Edith Newbold Jones was born in Manhattan, New York City, to a wealthy old New York family.
Edith Newbold Jones, who would become known to the world as Edith Wharton, was born on January 24, 1862, at 14 West 23rd Street in Manhattan, New York City. She was the third child and only daughter of George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, members of the old, aristocratic New York families whose wealth derived from real estate and old mercantile fortunes.
Her birth into this rarefied social milieu—later immortalized and critiqued in her fiction—gave her intimate access to the customs, manners, and hypocrisies of America's Gilded Age elite. The phrase "keeping up with the Joneses" is sometimes said to derive from her father's family.
Educated privately by governesses and tutors, young Edith had unrestricted access to her father's library, which nurtured a voracious appetite for reading and a precocious talent for storytelling; she reportedly began composing tales before she could properly write. The family's extended travels through Europe during her childhood further exposed her to art, architecture, and languages, planting the seeds for the cosmopolitan sensibility and keen social observation that would define her later novels. This privileged but constrained upbringing—especially the limited educational and professional opportunities afforded to women of her class—would become both the subject and the target of her most celebrated fiction.
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