Over the course of a long and astonishingly productive literary career that stretched from the early 1890s to just before World War II, Edith Wharton published nearly a dozen story collections, leaving a body of work as various as it is enduring. With this two-volume set, The Library of America pres[...]
Over the course of a long and astonishingly productive literary career that stretched from the early 1890s to just before World War II, Edith Wharton published nearly a dozen story collections, leaving a body of work as various as it is enduring. With this two-volume set, The Library of America pres[...]
Edith Wharton's seven works of travel have been called "brilliantly written and permanently interesting." For the first time, excerpts from each of these works have been made available to the general reader in a single volume. The collection spans a period of three decades: from the time of leisurel[...]
This title includes three beloved novels by Edith Wharton, in a couture-inspired Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition designed by a fashion illustrator for Alexander McQueen. This edition celebrates the 150th anniversary of Edith Wharton's birth in 2012. "The House of Mirth": Nineteen year old Lily Bart [...]
An exciting archive came to auction in 2009: the papers and personal effects of Anna Catherine Bahlmann (1849-1916), a governess and companion to several prominent American families. Among the collection were one hundred thirty-five letters from her most famous pupil, Edith Newbold Jones, later the [...]
The original text of The Decoration of Houses continues without revision as an authentic classic, perhaps the most important book of its kind ever published. Its carefully reasoned chapters on such aspects of house interiors as fireplaces, ceilings and floors, halls and stairs, are of the greatest v[...]
Highlighting the position of women in turn of the century America, this novel uses the text from the original 1905 edition, including eight contemporary illiustrations. A section on backgrounds and contexts reprints selections from Edith Wharton's letters, contemporary articles about vocations for w[...]
The text of Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1921 novel of desire and its implications in Old New York is accompanied by necessarily rigorous annotations. "Contexts" constructs the historical foundations of the novel, with documents on "The New York Four Hundred" elite social gatherings and ar[...]
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[...]
As her marriage to an eminent and wealthy bachelor approaches, Kate Orme should feel nothing but bliss. Yet, when she learns of Denis' guilty secret she becomes painfully aware of her fiance's flawed morality. Determining that no child of hers should inherit such character traits, she does everythin[...]
Highly acclaimed at its publication in 1913, The Custom of the Country is a cutting commentary on America's nouveaux riches, their upward-yearning aspirations and their eventual downfalls. Through her heroine, the beautiful and ruthless Undine Spragg, a spoiled heiress who looks to her next material[...]
HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.
HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.
Edith Wharton made the world of Old New York her own, the wealthy high society so powerfully depicted in these three elegantly ironic novels. Revolving around the marriage question, they explore the dilemma of women and men held within the rigid bounds of social convention. Thus in The House of Mirt[...]
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY LIONEL SHRIVER Newland Archer and May Welland are the perfect couple. He is a wealthy young lawyer and she is a lovely and sweet-natured girl. All seems set for success until the arrival of May's unconventional cousin Ellen Olenska, who returns from Europe without her husband[...]
Lily Bart has no fortune, but she possesses everything else she needs to make an excellent marriage: beauty, intelligence, a love of luxury and an elegant skill in negotiating the hidden traps and false friends of New York's high society. But time and again Lily cannot bring herself to make the fina[...]
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" (1916) and "Ethan Frome" represent a sharp depa[...]
The return of the beautiful Countess Olenska into the rigidly conventional society of New York sends reverberations throughout the upper reaches of society. Newland Archer, an eligible young man of the establishment is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a pretty ingenue, when May's cou[...]
A classic work left unfinished by Edith Wharton has been brought to a successful completion using Wharton's own synopsis, as it chronicles the fortunes of five rich New York girls who travel to England in search of titled husbands. Reprint. NYT.[...]
This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "The House of Mirth" by Edith Wharton. 'It was characteristic of her that she always roused speculation, that her simplest acts seemed the result of far-reaching intentions'. A searing, shocking tale of women as consumer items in a man's world, "The H[...]
This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "Ethan Frome" by Edith Wharton. 'He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface'. Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to ma[...]