Influence of
George Eliot
upon
Wharton's "literary reference points are the 19th-century English and French writers who influenced Edith Wharton's writing and those works filled her library shelves: Balzac, Flaubert, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens, Meredith, Tolstoj, Conrad and James… and Proust". (Bernstock, p. 289).