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...

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...

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...

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...

THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY is probably Edith Wharton's most savage satire on the manners of late nineteenth-century America. It is the story of the exquisitely beautiful but brutally ambitious Undine Spragg who marries her way into the high aristocracy of Europe, abandoning several husbands along the...

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...

Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize. The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton's masterful portrait of desire and betrayal in the sumptuous Golden Age of New York, when society people "dreaded scandal more than disease." This is Newland Archer's world as he prepares to marry the beautiful but conventional...

Set in the 1870s, Edith Wharton examines the American elite culture on the East Coast. Newland Archer is a lawyer and heir to one of New York City's most prominent families. He is arraigned to be married to May Welland. Newland is pleased with the prospect, under he meets Countess Ellen Olenska, May...

Delving into heretofore untapped sources, the author of the acclaimed masterpiece Virginia Woolf brilliantly interweaves Edith Wharton's life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her to be far more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age.

Delving into heretofore untapped sources, the author of the acclaimed masterpiece Virginia Woolf brilliantly interweaves Edith Wharton's life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her to be far more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age.