Tales of Men and Ghosts

Tales of Men and Ghosts is a superb collection of fantasy and horror tales by the great American author Edith Wharton. "It is not often that youth allows itself to feel undividedly happy: the sensation is too much the result of selection and elimination to be within reach of the awakening clutch on life."Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862 to George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander at their brownstone at 14 West Twenty-third Street in New York City.[2][3] To her friends and family she was known as "Pussy Jones."[4] She had two older brothers, Frederic Rhinelander, who was sixteen, and Henry Edward, who was twelve.[2] She was baptized April 20, 1862, Easter Sunday, at Grace Church.Wharton's paternal family, the Joneses, were a very wealthy and socially prominent family having made their money in real estate.[5] The saying "keeping up with the Joneses" is said to refer to her father's family.[6][7] She was also related to the Rensselaers, the most prestigious of the old patroon families, who had received land grants from the former Dutch government of New York and New Jersey. Her father's first cousin was Caroline Schermerhorn Astor.[8] She had a lifelong friendship with her niece, the landscape architect Beatrix Farrand of Reef Point in Bar Harbor, Maine. Fort Stevens in New York was named for Wharton's maternal great-grandfather, Ebenezer Stevens, a Revolutionary War hero and General.Wharton was born during the Civil War; although Wharton herself in describing her family life does not mention the War except that their travels to Europe after the War were due to the depreciation of American currency.[2][10] From 1866 to 1872, the Jones family visited France, Italy, Germany, and Spain.[11] During her travels, the young Edith became fluent in French, German, and Italian. At the age of nine, she suffered from typhoid fever, which nearly killed her, while the family was at a spa in the Black Forest.[2] After the family returned to the United States in 1872, they spent their winters in New York and their summers in Newport, Rhode Island.[11] While in Europe, she was educated by tutors and governesses. She rejected the standards of fashion and etiquette that were expected of young girls at the time, which were intended to allow women to marry well and to be put on display at balls and parties. She considered these fashions superficial and oppressive. Edith wanted more education than she received, so she read from her father's library and from the libraries of her father's friends.[12] Her mother forbade her to read novels until she was married, and Edith obeyed this commandWharton wrote and told stories from an early age.[14] When her family moved to Europe and she was just four or five she started what she called "making up."[14] She invented stories for her family and would walk with an open book, turn the pages as if reading and improvise a story.[14] Wharton began writing poetry and fiction as a young girl, and attempted to write her first novel at age eleven.[15] Her mother's criticism quashed her ambition and she turned to poetry.[15] At age 15, her first published work appeared, a translation of a German poem "Was die Steine Erzählen" ("What the Stones Tell") by Heinrich Karl Brugsch, for which she was paid $50. Her family did not want her name to appear in print, since writing was not considered a proper occupation for a society woman of her time. Consequently, the poem was published under the name of a friend's father, E. A. Washburn, a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson who supported women's education.[16] In 1877, at the age of 15, she secretly wrote a 30,000 word novella "Fast and Loose." In 1878 her father arranged for a collection of two dozen original poems and five translations, Verses, to be privately published.[17] Wharton published a poem under a pseudonym in the New York World in 1879.

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