Born Edith Newbold Jones in 1862, Edith Wharton was a member of the New York leisure class that would become the subject of much of her fiction. Few American women obtained university educations in the decades when Wharton was coming of age; her schooling was conducted by private tutors employed by her parents.

As a child, this future practitioner of the supernatural tale had a terrible fear of ghosts and ghost stories. In an essay entitled "Life and I" Wharton reminisced that "till I was twenty seven or eight, I could not sleep in the room with a book containing a ghost story, and I have frequently had to burn books of this kind, because it frightened me to know that they were downstairs in the library!" Still, the young woman discovered a talent for literature, privately publishing a volume of poetry at the age of sixteen...