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The whirling princess: how a little rich girl known as Pussy Jones became Edith Wharton, writing her way into the aristocracy of American letters.(Book review)

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From: American Scholar
Date: 20070622
Author:Gilbert, Sandra M.

EDITH WHARTON By Hermione Lee Knopf\ $35

In the early 1900s, Edith New. bold Jones Wharton and her feckless, somewhat weak-minded husband, Teddy (Edward Robbins Wharton), began to build a summer home in Lenox, Massachusetts, a structure that was, as the biographer Hermione Lee dryly informs us, "by no means a modest house." In fact, The Mount, as it was eventually called, "had thirty-five rooms, and a hundred windows" (although some of these were "blind windows, made to balance real ones"). Perhaps appropriately, Lee's new life of Wharton is also far from modest in scale: ...

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The whirling princess: how a little rich girl known as Pussy Jones became Edith Wharton, writing her way into the aristocracy of American letters.(Book review)

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