Читать книгу The Women Who Make Our Novels онлайн

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She was born in New York (item 1) in 1862, Edith Newbold Jones, the daughter of Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones (item 2). She was educated at home (item 3) and was married to Edward Wharton of Boston in 1885 (item 4—no! countless items of luck had already intervened!). In other words, Mrs. Wharton, granddaughter of General Ebenezer Stevens of Revolutionary fame, came of distinguished family, was the child of extremely well-to-do parents, had every advantage that careful instruction, generous travel and cultivated surroundings could confer upon her. Much of her life has been spent in Italy; a perfect acquaintance with great painting and architecture, everywhere so discernible in her work, has always with her been the customary thing. Private tutors in America and abroad spared her the leveling processes of forty lines of Virgil a day and ten mathematical sums each night. They touched her as a sculptor touches his clay, firmly and caressingly and only to bring out her peculiar excellences, only to help her native genius to expression. Think of it—Italy and all the other rich backgrounds, means, social position, fine traditions, the right surroundings, the right mentors, the right tastes and a considerable gift to begin with! What a mold! It is exquisite, perhaps unmatched in the instance of any other novelist. It is what we dream of for genius and it is what genius would smash to fragments! The very fact that Mrs. Wharton had a mold is the best evidence that she is not a genius in the most discriminating sense of a most indiscriminately used word.