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The Custom of the Country Study Guide |
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Summary
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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country. Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.
Life Imitates Art. The phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” (i.e., trying to compete with your neighbors to own the best things) may have originally referred to Edith Wharton’s father’s family (whose last name was Jones). Fittingly, many of Wharton’s novels are about characters who metaphorically try to “keep up with the Joneses.”
Based on True Events. The Custom of the Country, a novel about a woman who gets divorced four times, was published in the same year that Edith Wharton divorced her own husband.