Top Highlights

• Edith Wharton turned her back on the genteel dilettantism
• She was a knowledgeable inhabitant and lover of France, not a tourist; a writer, not a leisured traveller keeping a diary.
• she broke with her parents' attitudes and customs, and created a different kind of life for herself.
• Sometimes these single children will be unhealthily close to their mother, as in her early novel Sanctuary, where the over-vigilant mother uses her son to work out her own guilt,
• Who keeps and who publishes the love letters of the famous writer-to-be was one of Wharton's favourite subjects, as in her first short novel, The Touchstone (written with much advice from Walter Berry).