Elizabeth Edwards

About Elizabeth Edwards

Elizabeth Anania Edwards (born Mary Elizabeth Anania on July 3, 1949, in Jacksonville, Florida) is an attorney and the wife of John Edwards, a former U.S. Senator from North Carolina who was the 2004 United States Democratic vice-presidential nominee, and a former candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

Edwards spent some of her childhood attending school in Japan, where her father, Vincent Anania (1920–2008), a United States Navy pilot, was stationed. She attended Mary Washington College and then transferred to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill receiving an undergraduate degree and completing three years of graduate work in English, as well as earning a J.D. at the same institution. She met John Edwards when they were both law students there. They married on July 30, 1977.

The Edwards are the parents of four children: Wade, Catharine, Emma Claire, and Jack. Wade was killed in April 1996 when he lost control of the Jeep he was driving from his Raleigh home to the family's beach house near Wilmington. Three weeks before his death, Wade Edwards was honored by First Lady Hillary Clinton at The White House as one of the 10 finalists in an essay contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Voice of America. Wade, accompanied by his parents and sister, went on to meet North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, who entered Wade's essay and his obituary into the congressional record. Following Wade's death, Edwards and her husband chose to have children again: Emma Claire, born in 1998 when Elizabeth was 48, and Jack, born in 2000 when she was 50. Edwards was pregnant with Emma Claire during her husband's 1998 Senate race. Emma Claire and Jack were born in Chapel Hill, where the family now resides.