Edith Wharton
Edith Newbold Jones was born into such wealth and privilege that her family inspired the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses." The youngest of three children, Edith spent her early years touring Europe with her parents and, upon the family's return to the United States, enjoyed a privileged childhood in New York and Newport, Rhode Island. Edith's creativity and talent soon became obvious: By the age of eighteen she had written a novella, (as well as witty reviews of it) and published poetry in the Atlantic Monthly.After a failed engagement, Edith married a wealthy sportsman, Edward Wharton. Despite similar backgrounds and a shared taste for travel, the marriage was not a success. Many of Wharton's novels chronicle unhappy marriages, in which the demands of love and vocation often conflict with the expectations of society. Wharton's first major novel, The House of Mirth, published in 1905, enjoyed considerable literary success. Ethan Frome appeared six years later, solidifying Wharton's reputation as an important novelist. Often in the company of her close friend, Henry James, Wharton mingled with some of the most famous writers and artists of the day, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, André Gide, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, and Jack London.In 1913 Edith divorced Edward. She lived mostly in France for the remainder of her life. When World War I broke out, she organized hostels for refugees, worked as a fund-raiser, and wrote for American publications from battlefield frontlines. She was awarded the French Legion of Honor for her courage and distinguished work.The Age of Innocence, a novel about New York in the 1870s, earned Wharton the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921 -- the first time the award had been bestowed upon a woman. Wharton traveled throughout Europe to encourage young authors. She also continued to write, lying in her bed every morning, as she had always done, dropping each newly penned page on the floor to be collected and arranged when she was finished. Wharton suffered a stroke and died on August 11, 1937. She is buried in the American Cemetery in Versailles, France.
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton
The classic novel of despair, forbidden emotions, and sexual undercurrents set against the austere New England countryside
Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. But when Zeena'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 book.
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s masterful portrait of desire and betrayal during the sumptuous Golden Age of Old New York, a time when society people “dreaded scandal more than disease.”
This is Newland Archer’s world as he prepares to marry the beautiful but conventional May Welland. But when the mysterious Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York after a disastrous marriage, Archer falls deeply in love with her. Torn between duty and passion, Archer struggles to make a decision that will either courageously define his life—or mercilessly destroy it.
Summer
Edith Wharton
A naive girl from a humble background meets an ambitious city boy, and a torrid romance ensues. Despite her pride, independence, and honesty, Charity Royall feels shadowed by her past--especially in her ardent relationship with the educated and refined Lucius Harney. Can passion overcome the effects of heredity and environment?
With its frank treatment of a woman's sexual awakening, Summer created a sensation upon its 1917 publication. Edith Wharton — the author of Ethan Frome and a peerless observer and chronicler of society — completely shattered the standards of conventional love stories with this novel's candor and realism. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author declared Summer a personal favorite among her works, and liked to refer to it as "the Hot Ethan." Over a century later, it remains fresh and relevant.
The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton
First published in 1905, The House of Mirth shocked the New York society it so deftly chronicles, portraying the moral, social and economic restraints on a woman who dared to claim the privileges of marriage without assuming the responsibilities.
Lily Bart, beautiful, witty and sophisticated, is accepted by 'old money' and courted by the growing tribe of nouveaux riches. But as she nears thirty, her foothold becomes precarious; a poor girl with expensive tastes, she needs a husband to preserve her social standing, and to maintain her in the luxury she has come to expect. Whilst many have sought her, something—fastidiousness or integrity—prevents her from making a 'suitable' match.
In Morocco
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.
French Ways and Their Meaning
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton was devoted to the French people and their culture. During the First World War, while living in France and devoting herself to numerous war and relief efforts, she wrote several essays about the French and the unique attributes of their civilization, having in mind particularly the need for both Americans and the English to understand the ways of a people whose nation they were defending in the Great War. These pieces were first published in book form in 1919, under the title French Ways and Their Meaning.
Ghosts
Edith Wharton
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
The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
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."
Old New York
Edith Wharton
The four novellas collected here, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Age of Innocence, brilliantly capture New York of the 1840s, '50s, '60s, and '70s. Originally published in 1924, this outstanding quartet includes False Dawn, about a rocky father/son relationship; The Old Maid, the best known of the four, in which a young woman's hidden illegitimate child is adoted by her best friend, with devastating results; The Spark, involving a young man and his moral rehabilitation -- "sparked" by a chance encounter with Walt Whitman; and New Year's Day, an O. Henryesque tale of a married woman suspected of adultery. Each reveals the codes and customs that ruled society of the time, drawn with the perspicacious eye and style that is uniquely Edith Wharton's. Pocket Books' enriched Classics present the great works of world literature enhanced for the contemporary reader. This valume reprints the orginal New York Times Book Review feature on Old New York, a piece that helps fix the stories in the contemporary critical landscape. Also included are critical perspectives, suggestions for further reading, and a visual essay composed of authentic period illustrations and photographs.
Xingu
Edith Wharton
The book is a satire of a pretentious ladies lunch and literature group set in the early 1900's. The 6 ladies are reminiscent of an elite high school clique where there is heavy competition and an odd man out. The story focuses on the visit of a famous guest author, that doesn't turn out quite as planned. The only topic presented that the guest will discuss is Xingu. The ladies all state that they have just studied it ... but have they and do they even know what it is?
The Writing of Fiction
Edith Wharton
This edition features a new introduction from Brandon Taylor.
The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton contains brilliant advice on writing from the first woman ever to win a Pulitzer Prize -- for her novel The Age of Innocence. In The Writing of Fiction, Wharton provides general comments on the roots of modern fiction, the various approaches to writing a piece of fiction, and the development of form and style. She also devotes entire chapters to the telling of a short story, the construction of a novel, and the importance of character and situation in the novel. Not only a valuable treatise on the art of writing, The Writing of Fiction also allows readers to experience the inimitable but seldom heard voice of one of America's most important and beloved writers, and includes a final chapter on the pros and cons of Marcel Proust.
The Custom of the Country
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton’s compulsively readable 20th century classic about the conquests of Undine Spragg, the glamorous and insatiable social climber—now with a new 2022 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 devastating, 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.
Ethan Frome and Other Short Fiction
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.
© 2024 Pagebound