Edith Wharton
Author
Series
Description
One of Wharton's first novels to deal frankly with a young woman's sexual awakening, "Summer" created a sensation when it was published in 1917. Praised for its realism and candor by such writers as Joseph Conrad and Henry James, it is now considered a classic of American and women's literature.
Author
Formats
Description
Ralph Marvell, a gentle young man with the heart of a poet, squanders his family's modest inheritance in an attempt to find happiness. But the real star of Wharton's narrative is the beautiful, ambitious, and blatantly amoral schemer, Undine Spragg, who manipulates her nouveau-riche Midwestern parents into taking her East. There she rampages through New York society in search of a wealthy husband--who turns out, disastrously, to be Ralph Marvell.
5) The Reef
Author
Series
Everyman's library volume 201
Formats
Description
Written in 1912 and set in and around London, "The Reef" is a story of complex morality and its intricately woven place in society. This narrative primarily follows George Darrow and Anna Leath, a young gentleman and a widowed lady who plan to marry. Both of them experience doubts about their union, with surprising outcomes. Darrow has a brief liaison with the delicate, generous Sophy Viner, a kind woman of the working class. She later meets Anna's...
Author
Formats
Description
A young lawyer sells a package of love letters written to him over the years by a distinquished novelist to raise money to pay for his wedding to another woman. His secret comes back to haunt him and, when he confesses to his wife, their marriage is reduced to resigned coexistence.
8) The children
Author
Series
Formats
Description
"Early twentieth-century American author Edith Wharton's 1928 novel about a group of seven step-siblings who strike up a relationship with a solitary bachelor on a yacht while hoping that their parents' reconciliation lasts". *** "One of Mrs. Wharton's latest novels, this is a story of expatriate Americans in the 1920s. Its theme is the predicament of children whose rich, pleasure-mad parents progress through marriages and divorces as casually as...
Author
Formats
Description
Bunner Sisters, written in 1892 but not published until 1916 in Xingu and Other Stories, takes place in a shabby neighborhood in New York City. The two Bunner sisters, Ann Eliza the elder, and Evelina the younger, keep a small shop selling artificial flowers and small handsewn articles to Stuyvesant Square's "female population." Ann Eliza gives Evelina a clock for her birthday. The clock leads the sisters to become involved with Herbert Ramy, owner...
Author
Formats
Description
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...
11) Twilight sleep
Author
Formats
Description
Twilight Sleep is a novel by American author Edith Wharton and was first published in 1927 as a serial in the Pictorial Review before being published as a novel in the same year. The story, filled with irony, is centered around a socialite family navigating the New York of the Jazz Age and their relationships. This novel landed at number one on the best-selling list just two months after its publication and finished the year at number seven. Even...
Author
Formats
Description
In these powerful and elegant tales, Edith Wharton evokes moods of disquiet and darkness within her own era. In icy new England a fearsome double foreshadows the fate of a rich young man; a married farmer is bewitched by a dead girl; a ghostly bell saves a womans reputation. Brittany conjures ancient cruelties, Dorset witnesses a retrospective haunting and a New York club cushions an elderly aesthete as he tells of the ghastly eyes haunting his nights....
13) Old New York
Author
Formats
Description
First published in 1924, "Old New York" is a collection of four short stories set in the New York of the 1840s, 50s, 60s, and 70s by American author Edith Wharton. These stories are often considered a companion to Wharton's celebrated novel "The Age of Innocence", as many of the same characters and settings appear. "Old New York" is Wharton at her best as she explores the social issues that were often at the center of her works: infidelity, the class...
Author
Description
In this classic, a mother's past complicates her daughter's future in 1920s New York.
Trapped in an unhappy marriage with a controlling husband, Kate Clephane began an affair with a wealthy man, only to lose her daughter, Anne, and be exiled from New York society. Years later, after their entanglement has ended, Kate meets Chris Fenno in France. Although he is a much younger man, Chris is the love of Kate's life. However, their difficult circumstances...
15) In Morocco
Author
Formats
Description
The great American novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937) here gives us her colorful and textured travel memoir "In Morroco" (1920). Still a deeply energized work, Wharton imbues the reader with a sense of wonder that served as the impetus for her travels into this exotic Northern African land. Edith Wharton made her name as a novelist closely associated with the prolific Henry James. Their personal and literary kinship may be seen in much of her long...
Author
Series
Her Old New York volume 1
Description
A young woman is caught between two mothers in 1850s Manhattan in this novella by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Age of Innocence.
Tina is a girl torn between two women. There is her adoptive mother, Delia Ralston, a member of one of Manhattan's ruling families, and then there is Charlotte Lovell, the woman who gave her up so that she could have a chance at a better life. As Tina grows up, the tensions between Delia and Charlotte begin...
Author
Description
A trailblazer among American women at the turn of the century, Edith Wharton set out in the newly invented "motor-car" to explore the cities and countryside of France. As the Whartons embark on three separate journeys through the country in 1906 and 1907, accompanied first by Edith's brother, Harry Jones, and then by Henry James, Edith is enamored by the freedom that this new form of transport has given her. With a keen eye for architecture and art,...
18) Kerfol
Author
Description
What begins as an ordinary event quickly shifts into the bizarre after the narrator, a wealthy bachelor, meets their friend, Lanvivain, at an old mansion. Thinking about purchasing the property, the narrator and Lanvivain explore the mansion at Kerfol, attracted to the vast and ordinate property. Lanvivain enthusiastically urges the bachelor to buy the property, declaring that it matches his personality exactly. The narrator, however, is unconvinced,...
19) False dawn
Author
Series
Formats
Description
Twenty-one-year-old Lewis Raycie about to embark on a Grand Tour, is advised by his father to seek out works of art for a gallery with their family name. However, when Lewis returns, the paintings he has selected are not what his father expected.
Art Fiction is a literary genre in which art is not solely an object, but is a reflection of what is human in all of us. Other examples are:
Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
Glimpses of Gauguin...
Author
Formats
Description
Edith Wharton was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. Wharton combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels of social and psychological insight. She was also well acquainted with many of her era's other literary and public figures, including Theodore Roosevelt....