'If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature.' This title features two moving stories of love, loss, desire and divorce, from one of the great chroniclers of nineteenth-century New York life. Introducing Little Black [...]

Life is always hard for the poor, in any place and at any time. Ethan Frome is a farmer in Massachusetts. He works long hours every day, but his farm makes very little money. His wife, Zeena, is a thin, grey woman, always complaining, and only interested in her own ill health. Then Mattie Silver, a[...]

Set against the bleak winter landscape of New England, Ethan Frome tells the story of a poor farmer, lonely and downtrodden, his wife Zenia, and her cousin, the enchanting Mattie Silver. In her introduction the distinguished critic Elaine Showalter discusses the background to the novel's compositio[...]

'They lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.' Edith Wharton's most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War, is a brilliantly realized anatomy of New York soci[...]

"You'll call this sentimental--perhaps--but then a dog somehow represents the private side of life, the play side," Virginia Woolf confessed to a friend. In this charming and engaging book, Maureen Adams celebrates this private, playful side telling readers about the relationships between five remar[...]

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 Yor[...]

THE HOUSE OF MIRTH stands as the work that established Edith Wharton's literary reputation. In it, she discovered her major subject: the fashionable New York society in which she had been raised. She described its power to debase both people and ideals. This theme forms the dramatic core of this def[...]

Set against the bleak winter landscape of New England, Ethan Frome tells 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 chara[...]

Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905) is a sharp and satirical, but also sensitive and tragic analysis of a young, single woman trying to find her place in a materialistic and unforgiving society. The House of Mirth offers a fascinating insight into the culture of the time and, as suggested by t[...]

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 s[...]

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 characte[...]

This well-rounded introduction to the works of the illustrious American author features the complete text of Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Age of Innocence." Additional selections include excerpts from her highly influential guide to interior design, "The Decoration of Houses, " as we[...]

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 positi[...]