The Old Maid: [The 'Fifties]

by Edith Wharton

Overview

The Old Maid, Originally serialized in The Red Book Magazine in 1922, The Old Maid is an examination of class and society as only Edith Wharton could undertake. The story follows the life of Tina, a young woman caught between the mother who adopted her-the beautiful, upstanding Delia-and her true mother, her plain, unmarried "aunt" Charlotte, who gave Tina up to provide her with a socially acceptable life.

The three women live quietly together until Tina's wedding day, when Delia's and Charlotte's hidden jealousies rush to the surface. Says Roxana Robinson in her Introduction, "Wharton weaves her golden, fine-meshed net about her characters with inexorable precision."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9786257120357
Publisher:	E-Kitap Projesi & Cheapest Books
Publication date:	01/01/1924
Pages:	120
Sales rank:	826,377
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937) was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper class New York "aristocracy" to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996.
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. To her friends and family she was known as "Pussy Jones." She had two older brothers, Frederic Rhinelander, who was 16, and Henry Edward, who was 12. 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. The saying "keeping up with the Joneses" is said to refer to her father's family. She was 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. 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.

Date of Birth:

January 24, 1862

Date of Death:

August 11, 1937

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Place of Death:

Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France

Education:

Educated privately in New York and Europe

Table of Contents

About the Book & Author

PART I

I

II

III

IV

V

PART II

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

Editorial Reviews

"Nineteenth-century America was gone; twentieth-century America was alien. "All that I thought American in a true sense is gone, and I see nothing but vain-glory, crassness and a total ignorance . . . ," she wrote. She began to reconsider the old, lost world. What had seemed once petty and insular now seemed valuable and dignified; the rules, she saw, had been founded on moral principle. "I am steeping myself in the nineteenth century," she wrote, ". . . such a blessed refuge from the turmoil and mediocrity of today-like taking sanctuary in a mighty temple."

― Edith Wharton, The Old Maid

From the Publisher