With the Family

Drawing mainly on Edith’s lightly fictionalized autobiographical fragments, this chapter treats her early childhood in Canal Dover, Ohio, and her adolescent years in Chicago. Her family initially lived with her maternal grandparents, the Newburghs. For Edith, it was always summer—or almost always—with them. But Canal Dover with its blast furnace and iron works was not a happy place, as Edith’s prize-winning “Among the Iron-Workers” (1890) movingly relates. When Edith was about nine the Rickerts moved to Chicago, where in 1883 and 1884 Edith’s sisters Ethel Quinton and Frances Edna were born. Edith herself negotiated the Chicago Public Schools system with aplomb, winning the Foster Medal for “the encouragement of scholarship and good conduct,” and a full scholarship to Vassar College. She resisted the lodger, Mac, when he wanted to become engaged.