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Biographical Summary
Edith Wharton lived a very interesting life. She had grown up in a relatively high class family. She had some trouble in her relationship though. Most of her novels are written about her past life experiences. Although she did have challenges to face, Edith Wharton ended up extremely well.
On January 24, 1862, Edith Wharton was born in New York City. Her parents are George Fredric Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander. They were descents from English and Duitch colonists who made money banking, real estate, and shipping. She has two brothers, Frederic Rhinelander and Henry Edward. The family moved to Spain for about a year and then moved to Pairs. Summer of 1870, they moved to Germany, and there Edith got typhoid fever. At age ten, she moved back to Manhattan. She was taught by a governess and also taught herself by reading her father’s library. In 1885, she married Edward Robbins Wharton. She was twenty three and he was tweleve years older than her. He was a wealthy banker but they did not have an easy relationship. They had two different outlooks on life, Edith was more artistic and he was more about business and work. She had a love affair with Morton Fullerton and ends up divorcing Edward in 1913. She moved to Pairs for a more artistic surrounding. In Paris, she met many famous writer and intellectual people. She really enjoyed gardening and very fashionable houses. She had a love for arts and letters. SAhe had surrounded her self with a beautiful world, even though in realtiy the world she lived in was anything but beautiful. She lived life against what society believed a women should be. She wanted to stand out against the rest of society and do something.
Edith Wharton wrote at least eighty-five...
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...at people think and what happens to herself. In the end of the whole novel, both characters make the right and conscious decision to live their lives as they have before they met each other.
WORKS CITED
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"Edith Wharton." Edith Wharton. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Nov. 2013.
Bloom, Harold. The New Moulton's Library of Literary Criticism. New York: Chelsea House,
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Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1934. Print.
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. New York: Scribner, 1968. Print.
"Wharton, Edith 1862-1937." American Decades. Ed. Judith S. Baughman, et al. Vol. 1: 1900 1909. Detroit: Gale, 2001. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 2 Nov. 2013
She sees her father old and suffering, his wife sent him out to get money through begging; and he rants on about how his daughters left him to basically rot and how they have not honored him nor do they show gratitude towards him for all that he has done for them (Chapter 21). She gives into her feelings of shame at leaving him to become the withered old man that he is and she takes him in believing that she must take care of him because no one else would; because it is his spirit and willpower burning inside of her. But soon she understands her mistake in letting her father back into he life. "[She] suddenly realized that [she] had come back to where [she] had started twenty years ago when [she] began [her] fight for freedom. But in [her] rebellious youth, [she] thought [she] could escape by running away. And now [she] realized that the shadow of the burden was always following [her], and [there she] stood face to face with it again (Chapter 21)." Though the many years apart had changed her, made her better, her father was still the same man. He still had the same thoughts and ways and that was not going to change even on his death bed; she had let herself back into contact with the tyrant that had ruled over her as a child, her life had made a complete
While she might think that her plans are working, they only lead her down a path of destruction. She lands in a boarding house, when child services find her, she goes to jail, becomes pregnant by a man who she believed was rich. Also she becomes sentenced to 15 years in prison, over a street fight with a former friend she double crossed. In the end, she is still serving time and was freed by the warden to go to her mother’s funeral. To only discover that her two sisters were adopted by the man she once loved, her sister is with the man who impregnated her, and the younger sister has become just like her. She wants to warn her sister, but she realizes if she is just like her there is no use in giving her advice. She just decides that her sister must figure it out by
In Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton, Ethan, a reserved young man was torn between two women. He was married to Zenobia Frome, but his true love was his wife’s cousin, Mattie Silver. Zeena and Mattie were different in all aspects. Mattie was a caring, loving, beautiful young girl, while Zeena was a sickly, shrewish woman aged well beyond her years. Ethan was continuously drawn to Mattie throughout the novel, as she was much more attractive and amicable than Zeena.
Perhaps Edith Wharton's reason for writing Ethan Frome, was that it so vividly reflected her own dreary life. Abandoned of any love as a child from her mother and trapped in a marriage similar to that of Zeena and Ethan, Wharton found herself relying on illicit love. This illicit love was also her favorite topic of writing, which helped her to escape her own tragedies. She spent many nights in the arms of other men searching desperately for the love she believed existed, but had never felt, which is evident in all of her writings.
At the end she risks her life and becomes a pretty to become and experiment to David’s moms to test a cure to the brain lesions created when they go ... ... middle of paper ... ... o save them from going through a transformation that will change them forever. The moral of the book is you don’t have to get surgery to look a certain way.
Throughout the novel, crucial family members and friends of the girl that died are meticulously reshaped by her absence. Lindsey, the sister, outgrows her timidity and develops a brave, fearless demeanor, while at the same time she glows with independence. Abigail, the mother, frees herself from the barbed wire that protected her loved ones yet caused her great pain, as well as learns that withdrawing oneself from their role in society may be the most favorable choice. Ruth, the remote friend from school, determines her career that will last a lifetime. and escapes from the dark place that she was drowning in before. Thus, next time one is overcome with grief, they must remember that constructive change is guaranteed to
Edith Wharton, originally named “Edith Newbold Jones”(Cliff Notes), was born on “January 24, 1862 in New York City to George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones and died on August 11, 1937”(Cliff Notes). She was born into a wealthy family and was a “designer, short story writer and American novelist”(Cliff Notes). Wharton descended from the English and Dutch cultures. She had two siblings, one known as “Frederic Rhinelander Jones” (Cliff Notes) who was sixteen years older than her, and “Henry Edward Jones eleven years older”(Cliff Notes). While her brothers attended boarding school, Wharton became “raised as an only child in a brownstone mansion on West Twenty-third Street in New York City”(Cliff
...eisz. She can hear her playing the piano and thinks of her talking about art. She wonders if she is a real artist. She becomes exhausted and knows that she is too far out to return. The water that she was so mesmerized with throughout the novel and that was the beginning of her new life, was also the end.
In the novel Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton creates an interesting plot revolving around two star-crossed lovers. Unfortunately, there is only one important thing that gets in the way of these lovers, a wife who’s a hypochondriac. Zeena, the wife, finds herself in a particular situation, a situation where she needs to figure out how to get rid of Mattie. She tries everything to get rid of her, especially her illness, using it as an excuse to get what she wants, oppressing Ethan’s desires and needs. Despite her malicious actions, she creates a justifiable reasoning of her intent. In Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton creates a psychological response in regards to Zeena. Rather than being depicted as the villain of the novel, Zeena is merely the victim of
Nelson, Victoria. The Secret Life of Puppets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001. WNC Database. Web. 7 Dec. 2011.
Wharton received inspiration for her writings through her upbringing. Edith Wharton lived in upper-class New York City, which is the setting of her novel The Age of Innocence. “But I’m improvident: I live in the moment when I’m happy” (Wharton 87). This quotation shows the mindset of most of the people of Old New York. Because they were forced to hide their true emotions, when they were sincerely happy, they only focused on the happiness in their lives. However, her works were not just influenced by where she was raised. As a young child, Edith Wharton read many of the books in her father’s library...
Emily Dickinson lived the rich life life in American society. Dickinson was born on December 10,1830. She was born to Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson. She was the middle child with an older brother and a younger sister. She was born and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts. “Dickinson came from a family that encouraged learning,”(Dickinson) She had very few friends because she came across being proper, shy, and meek. Although Dickinson was not very social, she still had a different way of thinking which made her the writer that she was.
Emily Dickinson was born December 10th, 1830 in her family home on main street in Amherst, Massachusetts to her two parents Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson. The homestead in which she was born was a family home owned by her grandparents who, soon after her sister’s birth in 1833, sold it out of the family. The Dickinson’s held residence in the home as tenants for the next seven years. Once her father’s political career took off, around the age she was nine, they moved to, and bought a new house in the same town. Dickinson was very close to her siblings, her older brother Austin and younger sister Lavinia. She had a strong attachment to her home and spent a lot of her time doing domestic duties such as baking and gardening. Dickinson also had good schooling experiences of a girl in the early nineteenth century. She started out her education in an Amherst district school, then from there she attended Amherst Academy with her sister for about seven years. At this school it is said that she was an extraordinary student with very unique writing talent. From there she attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for a year in 1847. this year was the longest she had spent away from home. In her youth, Dickinson displayed a social s...
...g through the motions, her eyes tearing up, her lip quivering, the music swelling. It's too much and I resent it, but it makes me worry. I'm certainly not worrying that the plot will not go exactly how I know it will go. I worry, instead, that it will go that way. I worry that she'll stop running, that she'll move to New York to be with Her Man, that she'll say she's sorry for whatever shortcomings she might have displayed during their brief and apparently enchanting courtship, that she'll change herself to fit his idea of what she should be. She has to do it and I know she will. But it still makes me sad, knowing that she has to do this to make everyone else feel secure — again and again, in movie after movie — that they're also making the proper apologies and the right choices, because any other choices are unimaginable for Pretty Women and their gonnabe mates.
Emily Dickinson was born at 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts in a wealthy family. She attended an Amherst Academy, which was founded by Emily’s grandfather Samuel Fowler Dickinson. In 1847, she went to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary where she spent a year and decided to withdraw. After returning from the seminary, she only traveled to Washington DC and Philadelphia at 1955, and remained in Amherst for the most part of her life. In 1960, she became very introverted and the only connection with world were her letters that she wrote to her friends and family members. Her alienation from the world and her refusal to get merried made her to become a legend in her town and because of that she received a title of “The Myth” and ‘New England Nun”.