Books by Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome (Signet Classics)

by Edith Wharton

A masterwork of American literature from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Age of Innocence.

A marked departure from Edith Wharton’s usual ironic contemplation of the fashionable New York society to which she belonged, Ethan Frome is a sharply etched portrait of the simple inhabitants of a nineteenth-century New England village. The protagonist, Ethan Frome, is a man tormented by a passionate love for his ailing wife’s young cousin. Trapped by the bonds of marriage and the fear of public condemnation, he is ultimately destroyed by that which offers him the greatest chance at happiness.

Like The House of Mirth and many of Edith Wharton’s other novels, Ethan Frome centers on the power of local convention to smother the growth of the individual. Written with stark simplicity, this powerful and tragic novel has long been considered one of Wharton’s greatest works.

Ethan Frome (Signet Classics)

by Edith Wharton

A New England farmer must choose between his duty to care for his invalid wife and his love for her cousin, in a new edition of Wharton's classic novel, which features a new foreword by novelist Anita Shreve. Reprint.

The House of Mirth

by Anna Quindlen, Edith Wharton

A literary sensation when it was published by Scribners in 1905, The House of Mirth quickly established Edith Wharton as the most important American woman of letters in the twentieth century. The first American novel to provide a devastatingly accurate portrait of New York's aristocracy, it is the story of the beautiful and beguiling Lily Bart and her ill-fated attempt to rise to the heights of a heartless society in which, ultimately, she has no part.

The House of Mirth

by Anna Quindlen, Edith Wharton

In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton depicts the glittering salons of Gilded Age New York with precision and wit, even as she movingly portrays the obstacles that impeded women's choices at the turn of the century.

The beautiful, much-desired Lily Bart has been raised to be one of the perfect wives of the wealthy upper class, but her spark of character and independent drive prevents her from becoming one of the many women who will succeed in those circles. Though her desire for a comfortable life means that she cannot marry for love without money, her resistance to the rules of the social elite endangers her many marriage proposals. As Lily spirals down into debt and dishonor, her story takes on the resonance of classic tragedy. One of Wharton's most bracing and nuanced portraits of the life of women in a hostile, highly ordered world, The House of Mirth exposes the truths about American high society that its denizens most wished to deny. With an introduction by Pamela Knights.

The House of Mirth

by Anna Quindlen, Edith Wharton

A bestseller when it was published nearly a century ago, this literary classic established Edith Wharton as one of the most important American writers in the twentieth century—now with a new introduction from Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jennifer Egan.

Wharton’s first literary success—a devastatingly accurate portrait of New York’s aristocracy at the turn of the century—is considered by many to be her most important novel, and Lily Bart, her most unforgettable character. Impoverished but well-born, the beautiful and beguiling Lily realizes a secure future depends on her acquiring a wealthy husband. But with her romantic indiscretion, gambling debts, and a maelstrom of social disasters, Lily’s ill-fated attempt to rise to the heights of society ultimately leads to her downfall.

From the conventionality of old New York to the forced society of the French Riviera, Wharton weaves a brilliantly satiric yet sensitive exploration of manners and morality. The House of Mirth reveals Wharton’s unparalleled gifts as a storyteller and her clear-eyed observations of the savagery beneath the well-bred surface of high society.

The House of Mirth

by Anna Quindlen, Edith Wharton

One of Edith Wharton’s most accomplished social satires, this novel tells the story of the beautiful but impoverished New York socialite Lily Bart, whose refusal to compromise in her search for a husband leads to her exclusion from polite society. In charting the course of Lily’s life and downfall, Wharton also provides a wider picture of a society in transition, a milieu in which old certainties, manners, and morals no longer hold true, and where the individual has become an expendable commodity.

This classic American novel is now available in a Broadview edition that includes a critical introduction and a rich selection of contextual documents. Appendices include Wharton’s correspondence about The House of Mirth, contemporary articles on social mores, etiquette, and dress, and related writings by Henry James, Thorstein Veblen, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Ethan Frome and Other Short Fiction (Bantam Classic)

by Edith Wharton

On a bleak New England farm, a taciturn young man has resigned himself to a life of grim endurance. Bound by circumstance to a woman he cannot love, Ethan Frome is haunted by a past of lost possibilities until his wife’s orphaned cousin, Mattie Silver, arrives and he is tempted to make one final, desperate effort to escape his fate. In language that is spare, passionate, and enduring, Edith Wharton tells this unforgettable story of two tragic lovers overwhelmed by the unrelenting forces of conscience and necessity.

Included with Ethan Frome are the novella The Touchstone and three short stories, “The Last Asset,” “The Other Two,” and “Xingu.” Together, this collection offers a survey of the extraordinary range and power of one of America’s finest writers.

The Age of Innocence

by Edith Wharton

Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, The Age of Innocence is an elegant, masterful portrait of desire and betrayal in old New York—now with a new introduction from acclaimed author Colm Tóibín for the novel’s centennial.

With vivid power, Wharton evokes a time of gaslit streets, formal dances held in the ballrooms of stately brownstones, and society people "who dreaded scandal more than disease." This is Newland Archer's world as he prepares to many the docile May Welland. Then, suddenly, the mysterious, intensely nonconformist Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York after a long absence, turning Archer's world upside down.

This classic Wharton tale of thwarted love is an exuberantly comic and profoundly moving look at the passions of the human heart, as well as a literary achievement of the highest order.

The Age of Innocence

by Edith Wharton

Initially serialized in the Pictorial Review in 1920, The Age of Innocence is a stylistic and intimate portrayal of upper class life in New York City during the Gilded Age.

Lawyer and socialite Newland Archer is about to enter a loveless marriage with a well-to-do bride, when her cousin, the exotic Ellen Olenska, enters the picture. Olenska is stuck in a bad marriage with a Polish count, and Archer finds himself in the awkward position of persuading her to save her family’s reputation by staying with her husband, even though Archer himself has fallen in love with her.

Combining a romantic tragedy with artful descriptions of aristocratic life in New York City, Edith Wharton’s twelfth novel is now available as an elegantly designed clothbound edition with an elastic closure and a new introduction.
 

The Age of Innocence

by Edith Wharton

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

'I want - I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that - categories like that - won't exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter.'

Newland Archer, a successful and charming young lawyer conducts himself by the rules and standards of the polite, upper class New York society that he resides in. Happily engaged to the pretty and conventional May Welland, his attachment guarantees his place in this rigid world of the elite.

However, the arrival of May's cousin, the exotic and beautiful European Countess Olenska throws Newland's life upside down. A divorcee, Olenska is ostracised by those around her, yet Newland is fiercely drawn to her wit, determination and willingness to flout convention. With the Countess, Newland is freed from the limitations that surround him and truly begins to 'feel' for the first time.

Wharton's subtle exposé of the manners and etiquette of 1870s New York society is both comedic, subtle, satirical and cynical in style and paints an evocative picture of a man torn between his passion and his obligation.

The House of Mirth (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)

by Edith Wharton

A black comedy of manners about vast wealth and a woman who can define herself only through the perceptions of others. The beautiful Lily Bart lives among the nouveaux riches of New York City – people whose millions were made in railroads, shipping, land speculation and banking. In this morally and aesthetically bankrupt world, Lily, age twenty-nine, seeks a husband who can satisfy her cravings for endless admiration and all the trappings of wealth. But her quest comes to a scandalous end when she is accused of being the mistress of a wealthy man. Exiled from her familiar world of artificial conventions, Lily finds life impossible.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Age of Innocence (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton’s acclaimed novel of love, duty, and half-known truths in Gilded Age New York society, with a foreword by bestselling author Elif Batuman

Dutiful Newland Archer, an eligible young man from New York high society, is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a suitable match from a good family, when May’s cousin, the beautiful and exotic Countess Ellen Olenska, is introduced into their circle. The Countess brings with her an aura of European sophistication and a hint of perceived scandal, having left her husband and claimed her independence. Her worldliness, disregard for society’s rules, and air of unapproachability attract the sensitive Newland, despite his enthusiasm about a marriage to May and the societal advantages it would bring. Almost against their will, Newland and Ellen develop a passionate bond, and a classic love triangle takes shape as the three young people find themselves drawn into a poignant and bitter conflict between love and duty. Written in 1920, Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a time and place long gone by—1870s New York City—beautifully captures the complexities of passion, independence, and fulfillment, and how painfully hard it can be for individuals to truly see one another and their place in the world.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Summer (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

by Edith Wharton

A tale of forbidden sexual passion and thwarted dreams played out against the lush, summer backdrop of the Massachusetts Berkshires, Edith Wharton called Summer her 'hot Ethan.' In their rural settings and their poor, uneducated protagonists, Summer and Ethan Frome represent a sharp departure from Wharton's familiar depictions of the urban upper class. Charity Royall lives unhappily with her hard-drinking adoptive father in an isolated village, until a visiting architect awakens her sexual passion and the hope for escape. Exploring Charity's relation to her father and her lover, Wharton delves into dark cultural territory: repressed sexuality, small-town prejudice, and, in subtle hints, incest.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Portable Edith Wharton (Penguin Classics)

by Edith Wharton

Best known for her novels depicting the stifling conformity and ceremoniousness of the upper-class New York society into which she was born, Edith Wharton also wrote brilliantly in many genres: essays, travel pieces, memoirs, and a variety of short stories. This unique collection provides a fresh look at Wharton's genius by including a generous sampling of her short stories, along with nonfiction, letters, excerpts from the novels The House of Mirth, The Reef, and The Age of Innocence, and Summer, reprinted in its entirety. Also included in this volume is an introduction by Linda Wagner-Martin, who examines the life and literary accomplishments of Edith Wharton, a chronology, notes, and bibliography.

Edited with an introduction by Linda Wagner-Martin.

Ethan Frome (Penguin Classics)

by Edith Wharton

Set against the frozen waste of a harsh New England winter, Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome is a tale of despair, forbidden emotions, and sexual tensions, published with an introduction and notes by Elizabeth Ammons in Penguin Classics. Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeenie. But when Zeenie's vivacious cousin enters their household as a 'hired girl', Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent. In one of American fiction's finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio toward their tragic destinies. Different in both tone and theme from Wharton's other works, Ethan Frome has become perhaps her most enduring and most widely read novel.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Summer (Little Clothbound Classics)

by Edith Wharton

A tale of forbidden sexual passion and thwarted dreams played out against the lush, summer backdrop of the Massachusetts Berkshires, Edith Wharton called Summer her 'hot Ethan.' In their rural settings and their poor, uneducated protagonists, Summer and Ethan Frome represent a sharp departure from Wharton's familiar depictions of the urban upper class. Charity Royall lives unhappily with her hard-drinking adoptive father in an isolated village, until a visiting architect awakens her sexual passion and the hope for escape. Exploring Charity's relation to her father and her lover, Wharton delves into dark cultural territory: repressed sexuality, small-town prejudice, and, in subtle hints, incest.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Age of Innocence (Penguin Vitae)

by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton’s acclaimed novel of love, duty, and half-known truths in Gilded Age New York society, with a foreword by bestselling author Elif Batuman.

A Penguin Vitae Edition

Dutiful Newland Archer, an eligible young man from New York high society, is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a suitable match from a good family, when May’s cousin, the beautiful and exotic Countess Ellen Olenska, is introduced into their circle. The Countess brings with her an aura of European sophistication and a hint of perceived scandal, having left her husband and claimed her independence. Her worldliness, disregard for society’s rules, and air of unapproachability attract the sensitive Newland, despite his enthusiasm about a marriage to May and the societal advantages it would bring. Almost against their will, Newland and Ellen develop a passionate bond, and a classic love triangle takes shape as the three young people find themselves drawn into a poignant and bitter conflict between love and duty. Written in 1920, Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a time and place long gone by—1870s New York City—beautifully captures the complexities of passion, independence, and fulfillment, and how painfully hard it can be for individuals to truly see one another and their place in the world.

Penguin Classics presents Penguin Vitae, loosely translated as “Penguin of one’s life,” a deluxe hardcover series featuring a dynamic landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction that has shaped the course of our readers' lives. Penguin Vitae invites readers to find themselves in a diverse world of storytellers, with beautifully designed classic editions of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.

The Custom of the Country: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Edith Wharton

Wharton’s sly and delicious novel about the ambitious social ascent of Undine Spragg, now in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with a foreword by Sofia Coppola

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition

Considered by many to be her masterpiece, Edith Wharton’s second full-length work is a scathing yet personal examination of the exploits and follies of the modern upper class. As she unfolds the story of Undine Spragg, from New York to Europe, Wharton affords us a detailed glimpse of what might be called the interior décor of this America and its nouveau riche fringes. Through a heroine who is as vain, spoiled, and selfish as she is irresistibly fascinating, and through a most intricate and satisfying plot that follows Undine’s marriages and affairs, she conveys a vision of social behavior that is both supremely informed and supremely disenchanted.

The Age of Innocence (Oxford World's Classics)

by Edith Wharton

The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton's most famous novel, is a love story, written immediately after the end of the First World War. Its brilliant anatomization of the snobbery and hypocrisy of the wealthy elite of New York society in the 1870s made it an instant classic, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. Newland Archer, Wharton's protagonist, charming, tactful, enlightened, is a thorough product of this society; he accepts its standards and abides by its rules but he also recognizes its limitations. His engagement to the impeccable May Welland assures him of a safe and conventional future, until the arrival of May's cousin Ellen Olenska. Independent, free-thinking, scandalously separated from her husband, Ellen forces Archer to question the values and assumptions of his narrow world. As their love for each other grows, Archer has to decide where his ultimate loyalty lies.
Stephen Orgel's introduction and notes set the novel in the context of the period and discusses Wharton's skilfull weaving of characters and plot, her anthropological exactitude, and the novel's autobiographical overtones.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Age of Innocence (Everyman's Library)

by Edith Wharton

One of Wharton’s most renowned novels—and the first by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize—exquisitely details the struggle between love and responsibility through the experiences of men and women in Gilded Age New York. • With an introduction by Peter Washington
The novel follows Newland Archer, a young, aristocratic lawyer engaged to the cloistered, beautiful May Welland. When May’s disgraced cousin Ellen arrives from Europe, fleeing her marriage to a Polish Count, her worldly, independent nature intrigues Archer, who soon falls in love with her. Trapped by his passionless relationship with May and the social conventions that forbid a relationship with Ellen, Archer finds himself torn between possibility and duty.
Wharton’s profound understanding of her characters’ lives makes the triangle of Archer, May, and Ellen come to life with an irresistible urgency. A wry, incisive look at the ways in which love and emotion must negotiate the complex rules of high society, The Age of Innocence is one of Wharton's finest, most illuminative works.

Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters (Everyman's Library)

by Edith Wharton

These three brilliantly wrought, tragic novellas explore the repressed emotions and destructive passions of working-class people far removed from the social milieu usually inhabited by Edith Wharton's characters.

Ethan Frome is one of Wharton's most famous works; it is a tightly constructed and almost unbearably heartbreaking story of forbidden love in a snowbound New England village. Summer, also set in rural New England, is often considered a companion to Ethan Frome-Wharton herself called it “the hot Ethan”-in its portrayal of a young woman's sexual and social awakening. Bunner Sisters takes place in the narrow, dusty streets of late nineteenth-century New York City, where the constrained but peaceful lives of two spinster shopkeepers are shattered when they meet a man who becomes the unworthy focus of all their pent-up hopes.

All three of these novellas feature realistic and haunting characters as vivid as any Wharton ever conjured, and together they provide a superb introduction to the shorter fiction of one of our greatest writers.

Ethan Frome & Summer (Modern Library Classics)

by Edith Wharton

A pair of masterly short novels, featuring an introduction by Elizabeth Strout, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Anything Is Possible and My Name Is Lucy Barton

Thought Edith Wharton is best known for her cutting contemplation of fashionable New York, Ethan Frome and Summer are set in small New England towns, far from Manhattan’s beau monde. Together in one volume, these thematically linked short novels display Wharton’s characteristic criticism of society’s hypocrisy, and her daring exploration of the destructive consequences of sexual appetite. From the wintry setting of Ethan Frome, where a man hounded by community standards is destroyed by the very thing that might bring him happiness, to the florid town of Summer, where a young woman’s first romance projects her into a dizzying rite of passage, Wharton captures beautifully the urges and failures of human nature.

Praise for Edith Wharton and Ethan Frome

“Ethan Frome [is considered] Mrs. Wharton’s masterpiece . . . The secret of its greatness is the stark human drama of it; the social crudity and human delicacy intermingled; the defiant, over-riding passion, and the long-drawn-out logic of the paid penalty. It has no contexts, no mitigations; it is plain, raw, first-hand human stuff.”—The New York Times

“Ethan Frome [has] become part of the American mythology. . . . Wharton’s astonishing authority here is to render such pain with purity and economy . . . Truly it is a northern romance, akin even to Wuthering Heights.”—Harold Bloom

“Traditionally, Henry James has always been placed slightly higher up the slope of Parnassus than Edith Wharton. But now that the prejudice against the female writer is on the wane, they look to be exactly what they are: giants, equals, the tutelary and benign gods of our American literature.”—Gore Vidal

Summer

by Edith Wharton, Karl Ove Knausgaard

The grand finale of Karl Ove Knausgaard's masterful and intensely-personal series about the four seasons, illustrated with paintings by the great German artist Anselm Kiefer

2 June--It is completely dark out now. It is twenty-three minutes to midnight and you have already slept for four hours. What you will dream of tonight, no one will ever know. Even if you were to remember it when you wake up, you wouldn't have a language in which to communicate it to us, nor do I think that you quite understand what dreams are, I think that is still undefined for you, that your thoughts haven't grasped it yet, and that it therefore lies within that strange zone where it neither exists nor doesn't exist.

The conclusion to one of the most extraordinary and original literary projects in recent years, Summer once again intersperses short vividly descriptive essays with emotionally-raw diary entries addressed directly to Knausgaard's newborn daughter. Writing more expansively and, if it is possible, even more intimately and unguardedly than in the previous three volumes, he mines with new depth his difficult memories of his childhood and fraught relationship with his own father. Documenting his family's life in rural Sweden and reflecting on a characteristically eclectic array of subjects--mosquitoes, barbeques, cynicism, and skin, to name just a few--he braids the various threads of the previous volumes into a moving conclusion.

At his most voluminous since My Struggle, his epic sensational series, Knausgaard writes for his daughter, striving to make ready and give meaning to a world at once indifferent and achingly beautiful. In his hands, the overwhelming joys and insoluble pains of family and parenthood come alive with uncommon feeling.

Summer

by Edith Wharton, Karl Ove Knausgaard

The grand finale of Karl Ove Knausgaard's masterful and intensely-personal series about the four seasons, illustrated with paintings by the great German artist Anselm Kiefer

The conclusion to one of the most extraordinary and original literary projects in recent years, Summer once again intersperses short vividly descriptive essays with emotionally-raw diary entries addressed directly to Knausgaard's newborn daughter. Writing more expansively and, if it is possible, even more intimately and unguardedly than in the previous three volumes, he mines with new depth his difficult memories of his childhood and fraught relationship with his own father. Documenting his family's life in rural Sweden and reflecting on a characteristically eclectic array of subjects--mosquitoes, barbeques, cynicism, and skin, to name just a few--he braids the various threads of the previous volumes into a moving conclusion. At his most voluminous since My Struggle, his epic sensational series, Knausgaard writes for his daughter, striving to make ready and give meaning to a world at once indifferent and achingly beautiful. In his hands, the overwhelming joys and insoluble pains of family and parenthood come alive with uncommon feeling.

Summer

by Edith Wharton, Karl Ove Knausgaard

In 1917, when Edith Wharton published Summer, she was living in a France “steeped in the tragic realities of war.” Yet she set this book far away from Paris and explored her most daring theme—a woman’s awakening to her sexual needs.

Eighteen-year-old Charity Royall, is bored in the small Massachusetts town of North Dormer and ignorant of desire until she meets a visiting architect, Lucius Harney. Like the lush summer of Berkshires around them, their romance is shimmering and idyllic, but its consequences are harsh and real. And the book, for its early twentieth-century audience, was shocking.

Wharton’s pellucid prose, her raw depiction of the mountain community where Charity was born, and Charity’s rites of passage into adulthood elevate Summer into a groundbreaking study of society, nature, and human needs. Joseph Conrad prized this gem of a novel and Wharton also favored it. Now the modern reader can experience the most erotic fiction Edith Wharton ever wrote. This anniversary edition also contains an introduction by notable Wharton scholar Candace Waid.

Summer

by Edith Wharton, Karl Ove Knausgaard

Considered by some to be her finest work, Edith Wharton’s Summer created a sensation when first published in 1917, as it was one of the first novels to deal honestly with a young woman’s sexual awakening.

Summer is the story of Charity Royall, a child of mountain moonshiners adopted by a family in a poor New England town, who has a passionate love affair with Lucius Harney, an educated man from the city. Wharton broke the conventions of women’s romantic fiction by making Charity a thoroughly independent modern woman—in touch with her emotions and sexuality, yet kept from love and the larger world she craves by the overwhelming pressures of heredity and society.

Praised for its realism and honesty by such writers as Joseph Conrad and Henry James and compared to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Summer remains as fresh and powerful a novel today as when it was first written.

The Decoration of Houses (Dover Architecture)

by Edith Wharton, Ogden Codman Jr.

Thousands of books on interior design have come and gone since the 1897 publication of this pioneering manual, but The Decoration of Houses remains, thanks to the insightful and inspiring advice of its co-authors. Before she became the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton was a society matron, remodeling a summer home in Newport, Rhode Island. With the able assistance of architect Ogden Codman, Jr., Wharton assembled this corrective to the rampant vulgarity of her nouveau riche neighbors. Wharton and Codman defied the excesses of the Gilded Age, counseling readers to reject the popular penchant for clutter in favor of simplicity and balance.
More than an engaging item of period charm, this historic guide offers examples of design rooted in architectural principles. Black-and-white photographs illustrate the authors' ideals of classic beauty, depicting grand ballrooms and spacious boudoirs as well as the elements common to homes of every size and era: doors and windows, walls and ceilings, floors, halls, and stairs. One of the genre's most important and influential titles, this volume sparked a Renaissance in American interior design, and its sound advice and practical approach remain forever in style.

Italian Villas and Their Gardens

by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and Their Gardens, a seminal work on garden design, is a testament to the passionate connoisseurship of one of America’s greatest writers. A comprehensive look at the history and character of Italian garden architecture and ornamentation, the book explores more than seventy-five villas, capturing what Wharton calls their "garden-magic" and illuminating the intimate relationship between the house, its formal gardens, and the surrounding countryside.This beautiful hardcover facsimile is carefully reproduced from the first edition published in 1904 and features all of the original plates, including twenty-six illustrations by Maxfield Parrish, as well as décollage edges. It is published in association with The Mount Press. A portion of the proceeds of the sale of the book support the restoration of The Mount, the Massachusetts estate designed and built by Wharton based on the principles articulated in this book and in The Decoration of Houses. Elegantly written and informed by Wharton’s sensitivity and wit, Italian Villas and Their Gardens is a work that belongs on the shelf of every lover of gardens and good taste.

Ethan Frome (Enriched Classics)

by Edith Wharton

Enriched Classics offer readers accessible editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and commentary. Each book includes educational tools alongside the text, enabling students and readers alike to gain a deeper and more developed understanding of the writer and their work.

An entrancing but sad story of a poverty-stricken Massachusetts farmer caught in a loveless marriage. The main characters are Ethan Frome, his wife Zenobia, called Zeena, and her young cousin Mattie Silver. Frome and Zeena marry after she nurses his mother in her last illness. Although Frome seems ambitious and intelligent, Zeena holds him back. When her young cousin Mattie comes to stay on their New England farm, Frome falls in love with her. But the social conventions of the day doom their love and their hopes. Ethan’s love for his young cousin leads to one day of explosive emotions with tragic consequences. The story forcefully conveys Wharton’s abhorrence of society’s unbending standards of loyalty.

Enriched Classics enhance your engagement by introducing and explaining the historical and cultural significance of the work, the author’s personal history, and what impact this book had on subsequent scholarship. Each book includes discussion questions that help clarify and reinforce major themes and reading recommendations for further research.

Read with confidence.

Wharton's New England: Seven Stories and Ethan Frome (Hardscrabble Classics)

by Edith Wharton

Although Edith Wharton is usually identified with the "old New York" of such masterworks as The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, she spent ten years living and writing in New England, a setting that appears in two novels, a novella, and fully a quarter of her short stories. In these works Wharton turns from portraying the monied and the mannered to probing inscrutable psyches and souls. The New England of these tales - which range from light comedy to horror - becomes a metaphor for fierce poverty, cultural barrenness, and an oppressive Puritan heritage that both fascinated and repelled Wharton.
Thus the frigid, engulfing winter of Starkfield buries Ethan Frome in a living death. That sense of moral and emotional confinement also appears in "The Angel at the Grave," as a young woman senses she has been "walled alive into a tomb hung with the effigies of dead ideas." In "The Lamp of Psyche," a visit to Boston relatives sheds new light on a woman's marriage; "Xingu" gently satirizes the snobbery of small-town "huntresses of erudition"; "Bewitched" and "All Souls" explore the theme of witchcraft. Barbara A. White's insightful introduction suggests that in these stories Wharton "seems to have projected onto New England aspects of herself that she most feared: repression, coldness, inarticulateness, mental starvation, and even lack of high culture."

The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton

by Edith Wharton

Combining two volumes of Wharton's short stories in a brand new edition, this outstanding selection is the most comprehensive available. Although Edith Wharton is best known for her novels The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, this extensive collection of her short fiction shows her to be a master of all its varieties.

"Wharton's stories . . . owe their enduring power to portray the emotional consequences of life in a rarefied world." -- New York Times

The Old Maid: The 'Fifties (Modern Library Classics)

by Edith Wharton

Originally serialized in The Red Book Magazine in 1922, The Old Maid is an examination of class and society as only Edith Wharton could undertake. The story follows the life of Tina, a young woman caught between the mother who adopted her—the beautiful, upstanding Delia—and her true mother, her plain, unmarried “aunt” Charlotte, who gave Tina up to provide her with a socially acceptable life. The three women live quietly together until Tina’s wedding day, when Delia’s and Charlotte’s hidden jealousies rush to the surface. Says Roxana Robinson in her Introduction, “Wharton weaves her golden, fine-meshed net about her characters with inexorable precision.” This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the text of the original magazine publication.

Edith Wharton : Novellas and Other Writings : Madame De Treymes / Ethan Frome / Summer / Old New York / The Mother's Recompense / A Backward Glance (Library of America)

by Edith Wharton

Collected in this Library of America volume are no fewer than six of the works of Edith Wharton: novels, novellas, and her renowned autobiography, A Backward Glance. Together they represent nearly a quarter century in the productive life of one of the most accomplished and admired of American writers.

Madame de Treymes (1907) is set in fashionable Paris society, where a once free-spirited American woman is trying to extricate herself, with the help of a fellow countryman, from her marriage to an aristocratic Frenchman.

Such a village is the scene of Ethan Frome (1911), a tale of marital entrapment even more relentless. Ethan’s unhappy marriage and his desperate love for his wife’s cousin Mattie drive him to an act of shattering violence. The magnificent coda is a classic of American realistic fiction.

Set in the same region of the Berkshires, Wharton called Summer (1917) “the Hot Ethan.” It is the story of a young woman’s initiation into the intricate sexual and social mores of a small town—and her revolt against them.

Observations of the American scene continue in the four novellas that make up Old New York (1924). They take us from the 1840s of “False Dawn,” where a young man is ostracized for his avant garde taste in art, to the 1870s of “New Year’s Day,” where a domestic scandal unfolds.

The poignancies of parenthood are also the theme of The Mother’s Recompense (1925). Kate Clephane, a divorced woman who has been living in Europe, returns to New York to find her former lover engaged to her daughter—and to face the emotional tangles of this unusual triangle.

The fullest portraits of New York are saved for A Backward Glance (1934), one of the most compelling of American autobiographies. Another perspective is offered in “Life and I,” an autobiographical fragment that shows a younger Wharton writing with great frankness about her early life. It is published here for the first time.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Ghost Stories: Chilling Tales of the Supernatural (Arcturus Gilded Classics)

by Edith Wharton, Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, William Hope Hodgson, Montague Rhodes James

This luxurious hardback anthology brings together 15 classic ghost stories by some of the genre's most acclaimed writers, presented in a beautiful gift edition with gilded page edges.

This ghoulish collection is a perfect companion for lovers of the paranormal, featuring classic tales from Golden Age of the ghost story. Inside you will find haunted mansions, dark crypts, vengeful curses, silent specters and other supernatural delights of the genre, artfully conjured by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu and M. R. James.

Stories include:
• 'The Oval Portrait' by Edgar Allan Poe
• 'The Wailing Well' by M. R. James
• 'The Withered Arm' by Thomas Hardy
• 'Afterward' by Edith Wharton
• 'A Ghost' by Guy de Maupassant
• 'An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street' by Sheridan Le Fanu

This beautiful collection is presented with silver gilded page edges, ivory paper and wonderfully gothic endpaper illustrations, making it a wonderful gift for any horror lover.

ABOUT THE SERIES: The Arcturus Gilded Classics series presents luxury gift editions of classics works, printed on opulent ivory paper, featuring hardcover Wibilin binding, foil-embossed cover designs, beautifully designed end-papers and gilded page edges. These make perfect collectibles for lovers of classic literature.

The New York Stories of Edith Wharton (New York Review Books Classics)

by Edith Wharton

A New York Review Books Original

Edith Wharton wrote about New York as only a native can. Her Manhattan is a city of well-appointed drawing rooms, hansoms and broughams, all-night cotillions, and resplendent Fifth Avenue flats. Bishops’ nieces mingle with bachelor industrialists; respectable wives turn into excellent mistresses. All are governed by a code of behavior as rigid as it is precarious. What fascinates Wharton are the points of weakness in the structure of Old New York: the artists and writers at its fringes, the free-love advocates testing its limits, widows and divorcées struggling to hold their own.

The New York Stories of Edith Wharton gathers twenty stories of the city, written over the course of Wharton’s career. From her first published story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” to one of her last and most celebrated, “Roman Fever,” this new collection charts the growth of an American master and enriches our understanding of the central themes of her work, among them the meaning of marriage, the struggle for artistic integrity, the bonds between parent and child, and the plight of the aged.

Illuminated by Roxana Robinson’s Introduction, these stories showcase Wharton’s astonishing insight into the turbulent inner lives of the men and women caught up in a rapidly changing society.

Ghosts

by Edith Wharton

An elegantly hair-raising collection of Edith Wharton's ghost stories, selected and with a preface written by the author herself.

No history of the American uncanny tale would be complete without mention of Edith Wharton, yet many of Wharton’s most dedicated admirers are unaware that she was a master of the form. In fact, one of Wharton’s final literary acts was assembling Ghosts, a personal selection of her most chilling stories, written between 1902 and 1937.

In “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” the earliest tale included here, a servant’s dedication to her mistress continues from beyond the grave, and in “All Souls,” the last story Wharton wrote, an elderly woman treads the permeable line between life and the hereafter.

In all her writing, Wharton’s great gift was to mercilessly illuminate the motives of men and women, and her ghost stories never stray far from the preoccupations of the living, using the supernatural to investigate such worldly matters as violence within marriage, the horrors of aging, the rot at the root of new fortunes, the darkness that stares back from the abyss of one’s own soul.

These are stories to “send a cold shiver down one’s spine,” not to terrify, and as Wharton explains in her preface, her goal in writing them was to counter “the hard grind of modern speeding-up” by preserving that ineffable space of “silence and continuity,” which is not merely the prerogative of humanity but—“in the fun of the shudder”—its delight.

Contents
All Souls’
The Eyes
Afterward
The Lady’s Maid’s Bell
Kerfol
The Triumph of Night
Miss Mary Pask
Bewitched
Mr. Jones
Pomegranate Seed
A Bottle of Perrier

Glimpses of the Moon (Pushkin Blues)

by Edith Wharton

Nick Lansing and Susy Branch are young, attractive, but impoverished New Yorkers. They are in love and decide to marry, but realise their chances of happiness are slim without the wealth and society that their more privileged friends take for granted. Nick and Susy agree to separate when either encounters a more eligible proposition. However, as they honeymoon in friends' lavish houses, from a villa on Lake Como to a Venetian palace, jealous passions and troubled consciences cause the idyll to crumble. Edith Wharton has perceptively described the choices faced by Nick and Susy; the same dilemma still facing those seduced by the pleasures of society.

Pushkin Collection editions feature a spare, elegant series style and superior, durable components. The Collection is typeset in Monotype Baskerville, litho-printed on Munken Premium White Paper and notch-bound by the independently owned printer TJ International in Padstow. The covers, with French flaps, are printed on Colorplan Pristine White Paper. Both paper and cover board are acid-free and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified.

Glimpses of the Moon (Pushkin Press Classics)

by Edith Wharton

A young couple's love is threatened by the destructive power of money, by one of the greatest authors of her age

In this beautiful novel, Edith Wharton perceptively describes the seductions and temptations of high society with all her trademark wit and irony.

Nick Lansing and Susy Branch are young, attractive, but impoverished New Yorkers. They are in love and decide to marry, but they realise their chances of happiness are slim without the wealth and status that their more privileged friends take for granted.

Nick and Susy agree to separate whenever either encounters a more eligible proposition. However, as they honeymoon in friends' lavish houses, from a villa on Lake Como to a Venetian palace, jealous passions and troubled consciences cause the idyll to crumble.

The Touchstone (Hesperus Classics)

by Edith Wharton

An early but accomplished work by Edith Wharton, The Touchstone is a tale of money and moral compromise, and foreshadows some of the best novels of her later life. Stephen Glennard, an impoverished lawyer in the glamorous, money-driven society of New York, has one valuable possession: the letters written to him by the eminent and now-deceased author Margaret Aubyn. He has seldom read the letters—he took their writer for granted—but they assume an importance for Glennard when it becomes clear that their financial worth will ensure his future stability and pay for his marriage to the beautiful Alexa Trent. What he fails to realize is that Aubyn’s ghost, once unleashed upon the reading public, will exercise an influence over his own life that reduces all his hopes and pleasure to ashes. American novelist Edith Wharton is known for her finely crafted stories of New York mores, including her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Age of Innocence.

The Age Of Innocence (Chiltern Classic)

by Edith Wharton

Chiltern Publishing creates the most beautiful editions of the World’s finest literature.
Your favorite classics in a way you have never seen them before; the tactile layers, fine details and beautiful colors of these remarkable covers make these books feel extra special and look striking on any shelf.
The Age Of Innocence tells the story of a wealthy lawyer Newland Archer, who is engaged to sweet socialite May Welland in 1870s New York. On the surface, it is a perfect match. But when May's beautiful cousin Countess Ellen Olenska, who is estranged from her brutish husband, arrives in town, Newland begins to question the meaning of passion and love as he desperately pursues a relationship with Ellen, even though she has been made a social outcast by Archer's peers.

In Morocco (Stanfords Travel Classics)

by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton journeyed to Morocco in the final days of the First World War, at a time when there was no guidebook to the country.[i]In Morocco[/i] is the classic account of her expedition. A seemingly unlikely chronicler, Wharton, more usually associated with American high society, explored the country for a month by military vehicle. Travelling from Rabat and Fez to Moulay Idriss and Marrakech, she recorded her encounters with Morocco's people, traditions and ceremonies, capturing a country at a moment of transition from an almost unknown, road less empire to a popular tourist destination. Her descriptions of the places she visited - mosques, palaces, ruins, markets and harems - are typically observant and brim with color and spirit, whilst her sketches of the country's history and art are rigorous but accessible.This is a wonderful account by one of the most celebrated novelists and travel writers of the 20th century and is a fascinating portrayal of an extraordinary country. Stanfords Travel Classics feature some of the finest historical travel writing in the English language, with authors hailing from both sides of the Atlantic. Every title has been reset in a contemporary typeface and printed to a high quality specification.

Glimpses of the Moon (Pushkin Collection)

by Edith Wharton

Nick Lansing and Susy Branch are young, attractive, but impoverished New Yorkers. They are in love and decide to marry, but realise their chances of happiness are slim without the wealth and society that their more privileged friends take for granted. Nick and Susy agree to separate when either encounters a more eligible proposition. However, as they honeymoon in friends' lavish houses, from a villa on Lake Como to a Venetian palace, jealous passions and troubled consciences cause the idyll to crumble. Edith Wharton has perceptively described the choices faced by Nick and Susy; the same dilemma still facing those seduced by the pleasures of society.

Pushkin Collection editions feature a spare, elegant series style and superior, durable components. The Collection is typeset in Monotype Baskerville, litho-printed on Munken Premium White Paper and notch-bound by the independently owned printer TJ International in Padstow. The covers, with French flaps, are printed on Colorplan Pristine White Paper. Both paper and cover board are acid-free and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified.

Edith Wharton: Selected Poems: (American Poets Project #18)

by Edith Wharton

From first to last, poetry was part of Edith Wharton’s writing life. While rarely (after early youth) her primary focus, it always served her as a medium for recording the most vivid impressions and emotions, an intimate journal of longings and regrets. “Poetry was important to Wharton,” writes editor Louis Auchincloss, “because it enabled her to express the deeply emotional side of her nature that she kept under such tight control, not only in her life but in the ordered sweep of her fiction.”

In later years her poetry also engaged with the public passions of wartime, as she found herself involved with the plight of Allied soldiers in France. Her first models were Romantic, but in the course of her life she absorbed the influences of Symbolism and Modernism; and throughout her poetic career she showed a care for form even in her most private utterances, as in the erotic ode “Terminus,” never published in her lifetime. This volume collects the bulk of Wharton’s significant poetry, including much work previously uncollected or unpublished.

About the American Poets Project
Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

Twilight Sleep (Smith & Taylor Classics, 1)

by Edith Wharton

Mrs. Pauline Manford is a busy woman, as any upstanding New York society lady should be.
To manage a modern household is to hold the family together, staying on trend with all things helpful, but her daughter has horrible taste in married men, her ex-husband is unwell, and her son is struggling to forge a career for himself while his postpartum wife refuses to settle down from lavish partying. Pauline can’t decide if she should bob her hair, redecorate, or get a face lift, and she surely doesn’t have time to notice her current husband’s wandering eye as anything other than harmless flirtations.
When a rakish Italian actor bound for Hollywood and a scandal with the local wellness guru threaten to tear her perfectly constructed life apart, Pauline moves on to new spiritually medicinal treatments, and the Manfords must navigate the fraught tensions that bind them together. Hopefully a vacation from NYC’s ruthless grind to their quiet country house will deter any further worries. Twilight Sleep (1927), named for the early anesthetic that predates epidural and induces memory loss, is Edith Wharton’s oft-forgotten novel of modern motherhood and the pressures that lead women to reconstruct or completely escape their lives. Sharp and humorous, it feels as relevant today as it did in the 1920s.

In Morocco

by Edith Wharton

In 1917, amid the turmoil of World War I, Edith Wharton, the author of The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, travelled to Morocco. A classic of travel writing, In Morocco is her account of this journey through the country's cities and through its deserts. The Ecco Travels edition of In Morocco brings this previously rare and hard-to-obtain Edith Wharton classic back into print after an absence of many decades.

The Age of Innocence (The Norton Library)

by Edith Wharton

Part of the Norton Library series
The Norton Libraryedition of The Age of Innocence features the complete text of the first (1921) edition. An introduction by Sheila Liming provides historical and sociocultural context to the novel’s Gilded Age setting, illuminating the deft ironies, gender politics, and enduring influence of Edith Wharton’s masterwork.
The Norton Library is a growing collection of high-quality texts and translations―influential works of literature and philosophy―introduced and edited by leading scholars. Norton Library editions prepare readers for their first encounter with the works that they’ll re-read over a lifetime. Inviting introductions highlight the work’s significance and influence, providing the historical and literary context students need to dive in with confidence. Endnotes and an easy-to-read design deliver an uninterrupted reading experience, encouraging students to read the text first and refer to endnotes for more information as needed. An affordable price (most $10 or less) encourages students to buy the book and to come to class with the assigned edition.
About the Editor: Sheila Liming is Associate Professor at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. She is the author of What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and creator of the web database EdithWhartonsLibrary.org.

The Custom of the Country (Penguin Classics)

by Edith Wharton

Considered by many to be her masterpiece, Edith Wharton's second full-length work is a scathing yet personal examination of the exploits and follies of the modern upper class. As she unfolds the story of Undine Spragg, from New York to Europe, Wharton affords us a detailed glimpse of what might be called the interior décor of this America and its nouveau riche fringes. Through a heroine who is as vain, spoiled, and selfish as she is irresistibly fascinating, and through a most intricate and satisfying plot that follows Undine's marriages and affairs, she conveys a vision of social behavior that is both supremely informed and supremely disenchanted. This edition features a new introduction and explanatory notes and reset text.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Age of Innocence (Macmillan Collector's Library)

by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Age of Innocence, is both a poignant story of frustrated love and an extraordinarily vivid, delightfully satirical record of a vanished world.

Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition features an introduction by award-winning novelist, Rachel Cusk.

As the scion of one of New York’s leading families, Newland Archer has been born into a life of sumptuous privilege and strict duty. But the arrival of the Countess Olenska, a free spirit who breathes clouds of European sophistication, makes him question the path on which his upbringing has set him. As his fascination with her grows, he discovers just how hard it is to escape the bonds of the society that has shaped him.

Selected Poems of Edith Wharton

by Edith Wharton, Irene Goldman-Price

Edith Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her novel The Age of Innocence, was also a brilliant poet. This revealing collection of 134 poems brings together a fascinating array of her verse—including fifty poems that have never before been published.

The celebrated American novelist and short story writer Edith Wharton, author of The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Age of Innocence, was also a dedicated, passionate poet. A lover of words, she read, studied, and composed poetry all of her life, publishing her first collection of poems at the age of sixteen. In her memoir, A Backward Glance, Wharton declared herself dazzled by poetry; she called it her “chiefest passion and greatest joy.”

The 134 selected poems in this volume include fifty published for the first time. Wharton’s poetry is arranged thematically, offering context as the poems explore new facets of her literary ability and character. These works illuminate a richer, sometimes darker side of Wharton. Her subjects range from the public and political—her first published poem was about a boy who hanged himself in jail—to intimate lyric poems expressing heartbreak, loss, and mortality. She wrote frequently about works of art and historical figures and places, and some of her most striking work explores the origins of creativity itself.

These selected poems showcase Wharton’s vivid imagination and her personal experience. Relatively overlooked until now, her poetry and its importance in her life provide an enlightening lens through which to view one of the finest writers of the twentieth century.

The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton

by Edith Wharton

One might not expect a woman of Edith Wharton's literary stature to be a believer of ghost stories, much less be frightened by them, but as she admits in her postscript to this spine-tingling collection, "...till I was twenty-seven or -eight, I could not sleep in the room with a book containing a ghost story." Once her fear was overcome, however, she took to writing tales of the supernatural for publication in the magazines of the day. These eleven finely wrought pieces showcase her mastery of the traditional New England ghost story and her fascination with spirits, hauntings, and other supernatural phenomena. Called "flawlessly eerie" by Ms. magazine, this collection includes "Pomegranate Seed," "The Eyes," "All Souls'," "The Looking Glass," and "The Triumph of Night."

Motor-Flight Through France

by Edith Wharton

Shedding the turn-of-the-century social confines she felt existed for women in America, Edith Wharton set out in the newly invented "motor-car" to explore the cities and countryside of France. In A Motor-Flight Through France, originally published in 1908, Wharton combines the power of her prose, her love for travel, and her affinity for France to produce this compelling travelogue.

Now back in print, this edition of will interest students of American literature as well as those who wish to see France through the eyes of a great American writer. The introduction analyzes Wharton's use of the genre of travel writing and places Wharton's work in the context of her life and times.

Ethan Frome (Oxford World's Classics)

by Edith Wharton

Set against the bleak winter landscape of New England, Ethan Frome is the story of a poor farmer, lonely and downtrodden, his wife Zeena, and her cousin, the enchanting Mattie Silver. In the playing out of this short novel's powerful and engrossing drama, Edith Wharton constructed her least characteristic and most celebrated book. In her Introduction, the distinguished critic Elaine Showalter discusses the background to the novel's composition and the reasons for its enduring success.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Edith Wharton: Four Novels of the 1920s (LOA #271): The Glimpses of the Moon / A Son at the Front / Twilight Sleep / The Children (Library of America Edith Wharton Edition)

by Edith Wharton

Acclaimed biographer Hermione Lee presents four “remarkable and surprising” books that collectively capture World War I and the Jazz Age through the eyes of one of our greatest novelists.

Edith Wharton achieved the height of her critical and popular success in the 1920s, following The Age of Innocence, winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, with four works that, though less well-known today, reveal the same mastery of dramatic irony and penetrating social satire that place her, with Henry James and Willa Cather, among the foremost writers of her era. The Library of America now brings these brilliant works together for the first time in the fifth volume of its ongoing edition of Wharton’s works. Here are The Glimpses of the Moon (1922), a romance set amid the crosscurrents of upper-class social maneuvering that is considered by some scholars to have been a literary inspiration for The Great Gatsby; A Son at the Front (1923), set in Paris in the First World War, a searing character study of an American painter grappling with his son’s decision to answer the call of duty in the French army; Twilight Sleep (1927), a satire of the Jazz Age and the New York society ladies who turn to drugs, occultism, and other distractions to escape the pain and emptiness of their lives; and The Children (1928), an unlikely love story that editor Hermione Lee has called “a daring and profoundly sad book” and “the most remarkable and surprising of the novels that came after The Age of Innocence.” Also included is a chronology of Wharton’s life, newly expanded from Hermione Lee’s masterful biography of Wharton, as well as helpful explanatory notes.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Short Stories (Dover Thrift Editions: Short Stories)

by Edith Wharton

Described by literary critic Robert Morss Lovett as "a novelist of civilization, absorbed in the somewhat mechanical operations of civilization, absorbed in the somewhat mechanical operations of culture, preoccupied with the upper ('and inner') class," Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edith Wharton (1862-1937) also wrote superbly crafted works of short fiction. The seven stories in this excellent collection demonstrate the author's ability to create memorable tales on themes of love and marriage, divorce, the experience of the artist, high society and its workings and other topics.
"Souls Belated," a tragedy of mores, focuses on characters overcome by the demands of convention, while "The Pelican" and "The Muse's Tragedy" both present women whose realities differ from their public personae. "Expiation" is a satiric, revealing story about the publishing industry, featuring a writer determined to increase the sales of her first novel. In "The Dilettante," a young man who prides himself on his ability to manipulate women must face ironic consequences when he introduces his fiancée to his supposed lover. "Xingu" is a witty satire on the intellectual pretensions of a group of rich women, while "The Other Two" presents a darkly humorous look at the consequences of divorce.
Gathered in this inexpensive volume, these stories provide an excellent sampling of Wharton's masterly efforts in the short story genre, a form of fiction she felt especially suited to her talents and one that enabled her to achieve a focused and intimate realism.

The House of Mirth (Oxford World's Classics)

by Edith Wharton

Since its publication in 1905 The House of Mirth has commanded attention for the sharpness of Wharton's observations and the power of her style. A lucid, disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of her generation, Wharton's tale of Lily Bart's search for a husband of position in New York Society, and betrayal of her own heart, transformed the traditional novel of manners into an arrestingly modern document of cultural anthropology. With incisive contemporary analysis, the introduction by a leading scholar of American literature updates this increasingly important work.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Custom of the Country (Oxford World's Classics)

by Edith Wharton, Stephen Orgel

Edith Wharton's satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century appeared in 1913; it both appalled and fascinated its first reviewers, and established her as a major novelist. The Saturday Review wrote that she had "assembled as many detestable people as it is possible to pack between the covers of a six-hundred page novel," but concluded that the book was "brilliantly written," and "should be read as a parable."
It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the Midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father's money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion.
Wharton was recreating an environment she knew intimately, and Undine's education for social success is chronicled in meticulous detail. The novel superbly captures the world of post-Civil War America, as ruthless in its social ambitions as in its business and politics.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Ethan Frome: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton Critical Editions)

by Edith Wharton

This Norton Critical Edition of Edith Wharton's celebrated novella is based on the first edition, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1911. It is fully annotated for undergraduate readers.

"Backgrounds and Contexts" includes a rich selection of materials, some previously unavailable, for the study of contemporary psychological, social, and economic issues, as well as Wharton's private correspondence and writings and biographical accounts of the author.

Arranged under two headings, "Criticism" reveals Ethan Frome's impact as both a literary work and a social commentary. "Contemporary Reviews" consists of eight prominent assessments of Ethan Frome, including reviews from the New York Times Book Review, Outlook, The Nation, the Saturday Review, and those penned by Frederic Taber Cooper and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, among others. "Modern Criticism" (1956-1991) includes seven interpretations of the novella by Lionel Trilling, Elizabeth Ammons, Judith Fryer, Jean Frantz Blackall, Lev Raphael, Candace Waid, and Cynthia Griffin Wolff.

A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are also included.

The Age of Innocence (Vintage Classics)

by Edith Wharton

One of Wharton’s most famous novels—the first by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize—exquisitely details a tragic struggle between love and responsibility in Gilded Age New York.

Newland Archer, an aristocratic young lawyer, is engaged to the cloistered, beautiful May Welland. But when May’s cousin Ellen arrives from Europe, fleeing her failed marriage to a Polish count, her worldly and independent nature intrigues and unsettles Archer. Trapped by his passionless relationship with May and the social conventions that forbid a relationship with the disgraced Ellen, Archer is torn between possibility and duty. Wharton’s profound understanding of her characters’ lives makes the triangle of Archer, May, and Ellen both urgent and poignant. An incisive look at the ways desire and emotion must negotiate the complex rules of society, The Age of Innocence is one of Wharton’s most moving works.

Ethan Frome (Vintage Classics)

by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton’s most widely read work is a tightly constructed and almost unbearably heartbreaking story of forbidden love in a snowbound New England village.

This brilliantly wrought, tragic novella explores the repressed emotions and destructive passions of working-class people far removed from the elevated social milieu usually inhabited by Wharton’s characters. Ethan Frome is a poor farmer, trapped in a marriage to a demanding and controlling wife, Zeena. When Zeena’s young cousin Mattie enters their household she opens a window of hope in Ethan’s bleak life, but his wife’s reaction prompts a desperate attempt to escape fate that goes horribly wrong. Ethan Frome is an unforgettable story with the force of myth, featuring realistic and haunting characters as vivid as any Wharton ever conjured.

The House of Mirth (Vintage Classics)

by Edith Wharton

Set among the glittering salons of Gilded Age New York, Edith Wharton’s most popular novel is a moving indictment of a society whose soul-crushing limitations destroy a woman too spirited to be contained by them.

The beautiful, much-desired Lily Bart has been raised to be one of the perfect wives of the wealthy upper class, but her drive and her spark of independent character prevent her from conforming sucessfully. Her desire for a comfortable life means that she will not marry for love without money, but her resistance to the rules of the social elite endangers her many marriage proposals and leads to a dramatic downward spiral into debt and dishonor. One of Edith Wharton’s most bracing and nuanced portraits of the life of women in a hostile, highly ordered world, The House of Mirth unfolds with the force of classical tragedy.

The Custom of the Country (Vintage Classics)

by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton’s lacerating satire on marriage and materialism in turn-of-the-century New York features her most selfish, ruthless, and irresistibly outrageous female character.

Undine Spragg is an exquisitely beautiful but ferociously acquisitive young woman from the Midwest who comes to New York to seek her fortune. She achieves her social ambitions—but only at the highest cost to her family, her admirers, and her several husbands. Wharton lavished on Undine an imaginative energy that suggests she was as fascinated as she was appalled by the alluring monster she had created. It is the complexity of her attitude that makes The Custom of the Country—with its rich social and emotional detail and its headlong narrative power—one of the most fully realized and resonant of her works.

The Custom of the Country (Modern Library Torchbearers)

by Edith Wharton

The classic satire of New York society and the American Dream through the misadventures of an insatiable young striver—with an introduction by Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror

Ambitious and wholeheartedly materialistic, Undine Spragg is a beautiful heiress who sees men as a means to an end. New York millionaires and French aristocrats fall at her feet, but each conquest is merely a stepping-stone in Undine’s quest for power and position—and in her elusive search for happiness.

A biting satire from one of America’s greatest writers, The Custom of the Country features a compelling and ruthless heroine, a sharp-eyed critique of the marriage market and its objectification of women, and a knowing send-up of Gilded Age snobbery.

The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance:

AMERICAN INDIAN STORIES • THE AWAKENING • THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY • THE HEADS OF CERBERUS • LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET • LOVE, ANGER, MADNESS • PASSING • THE TRANSFORMATION OF PHILIP JETTAN • VILLETTE

The House of Mirth (Modern Library 100 Best Novels)

by Edith Wharton

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton depicts the glittering salons of Gilded Age New York with precision and wit, even as she movingly portrays the obstacles that impeded women's choices at the turn of the century.

The beautiful, much-desired Lily Bart has been raised to be one of the perfect wives of the wealthy upper class, but her spark of character and independent drive prevents her from becoming one of the many women who will succeed in those circles. Though her desire for a comfortable life means that she cannot marry for love without money, her resistance to the rules of the social elite endangers her many marriage proposals. As Lily spirals down into debt and dishonor, her story takes on the resonance of classic tragedy. One of Wharton's most bracing and nuanced portraits of the life of women in a hostile, highly ordered world, The House of Mirth exposes the truths about American high society that its denizens most wished to deny. With an introduction by Pamela Knights.

The Age of Innocence (Modern Library 100 Best Novels)

by Edith Wharton

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

Newland Archer saw little to envy in the marriages of his friends, yet he prided himself that in May Welland he had found the companion of his needs--tender and impressionable, with equal purity of mind and manners. The engagement was announced discreetly, but all of New York society was soon privy to this most perfect match, a union of families and circumstances cemented by affection.
Enter Countess Olenska, a woman of quick wit sharpened by experience, not afraid to flout convention and determined to find freedom in divorce. Against his judgment, Newland is drawn to the socially ostracized Ellen Olenska, who opens his eyes and has the power to make him feel. He knows that in sweet-tempered May, he can expect stability and the steadying comfort of duty. But what new worlds could he discover with Ellen? Written with elegance and wry precision, Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece is a tragic love story and a powerful homily about the perils of a perfect marriage.

Commentary by William Lyon Phelps and E. M. Forster

The Age of Innocence (Dover Thrift Editions: Classic Novels)

by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) wrote carefully structured fiction that probed the psychological and social elements guiding the behavior of her characters. Her portrayals of upper-class New Yorkers were unrivaled. The Age of Innocence, for which Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize in 1920, is one of her most memorable novels.
At the heart of the story are three people whose entangled lives are deeply affected by the tyrannical and rigid requirements of high society. Newland Archer, a restrained young attorney, is engaged to the lovely May Welland but falls in love with May's beautiful and unconventional cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska. Despite his fear of a dull marriage to May, Archer goes through with the ceremony — persuaded by his own sense of honor, family, and societal pressures. He continues to see Ellen after the marriage, but his dreams of living a passionate life ultimately cease.
The novel's lucid and penetrating prose style, vivid characterization, and its rendering of the social history of an era have long made it a favorite with readers and critics alike.

The House of Mirth A Library of America Paperback Classic

by Edith Wharton

Born in 1862 into an exclusive New York society against whose rigid mores she often rebelled, Edith Wharton bridged the literary worlds of two continents and two centuries in her rich and glamorous life. The House of Mirth (1905), her tenth book, is the story of young Lily Bart and her tragic sojourn among the upper class of turn-of-the-century New York, touching upon the insidious effects of social convention and the sexual and financial aggression to which free-spirited women were exposed. "A frivolous society," Wharton wrote, "can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys."

Library of America Paperback Classics feature authoritative texts drawn from the acclaimed Library of America series and introduced by today?s most distinguished scholars and writers. Each book features a detailed chronology of the author?s life and career, and essay on the choice of the text, and notes.

The contents of this Paperback Classic are drawn from Edith Wharton: Novels, volume number 30 in the Library of America series. It is joined in the series by four companion volumes, gathering novellas, short stories, and other writing by Edith Wharton.

Summer (Oxford World's Classics)

by Edith Wharton

'Can't you see that I don't care what anybody says?'

Charity Royall lives in the small New England village of North Dormer. Born among outcasts from the Mountain beyond, she is rescued by lawyer Royall and lives with him as his ward. Never allowed to forget her disreputable origins Charity despises North Dormer and rebels against the stifling dullness of the tight-knit community surrounding her. Her boring job in the local library is interrupted one day by the arrival of a young visiting architect, Lucius Harney, whose good looks and sophistication arouse her passionate nature. As their relationship grows, so too does Charity's conflict with her guardian; darker undercurrents start to come to the surface.

Summer is often compared to Wharton's other New England story, Ethan Frome, and it shares the same intensity of feeling and repression. Wharton regarded it as one of her best works, and its compelling story of burgeoning sexuality and illicit desire has a strikingly modern and troubling ambiguity.

About the Series:
For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Twilight Sleep

by Edith Wharton

Out of print for several decades, here is Edith Wharton's superb satirical novel of the Jazz Age, a critically praised bestseller when it was first published in 1927.

Sex, drugs, work, money, infatuation with the occult and spiritual healing—these are the remarkably modern themes that animate Twilight Sleep.

The extended family of Mrs. Manford is determined to escape the pain, boredom, and emptiness of life through whatever form of "twilight sleep" they can devise or procure.

Though the characters and their actions may seem more in keeping with today's society, this is still a classic Wharton tale of the upper crust and its undoing—wittily, masterfully told.

Madame de Treymes and Three Novellas

by Edith Wharton

Madame de Treymes, Edith Wharton's first publication after the highly successful The House of Mirth, is a captivating portrait of turn-of-the-century American and French culture. Inspired by Wharton's own entré into Parisian society in 1906 and reminiscent of the works of Henry James, it tells the story of two young innocents abroad: Fanny Frisbee of New York, unhappily married to the dissolute Marquis de Malrive, and John Durham, her childhood friend who arrives in Paris intent on convincing Fanny to divorce her husband and marry him instead.
A subtle investigation of the clash of cultures and the role of women in the social hierarchy, Madame de Treymes confirms Edith Wharton's position, as Edmund Wilson wrote, as "an historian of the American society of her time."
This Scribner edition of Madame de Treymes also includes three novellas: The Touchstone, Sanctuary, and Bunner Sisters. These short works are rich in the social satire and cunning insight that characterized Wharton's highly acclaimed novels The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth.

A Backward Glance An Autobiography

by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, vividly reflects on her public and private life in this stunning memoir.

With richness and delicacy, it describes the sophisticated New York society in which Wharton spent her youth, and chronicles her travels throughout Europe and her literary success as an adult. Beautifully depicted are her friendships with many of the most celebrated artists and writers of her day, including her close friend Henry James.

In his introduction to this edition, Louis Auchincloss calls the writing in A Backward Glance “as firm and crisp and lucid as in the best of her novels.” It is a memoir that will charm and fascinate all readers of Wharton’s fiction.

Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belport (Hesperus Modern Voices)

by Edith Wharton

As nuanced in her observations of human behavior as she is in her vivid depictions of French landscape and architecture, Wharton fully exploited her unique position as consort to Walter Barry, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris, which allowed her unparalleled access to life in the trenches. Sensitive without sentimentality, and offering a valuable and extremely rare female perspective of a war dominated by the male viewpoint, this series of articlesis nothing less than an inspirational testament to the strength of the human spirit at a time of the greatest adversity.

Afterward: A Ghost Story for Christmas (Seth's Christmas Ghost Stories)

by Edith Wharton

A newly rich American couple buy an ancient manor house in England, where they hope to live out their days in solitude. One day, when the couple are gazing out at their grounds, they spy a mysterious stranger. When her husband disappears shortly after this eerie encounter, the wife learns the truth about the legend that haunts the ancient estate.

The Age of Innocence Authoritative Text, Background and Contexts, Sources, Criticism

by Edith Wharton

"Contexts" constructs the historical foundation for this very historical novel. Many documents are included on the "New York Four Hundred," elite social gatherings, archery (the sport for upper-crust daughters), as well as Wharton's manuscript outlines, letters, and related writings.

"Criticism" collects eleven American and British contemporary reviews and nine major essays on The Age of Innocence, including a groundbreaking piece on the two film adaptations of the novel.

"A Chronology and Selected Bibliography" are also included.

The House of Mirth (Signet Classics)

by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton's classic novel, The House of Mirth, is a brillaint exposé of the pretense and greed of fashionable New York Society.

In The House of Mirth, which helped to establish Edith Wharton’s literary reputation, she honed her acerbic style and discovered her defining subject: the fashionable New York society in which she had been raised and that held the power to debase both people and ideals. In this devastatingly accurate and finely wrought tale, Lily Bart, the poor relation of a wealthy woman, is beautiful, intelligent, and hopelessly addicted to the moneyed world of luxury and grace. But her good taste and moral sensibility render her unfit for survival in a vulgar society whose glittering social edifice is based on a foundation of pure greed. A brilliant portrayal of both human frailty and nobility, and a bitter attack on false social values, The House of Mirth has been hailed by Louis Auchincloss as “uniquely authentic among American novels of manners.”

With an Introduction by Anna Quindlen
and an Afterword by Michael Gorra

Ethan Frome

by Edith Wharton

Perhaps the best-known and most popular of Edith Wharton's novels, 'Ethan Frome' is widely considered her masterpiece. The eponymous Ethan Frome lives in a typical New England village where he makes a living out of his stony farm and exists at odds with his wife Zeena, a whining hypochondriac. When Mattie, Zeena's cousin, comes to live with them, love develops between her and Ethan. They try to end their hapless romance by steering a bobsled into a tree; but both end up disabled, tied to a long life of despair with Zeena. Zeena, however, is transformed into a devoted nurse while Mattie becomes the nagging invalid.

Ethan Frome

by Edith Wharton

This amply annotated edition of Wharton’s 1911 classic novella includes textual notes and documents, including Wharton's preface, letters, reviews, and early short story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View.” It is accompanied by the editor’s comprehensive introduction and a wide array of readings on topics central to the novella: tragedy, health and fitness, sex and marriage, and turn-of-the-century New England poverty and isolation. Of her twenty-five novels and novellas, Ethan Frome is the one of which Edith Wharton was most proud. Historically viewed as a high society writer or novelist of manners, Wharton is now receiving her due as an astute chronicler and critic of American life who brought literary realism to new levels and helped to usher in a period of modernist innovation.

This Broadview Edition demonstrates that Ethan Frome, a nightmarish saga of thwarted romance, is not an anomaly in Wharton’s career, but a natural outgrowth of her interest in the interplay of individual and society.

Virginia's Sisters

by Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Anna Akhmatova, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Zelda Fitzgerald, Marina Tsvetaeva

The anthology includes stories and poems by well-known authors such as Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Gertrude Stein, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Emma Goldman, Katherine Mansfield as well as many new translations of international women's writing from the same period. These include writers such as Colette, Maria Messina, Antonia Pozzi, Fani Popova Mutafova, Magda Isanos, Gabriela Mistral, Carmen de Burgos, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, May Ziadeh, Yenta Serdatzky and others.

The Custom of the Country

by Edith Wharton

“For my money, no literary antiheroine can best Undine.” —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

Edith Wharton’s compulsively readable 20th century classic about the conquests of Undine Spragg, the glamorous and insatiable social climber—now with a new introduction by Brandon Taylor.

Undine Spragg is beautiful—anyone in New York will admit to as much. But what is the point of beauty if no one can see you? The Spraggs left the Midwest in search of a glamorous life for their daughter. Now, cooped up in a gilded uptown hotel they can barely afford, they begin to fear their move to the big city was for naught. But Undine is determined. And Undine always gets her way.

What follows is a tactical climb to the pinnacle of affluence and early 20th-century high society that will amaze and mortify. Witty and devasting, The Custom of the Country is an astute comedy of manners and a scathing satire of upper-class life that bites to this day. More than a century after its original publication, Edith Wharton’s 1913 masterpiece remains an un-put-downable showcase for one of the most memorable, controversial anti-heroines in American literature.

The Custom of the Country

by Edith Wharton

Wharton’s sly and delicious novel about the ambitious social ascent of Undine Spragg, now in a Penguin Vitae edition, with a foreword by Sofia Coppola

A Penguin Vitae Edition

Considered by many to be her masterpiece, Edith Wharton’s second full-length work is a scathing yet personal examination of the exploits and follies of the modern upper class. As she unfolds the story of Undine Spragg, from New York to Europe, Wharton affords us a detailed glimpse of what might be called the interior décor of this America and its nouveau riche fringes. Through a heroine who is as vain, spoiled, and selfish as she is irresistibly fascinating, and through a most intricate and satisfying plot that follows Undine’s marriages and affairs, she conveys a vision of social behavior that is both supremely informed and supremely disenchanted. 

Bewitched: The Ghostly Tales of Edith Wharton

by Edith Wharton, Mike Ashley

None

The Buccaneers A Novel

by Edith Wharton, Marion Mainwaring

Edith Wharton's spellbinding final novel tells a story of love in the gilded age that crosses the boundaries of society—now an original series on AppleTV+!

“Brave, lively, engaging...a fairy-tale novel, miraculouly returned to life.”—The New York Times Book Review

Set in the 1870s, the same period as Wharton's The Age of Innocence, The Buccaneers is about five wealthy American girls denied entry into New York Society because their parents' money is too new. At the suggestion of their clever governess, the girls sail to London, where they marry lords, earls, and dukes who find their beauty charming—and their wealth extremely useful.

After Wharton's death in 1937, The Christian Science Monitor said, "If it could have been completed, The Buccaneers would doubtless stand among the richest and most sophisticated of Wharton's novels." Now, with wit and imagination, Marion Mainwaring has finished the story, taking her cue from Wharton's own synopsis. It is a novel any Wharton fan will celebrate and any romantic reader will love. This is the richly engaging story of Nan St. George and Guy Thwarte, an American heiress and an English aristocrat, whose love breaks the rules of both their societies.

Mr Jones

by Edith Wharton

"World-renowned cartoonist Seth illustrates a new story for his Christmas Ghost Stories series. The telling or reading of ghost stories during long, dark, and cold Christmas nights is a yuletide ritual dating back to at least the eighteenth century, and was once as much a part of Christmas tradition as decorating fir trees, feasting on goose, and the singing of carols. During the Victorian era many magazines printed ghost stories specifically for the Christmas season. These "winter tales" didn't necessarily explore Christmas themes. Rather, they were offered as an eerie pleasure to be enjoyed on Christmas Eve with the family, adding a supernatural shiver to the seasonal chill. The tradition remained strong in the British Isles (and her colonies) throughout much of the twentieth century, though in recent years it has been on the wane. Certainly, few people in Canada or the United States seem to know about it any longer. This series of small books seeks to rectify this, to revive a charming custom for the long, dark nights we all know so well here at Christmastime. In this story by Edith Wharton, caretaker Mr. Jones won't let anyone into the house. What secrets could he be guarding?"--

A Son at the Front

by Edith Wharton

'The war went on; life went on; Paris went on.'

In A Son at the Front, her only novel dealing with World War I, Edith Wharton offers a vivid portrait of American expatriate life in Paris, as well as a gripping portrayal of a complex modern family. The painter John Campton is divorced from the mother of his son, George, and although Julia's second husband, Anderson Brant, a wealthy banker, has been a devoted stepfather to George, Campton resents his presence in George's life. This family drama is ruptured by the outbreak of fighting, which requires George, born in France, to report for military service despite his parents' belief that he should be exempted.

Reflecting Wharton's own experiences, A Son at the Front documents the shock of the outbreak of war, the early hope of a quick victory for the Allies, the terrible human cost of the war, and the relief when, belatedly, the United States enters the conflict. The novel's tone reflects the realities of life in Paris, and the profound disillusionment of the post-war period, standing as not only an important part of Wharton's oeuvre, but a landmark in the literature of the First World War.

The Touchstone

by Edith Wharton

Published in 1900, eleven years prior to her masterpiece Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton's novella The Touchstone explores the emotional complexities of love and betrayal. Penniless and unable to marry the woman he loves, the financially struggling lawyer Stephen Glennard discovers a way out of his predicaments by selling love letters written to him by deceased author Margaret Aubyn. Glennard’s psychological anguish as he grapples with his guilt and the repercussions of his actions presents a poignant narrative of human conscience and morality.

The Vice of Reading

by Edith Wharton

"No vices are so hard to eradicate as those which are popularly regarded as virtues. Among these the vice of reading is foremost."

A great American novelist offers a scathing attack on the worst kinds of reading. Edith Wharton argues that the growing cultural influence of "mechanical" readers is having a disastrous impact on the world of letters. A subtly devastating work of social criticism, The Vice of Reading is also a celebration of the voracious and amoral consumption that marks out the very best readers.

Eris Gems make available in the form of beautifully produced saddle-stitched booklets a series of outstanding short works of fiction and non-fiction.