The phrase keeping up with the Joneses traces back to a real New York family, and one daughter of that family decided the last thing she wanted was to be another Jones. This episode follows Edith Newbold Jones, born in 1862 into the apex of Old New York, through a childhood in Europe that made her fluent in French, German and Italian, and a return to a Newport society that treated girls as ornaments. Forbidden to read novels until marriage, she raided her father's library for Darwin and Milton and learned to see her own class as a closed ecosystem with bizarre survival rules.

We cover the translation published under a friend's father's name at 15, the decade of silence that followed, the marriage to Teddy Wharton with its depression and embezzlement, and the 1897 book The Decoration of Houses as a mansion-sized act of reclaiming control. Th ...