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Where to start reading the Penguin Little Black Classics

Bewitched

Edith Wharton was born in New York City on January 24, 1862. Edith married Teddy Wharton, who was 12 years older. They lived a life of relative ease with homes in New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Edith became a prolific writer and produced over 40 books in 40 years. 
Edith divorced Teddy in 1912, having no immediate heirs, and never married again. She was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University, and a full membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her novels became so popular that Ms. Wharton was able to live comfortably on her earnings the rest of her life. Edith continued to write until a stroke took her life in August 1937.

Edith Wharton's ghost stories whisper of passion, exile, and the things we cannot forget 
 
In an old Dorset house, a couple settle into a life of quiet comfort – until a presence makes itself felt. At a country gathering, a man is forced to confront a long-buried secret he has tried to outrun. In a small New England community, suspicion gathers around a widower believed to be under the spell of a dead woman. Bewitched brings together three of Edith Wharton’s most unsettling ghost stories. Elegant and controlled, they trace the lingering effects of guilt, secrecy and moral judgement – and the moment when the repressed makes its reappearance. 
 
Includes the stories: Afterward, The Eyes and Bewitched 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Pomegranate Seed and Other Ghostly Tales

PENGUIN HORROR: A celebration of the very best literary horror, a series of terrifying novels and tales that for generations have thrilled, captivated and kept readers wide awake at night. 
 
Known for writing some of the most incisive and elegant novels of the early twentieth century, Edith Wharton was also a master practitioner of the ghost story, producing dozens of frightful fictions throughout her lifetime. Combining pristine prose with strange, suffocating atmospheres and a profound sense of the uncanny, Pomegranate Seed and Other Ghostly Tales, a collection of Wharton's very best haunting narratives, detail spectral handwriting, isolated houses in lonely landscapes, and a husband with a terrible secret… 
 
‘Masterly stories of horror and unease’ New Yorker

Edith Wharton was born into a wealthy New York family in 1862, during the American Civil War. She married at twenty-three, and subsequently divided her time between homes in New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The House of Mirth, perhaps her most famous work, appeared in 1905, and was followed by Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, Summer and The Age of Innocence. Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She died in 1937.

Known for writing some of the most incisive and elegant novels of the early twentieth century, Edith Wharton was also a master practitioner of the ghost story, producing dozens of frightful tales throughout her lifetime. Combining pristine prose with strange, suffocating atmospheres and profound sense of the uncanny, this collection of her very best haunting narratives detail spectral handwriting, isolated houses in lonely landscapes, and a husband with a terrible secret… 
 
 ‘Masterly stories of horror and unease’ New Yorker

The Age of Innocence

A moving portrayal of the struggle between desire and duty in nineteenth-century New York high society 
 
Newland Archer, an eligible young man of the establishment is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a pretty ingénue, when May's cousin, Countess Olenska, is introduced into their circle. The Countess brings with her an aura of European sophistication and a hint of scandal, having left her husband and claimed her independence. 
 
Her sorrowful eyes, her tragic worldliness and her air of unapproachability attract the sensitive Newland and, almost against their will, a passionate bond develops between them. But Archer's life has no place for passion and, with society on the side of May and all she stands for, he finds himself drawn into a bitter conflict between love and duty.

Mr Jones

[This] series of Christmas ghost stories, miniature books chosen and illustrated by the cartoonist Seth... [offers] chills-and charm.

I just bought my set of these and they... are... PERFECT. I hope they do these every year.

Each of these tiny books-20 volumes now-is cleverly illustrated by the cartoonist known as Seth. Even smaller than a Christmas card, they make fun literary stocking stuffers.

Seth's evocative covers and black-and-white interior illustrations provide the perfect accompaniment to the stories ... Highly recommended for the horror lovers looking for something special in this post-Halloween season.

The Seth editions are harbingers of a Christmas ghost story revival.

Edith Wharton was born in New York City on January 24, 1862. Her and her husband, Teddy, lived a life of relative ease with homes in New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Edith became a prolific writer and produced over 40 books in 40 years. She was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University, and a full membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Edith continued to write until a stroke took her life in August 1937.

When Lady Jane Lynke unexpectedly inherits Bells, a beautiful country estate, she declares she'll never leave the peaceful grounds and sets about making the house her home. But she hasn't reckoned on the obstinate Mr Jones, the caretaker she's told dislikes her changes, yet never seems able to be found.

The Custom of the Country

Wharton's sly and delicious novel about the ambitious social ascent of Undine Spragg, with a foreword by 
Sofia Coppola 
 
Considered by many to be her masterpiece, Edith Wharton's second full-length work is a scathing yet personal examination of the exploits and follies of the modern upper class. As she unfolds the journey of Undine Spragg from New York to Europe, Wharton affords us a detailed glimpse of the America's interior and its nouveau riche fringes. Through a heroine who is as vain, spoiled and selfish as she is irresistibly fascinating, and through the intricate plot of Undine's marriages and affairs, Wharton conveys a vision of a social class that is both supremely informed and supremely disenchanted.

Edith Wharton (Author) 
Edith Wharton was born into a wealthy New York family in 1862, during the American Civil War. She married at twenty-three, and subsequently divided her time between homes in New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The House of Mirth, perhaps her most famous work, appeared in 1905, and was followed by Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, Summer and The Age of Innocence. Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She died in 1937. 
 
Sofia Coppola (Foreword By) 
Sofia Coppola is a director, producer and screenwriter known for films including 
Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinette (2006), The 
Bling Ring (2013), Beguiled (2017), and On the Rocks (2020). She won the 2004 
Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Lost in Translation. She is 
currently writing and directing a limited series adaptation of The Custom of the 
Country for Apple TV.

Considered by many to be her masterpiece, Edith Wharton's second full-length work is a scathing yet personal examination of the exploits and follies of the modern upper class. As she unfolds the journey of Undine Spragg from New York to Europe, Wharton affords us a detailed glimpse of the America's interior and its nouveau riche fringes. Through a heroine who is as vain, spoiled and selfish as she is irresistibly fascinating, and through the intricate plot of Undine's marriages and affairs, Wharton conveys a vision of a social class that is both supremely informed and supremely disenchanted.

Summer

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith 
 
Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil. 
 
A novella regarded by Edith Wharton as one of her very best, Summer tells the tale of forbidden sexual passion and thwarted dreams set against the backdrop of a lush summer in rural Massachusetts. A sensation on first publication, its honest depiction of a young woman attempting to live on her own terms remains as vital today as it was in 1917.

A novella regarded by Edith Wharton as one of her very best, Summer tells the tale of forbidden sexual passion and thwarted dreams set against the backdrop of a lush summer in rural Massachusetts. A sensation on first publication, its honest depiction of a young woman attempting to live on her own terms remains as vital today as it was in 1917.

Edith Wharton (Author) Edith Wharton was born in New York City on January 24, 1862. Edith married Teddy Wharton, who was 12 years older. They lived a life of relative ease with homes in New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Edith became a prolific writer and produced over 40 books in 40 years. 
Edith divorced Teddy in 1912, having no immediate heirs, and never married again. She was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University, and a full membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her novels became so popular that Ms. Wharton was able to live comfortably on her earnings the rest of her life. Edith continued to write until a stroke took her life in August 1937.

'We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?' 
 
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 and proceeds to shake up polite New York society. To Newland, she is a breath of fresh air and a free spirit, but the bond that develops between them throws his values into confusion and threatens his relationship with May. 
 
VINTAGE DECO: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on.

Abridged Edition

Penguin Readers Level 4: The Age of Innocence (ELT Graded Reader)

Penguin Readers is an ELT graded reader series for learners of English as a foreign language. With carefully adapted text, new illustrations and language learning exercises, the print edition also includes instructions to access supporting material online. 
 
Titles include popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and thought-provoking non-fiction, introducing language learners to bestselling authors and compelling content. 
 
The eight levels of Penguin Readers follow the Common European Framework of Reference for language learning (CEFR). Exercises at the back of each Reader help language learners to practise grammar, vocabulary, and key exam skills. Before, during and after-reading questions test readers' story comprehension and develop vocabulary. 
 
The Age of Innocence, a Level 4 Reader, is A2+ in the CEFR framework. The text is made up of sentences with up to three clauses, introducing more complex uses of present perfect simple, passives, phrasal verbs and simple relative clauses. It is well supported by illustrations, which appear regularly. 
 
Newland Archer is going to marry the sweet, pretty May Welland. Everyone thinks that they are perfect together. Then, May's beautiful cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, shocks everyone by leaving her husband and moving to New York. When Newland meets Ellen, he starts to question his future with May. 
 
Visit the Penguin Readers website 
Exclusively with the print edition, readers can unlock online resources including a digital book, audio edition, lesson plans and answer keys.

With carefully adapted text, new illustrations, language practise activities and additional online resources, the Penguin Readers series introduces language learners to bestselling authors and compelling content. Titles include popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and thought-provoking non-fiction. 
 
The Age of Innocence, a Level 4 Reader, is A2+ in the CEFR framework. The text is made up of sentences with up to three clauses, introducing more complex uses of present perfect simple, passives, phrasal verbs and simple relative clauses. It is well supported by illustrations, which appear regularly. 
 
Newland Archer is going to marry the sweet, pretty May Welland. Everyone thinks that they are perfect together. Then, May's beautiful cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, shocks everyone by leaving her husband and moving to New York. When Newland meets Ellen, he starts to question his future with May.

The Reckoning

'If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature.' 
 
Two moving stories of love, loss, desire and divorce, from one of the great chroniclers of nineteenth-century New York life. 
 
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. 
 
Edith Wharton (1862-1937). Wharton's works available in Penguin Classics are Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country and The House of Mirth.

Ethan Frome

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 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 towards their tragic destinies. 
 
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

Edith Newbold Jones (Edith Wharton) (1862-1937) was born in New York City during the American Civil War. She enjoyed a diverse and very successful career as interior and garden designer, short story writer and celebrated novelist, and was the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Wharton found inspiration for Ethan Frome's tragic denouement in an actual event in Lenox, Massachusetts, one of the victims of which she met personally. 
 
The House of Mirth is also published in the Penguin English Library.

Three Novels of New York (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

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 is in need of a rich husband to safeguard her place in the social elite. Unwilling to marry without both love and money, Lily becomes vulnerable to gossip. Wharton charts the course of Lily's life, providing a wider picture of a society in transition; a changing New York where old manners, morals and family attitudes are being replaced by the view that an individual is an expendable commodity. 
 
The Custom of the Country: Mr and Mrs Spragg are hoping to forge an entrée into society and arrange a suitably ambitious match for their only daughter. Wharton's story of Undine Spragg affords us a detailed glimpse of the interior décor of upper-class America and its nouveau riche. Through a heroine who is as vain and spoiled as she is fascinating, Wharton conveys a vision of social behaviour that is both informed and disenchanted. 
 
The Age of Innocence: When the Countess Ellen Olenska flees Europe and her brutish husband, her rebellious independence stirs the educated sensitivity of Newland Archer, already engaged to the Countess's cousin May Welland. As the drama unfolds, Edith Wharton's sharp ironic wit and Jamesian mastery of form create a disturbingly accurate picture of men and women caught in a society that denies humanity while desperately defending "civilisation".

Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones in New York in 1862. A member of a distinguished New York family, she married Edward Robbins Wharton, but divorced him in 1913. From 1910 until her death, she made her home in France. In 1915 the French government gave her the cross of the Legion of Honour for her guidance and charity during the First World War. Wharton won outstanding success with The House of Mirth. During her life she published more than forty volumes: novels, stories, verse, essays, travel books and memoirs.

The House of Mirth

Edith Newbold Jones (Edith Wharton) (1862-1937) was born in New York City during the American Civil War. She enjoyed a diverse and very successful career as interior and garden designer, short story writer and award-winning novelist. It was The House of Mirth, published in 1905, that made Wharton famous, and in 1921 she became the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize. 
 
Her great novella Ethan Frome is also published in the Penguin English Library.

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 House of Mirth sees Lily Bart, beautiful and charming, living among the wealthy families of New York but reluctant to finally commit herself to a husband. In her search for freedom and the happiness she feels she deserves, Lily is ultimately ruined by scandal. 
Edith Wharton's shattering novel created controversy on its publication in 1905 with its scathing portrayal of the world's wealthy and the prison that marriage can become. 
 
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

The tragic fall of Lily Bart, a beautiful socialite who loses her footing in the savage social-climbing world of New York high society in the nineteenth century

Edith Wharton was a natural story-teller. As plots do in real life, hers flow directly from character. Her prose is so effortlessly elegant that you're rarely aware as they purl by that the sentences are so pretty...I was born after the heavy spade work of female emancipation was done. But 100 years ago, Edith Wharton's drive, independence, wilfulness and autodidactic mastery of the English language were extraordinary, and I bashfully claim her as a kindred spirit

A cautionary tale of social disaster, told with wit and elan

Like Henry James, Wharton has a wonderful gift of revealing the inner life of her characters while also documenting the elegance and hypocrisy of high society...the accumulation of desolation in the final three chapters reduces me to tears

[Edith Wharton was] an ambitious, brilliant and industrious woman who created "her own personal and professional revolution"

Edith Wharton's 1905 novel gave literature one of its most complicated tragic heroines

The supreme novel of New York in its last great belle époque...Wharton is at her magnificent, merciless best here...The novel witheringly shows the savage side of high society, an impeccably mannered world of bridge and betrayal that simply spits Bart out

No one has bettered Edith Wharton on the cash-sex nexus of the respectable, as well as the clashes of propriety and fashion. The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth are probably the best novels by this knowing, compassionate writer

In a world of massive tragedy, it may seem strange to find the decline and death of Lily Bart, Edith Wharton's doomed protagonist in The House of Mirth, so sad...what makes one weep for Lily Bart in the end is the way her basic moral rectitude is so cruelly betrayed

Edith Wharton was born on 24 January 1862 in New York. She was educated in both America and Europe. In 1885 she married Edward Robbins Wharton. In 1899 she published her first work, a collection of stories called The Greater Inclination. In 1900 she published her first novel, The Touchstone. She wrote many other works including travel writing, home decoration manuals, short stories and her famous novels The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), The Custom of the Country (1913) and The Age of Innocence (1920). She lived in France from 1907. She was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1916 for her work helping refugees there during the war. Edith Wharton died on 11 August 1937.

The House of Mirth follows the tragic fall of Lily Bart, a beautiful socialite who loses her footing in the savage social-climbing world of New York high society in the nineteenth century. 
 
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 final decisive move: to abandon her sense of self and a chance of love for the final soulless leap into a mercenary union. Her time is running out, and degradation awaits. Edith Wharton's masterful novel is a tragedy of money, morality and missed opportunity. 
 
‘Edith Wharton's 1905 novel gave literature one of its most complicated tragic heroines’ Independent

Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

Beautifully packaged collection of three important stories by Edith Wharton, one of America's greatest writers.

Edith Wharton was born in New York City on January 24, 1862. Edith married Teddy Wharton, who was 12 years older. They lived a life of relative ease with homes in New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Edith became a prolific writer and produced over 40 books in 40 years. 
Edith divorced Teddy in 1912, having no immediate heirs, and never married again. She was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University, and a full membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her novels became so popular that Ms. Wharton was able to live comfortably on her earnings the rest of her life. Edith continued to write until a stroke took her life in August 1937.

These brilliantly wrought, tragic novellas explore the repressed emotions and destructive passions of working-cass people far removed from the social milieu usually inhabited by Edith Wharton's characters. 
Ethan Frome is one of Wharton's most famous works; it is a tightly constructed and almost unbearably heartbreaking story of forbidden love in a snowbound New England village. Summer, also set in rural New England, is often considered a companion to Ethan Frome - Wharton herself called it 'the hot Ethan' - in its portrayal of a young woman's sexual and social awakening. Bunner Sisters takes place in the narrow, dusty streets of late-nineteenth-century New York, where the constrained but peaceful lives of two spinster shopkeepers are shattered when they meet a man who becomes the unworthy focus of all their pent-up hopes. 
All three of these novellas feature realistic and haunting characters as vivid as any Wharton ever conjured, and together they provide a superb introduction to the shorter fiction of one of America's greatest writers.

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 ing&eacute;nue, when May's cousin, Countess Olenska, is introduced into their circle. The Countess brings with her an aura of European sophistication and a hint of scandal, having left her husband and claimed her independence. 
 
Her sorrowful eyes, her tragic worldliness and her air of unapproachability attract the sensitive Newland and, almost against their will, a passionate bond develops between them. But Archer's life has no place for passion and, with society on the side of May and all she stands for, he finds himself drawn into a bitter conflict between love and duty.

Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862 - August 11, 1937) was an American novelist. Her best known work, The Age of Innocence, won her a Pulitzer Prize and was written in 1920.

Edith Wharton's novels of manners seem to grow in stature as time passes. Here she draws a beautiful social climber, Undine Sprague, who is a monster of selfishness and honestly doesn't know it. Although the worlds she wants to conquer have vanished, Undine herself is amazingly recognizable. She marries well above herself twice and both times fails to recognize her husbands' strengths of character or the weakness of her own, and it is they, not she, who pay the price.

A tale of despair, forbidden emotions, and sexual undercurrents in the New England countryside

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 bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeenie. But when Zeenie'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 novel. 
 
Edith Wharton (1862-1937), born Edith Newbold Jones, was a member of a distinguished New York family said to be the basis for the idiom 'keeping up with the Joneses'. During her life she published more than forty volumes, including novels, stories, verse, essays, travel books and memoirs; for years she published poetry and short stories in magazines, but the book that made Wharton famous was The House of Mirth (1905), which established her both as a writer of distinction and popular appeal. In 1920, Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature with her novel The Age of Innocence. 
 
If you enjoyed Ethan Frome, you might like Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, also available in Penguin Classics.

Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, during the American Civil War. Wharton published her first short story in 1891; her first story collection, The Greater Inclination, in 1899; a novella called The Touchstone in 1900; and her first novel, a historical romance called The Valley of Decision, in 1902. The book that made Wharton famous was The House of Mirth, published in 1905. She died in 1937.

Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeenie. But when Zeenie'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 novel.

The Reef

Edith Wharton's subtle variation on the theme of the eternal triangle features Anna Leath, a rich American widow living in France; her daughter's delightful governess, Sophy Viner; and the first love of Anna's youth, George Darrow, who has come back into her life. Hoping to be reunited with George, Anna finds the path of love does not run smooth. THE REEF first appeared in 1912 when Edith Wharton was just fifty and at the height of her powers as a writer. It is a beautifully written, highly characteristic and eminently readable novel by a writer whose popularity is increasing by the year.

The Custom Of The Country

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 way. This novel, which has scences of comedy and even farce, is a commentary on both certain aspects of feminisim and certain aspects of capitalism in Edith Wharton's time. The novel makes a fitting companion to THE AGE OF INNOCENCE and THE HOUSE OF MIRTH and shows Wharton to be one of the greatest American novelists.

A black comedy of manners about vast wealth and a woman who can define herself only through the perceptions of others. 
 
The beautiful Lily Bart lives among the nouveaux riches of New York City &ndash; people whose millions were made in railroads, shipping, land speculation and banking. In this morally and aesthetically bankrupt world, Lily, age twenty-nine, seeks a husband who can satisfy her cravings for endless admiration and all the trappings of wealth. But her quest comes to a scandalous end when she is accused of being the mistress of a wealthy man. Exiled from her familiar world of artificial conventions, Lily finds life impossible.

Edith Wharton

In these elegant and devastating tales of deception, desire and social intrigue, Edith Wharton exposes the brittle veneer of civility that masks human ambition and longing.From the sunlit terraces of Rome to the drawing rooms of New York, Wharton’s characters navigate a world bound by class and convention, yet charged with emotional undercurrents they barely understand. In 'Roman Fever', two middle-aged women confront the unspoken rivalries that have shadowed their friendship for decades; in 'Mrs. Manstey’s View', a lonely widow’s cherished glimpse of life beyond her window becomes the stage for a quiet tragedy; and in 'After Holbein', the elaborate pretences of two ageing New Yorkers reveal the haunting persistence of vanity and illusion.

Edith Wharton

Books by Edith Wharton

Series by Edith Wharton

Brief Encounters52 Books

Penguin Horror5 Books

Seth's Ghost Stories4 Books

Vintage Deco9 Books

Articles featuring Edith Wharton

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