable avenues for women. Literary ambitions, when combined with what appeared to be social and intellectual contempt, brought condemnation.

Lucretia was apparently kind to Edith at this difficult moment. Certainly, the younger matrons in New York and Newport, many of them friends of Minnie Jones, took Edith's part. ("Is it not sad about Pussy's engagement," a Rhinelander cousin wrote to her brother. "Mrs. S. is at the bottom of it all.") The trauma for Edith was not so much in losing Harry Stevens, especially if she did not really love him, but in being publicly shamed. Lucretia lost no time in removing Edith from the scene of her defeat. By the end of November, Mrs. Jones and her two unmarried children were once again in Paris, and Mrs. Stevens was on her way to Nice for the winter.

A Season Of Suitors

Harry Stevens disappeared from Edith's life apparently without a word, apart from later fictional references to his mother. Lucretia Jones could easily avoid comment on these events, as she was adhering to the strictest rules of family mourning--heavy veils, black-bordered stationery, mourning bands, and a virtual retreat from society. Edith went out very little, but on her return from the winter trip to Europe, she again took her place in the social set of young marriageables. Her fourth season "out," two of them had been spent in Europe. Thus, January 1883 constituted a sort of second debut as she returned to the scene she had so suddenly left in November 1880 by accompanying her parents to France. She entered the Patriarchs Ball on the arm of Julian Buckler, younger half brother of Henry White; Julian wrote to yet a third brother, Willie Buckler, of Edith's extreme nervousness as she faced the cold stares of the New York matrons whom she had scandalized by breaking off her engagement to an eminently eligible young man. They believed she had put her literary ambitions above her duty to marry. Edith admitted to suffering from an "inferiority complex" at this time. She had all but forgotten her "literary dreams," she later confessed. Rather than feeling superior, she felt her friends were "quicker and more amusing" than she.

Edith was deeply discouraged. "I could not believe," she wrote in her memoirs, "that a girl like myself could ever write anything worth reading, and my friends would certainly have agreed with me." Lucretia's reproof of her first narrative effort ten years earlier had brought to a halt the "creative frenzy" of Edith's storytelling. Turning to poetry, she had had some success before Allen Rice--her patron of sorts--dashed her hopes: "You know," he said, "writing lyrics won't lead you anywhere. What you want to do is write an epic.... Why don't you try your hand at something like 'Don Juan'?" At this advice, she "shrank back into {her} secret retreat," thinking herself unfit to be either poet or novelist. She still read widely, but her "dream of a literary career ... faded into unreality." This remark casts a bright light on her desires: not content to write for herself, she wanted a literary career. She was indeed an "ambitious authoress," as the columnist for Town Topics had noted.

On January 24, 1883, Edith came into her majority, and the following day, Frederic and Henry Jones signed a revocation of power of attorney. Of legal age, she could now sign contracts, undertake financial obligations, and act on her own behalf. Yet, she had no money of her own, despite a sizable inheritance from her father. She depended on her mother for a home, and her estate was in the hands of her brothers, the appointed trustees. By the terms of George Frederic Jones's will, Edith (in co-partnership with her brothers and their descendants) received about $600,000 in various real estate holdings, including seven properties on the east side of Sixth Avenue and the north side of Fifty-fourth Street (one on the site of what is now the Warwick Hotel), four properties on West Eighteenth Street, several commercial properties on lower Broadway, one in Brooklyn, and another on Long Island. Her interest and rental income amounted to about $10,000 a year, rising and falling with the real estate and stock markets. She lived primarily on the income from this and one other inheritance until she published her first novel in 1902. Her literary fortunes then began to rise faster than the interest on her trust funds, and by the final decades of her life, she was supported almost entirely by her literary earnings.