Edith Wharton Books In Order

Old New York Books In Publication Order

  1. The Old Maid (1922)
  2. The Spark (1924)
  3. New Year’s Day (1924)
  4. False Dawn (1924)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Touchstone (1900)
  2. Crucial Instances (1901)
  3. The Valley of Decision (1902)
  4. Sanctuary (1903)
  5. The House of Mirth (1905)
  6. The Fruit of the Tree (1907)
  7. Madame de Treymes (1907)
  8. Ethan Frome (1911)
  9. The Reef (1912)
  10. The Custom of the Country (1913)
  11. Summer (1917)
  12. The Marne (1918)
  13. The Age of Innocence (1920)
  14. The Glimpses Of The Moon (1922)
  15. A Son at the Front (1923)
  16. The Mother’s Recompense (1925)
  17. Twilight Sleep (1927)
  18. The Children (1928)
  19. Hudson River Bracketed (1929)
  20. Certain People (1930)
  21. The Gods Arrive (1932)
  22. Human Nature (1933)
  23. The Buccaneers (1938)

Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order

  1. Souls Belated (1899)
  2. The Lady’s Maid’s Bell (1902)
  3. The Quicksand (1902)
  4. The Other Two (1904)
  5. The Mission of Jane (1904)
  6. The Bolted Door (1909)
  7. Afterward (1910)
  8. The Eyes (1910)
  9. Bunner Sisters (1916)
  10. Kerfol (1916)
  11. A Bottle of Perrier (1926)
  12. A Venetian Night’s Entertainment (2000)
  13. The Reckoning (2000)
  14. The Last Asset (2004)
  15. The Rembrandt (2004)
  16. In Trust (2004)
  17. The Recovery (2004)
  18. The Introducers (2004)
  19. The Seed of the Faith (2004)
  20. The Best Man (2004)
  21. The Refugees (2004)
  22. Fast And Loose (2006)
  23. The Triumph of Night, and Xingu (2008)
  24. Mr. Jones (2008)
  25. The Angel at the Grave (2014)
  26. The Duchess at Prayer (2014)
  27. The Confessional (2014)

Collections In Publication Order

  1. The Duchess at Prayer and Other Stories (1900)
  2. The Descent of Man, and Other Stories (1903)
  3. The Daunt Diana and Other Stories (1909)
  4. Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses (1909)
  5. Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910)
  6. Collected Stories, 1891-1910 (1910)
  7. Ethan Frome and Other Short Fiction (1911)
  8. The Muse’s Tragedy and Other Stories (1914)
  9. Xingu (1916)
  10. Madame de Treymes and Three Novellas (1916)
  11. Xingu and Other Stories (1916)
  12. The Book of the Homeless (1916)
  13. The Triumph of Night and Other Tales (1927)
  14. Roman Fever and Other Stories (1934)
  15. The New York Stories of Edith Wharton (1934)
  16. Novellas and Other Writings (1934)
  17. The Reckoning And Other Stories (1934)
  18. The Ghost-Feeler (1935)
  19. The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (1937)
  20. The Collected Stories (1937)
  21. Collected Stories, 1911-1937 (1937)
  22. Eternal Passion In English Poetry (1939)
  23. The Best Short Stories of Edith Wharton (1958)
  24. Stories of Edith Wharton, Volume 2 (1993)
  25. The Stories of Edith Wharton, Volume 1 (1993)
  26. Ethan Frome and Selected Stories (2004)
  27. The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories (2004)
  28. The Pelican and Other Stories (2008)
  29. The Dilettante and Other Stories (2008)
  30. His Father’s Son and Other Stories (2008)
  31. The Last Asset and Other Stories (2008)
  32. Mrs. Manstey’s View and Other Stories (2008)
  33. Coming Home And Other Stories (2008)
  34. The Blond Beast and Other Stories (2008)
  35. The Mission of Jane and Other Stories (2008)
  36. Margaret of Cortona and Other Stories (2008)
  37. The Greater Inclination (2008)
  38. Ghosts: Edith Wharton’s Gothic Tales (2011)
  39. The World Over (2012)
  40. The Descent of Man (2013)
  41. Artemis to Actaeon (2013)
  42. Short Works of Edith Wharton (2015)
  43. Roman Fever (2016)
  44. Verses (2017)
  45. Selected Poems of Edith Wharton (2019)
  46. Ghosts: Stories (2021)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904)
  2. Italian Backgrounds (1905)
  3. A Motor-Flight Through France (1908)
  4. The Cruise of The Vanadis (1910)
  5. French Ways and Their Meaning (1919)
  6. In Morocco (1919)
  7. Edith Wharton Abroad (1920)
  8. The Writing of Fiction (1925)
  9. A Backward Glance (1934)
  10. The Decoration of Houses (2007)
  11. Fighting France (2019)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. 50 Great Short Stories (1952)
  2. 50 Great American Short Stories (1963)
  3. The Web She Weaves (1983)
  4. Great American Ghost Stories (2008)
  5. Unforgettable Ghost Stories by Women Writers (2008)
  6. The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (2012)
  7. Terrifying Ghosts Short Stories (2021)

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Edith Wharton Books Overview

The Old Maid

Originally serialized in The Red Book Magazine in 1922, The Old Maid is an examination of class and society as only Edith Wharton could undertake. The story follows the life of Tina, a young woman caught between the mother who adopted her the beautiful, upstanding Delia and her true mother, her plain, unmarried aunt Charlotte, who gave Tina up to provide her with a socially acceptable life. The three women live quietly together until Tina’s wedding day, when Delia s and Charlotte s hidden jealousies rush to the surface. Says Roxana Robinson in her Introduction, Wharton weaves her golden, fine meshed net about her characters with inexorable precision. This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the text of the original magazine publication.

False Dawn

In the 1840s, Lewis Raycie’s domineering father sends him to Europe to buy art. When he selects Italian primitives, not yet recognized as masterpieces, his appalled father disinherits him, only to discover, too late, the wisdom of his son’s intuition. ‘There are only three or four American novelists who can be thought of as ‘major’ and Edith Wharton is one.’ Gore Vidal

The Touchstone

Edith Wharton 1862 1937, born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged clas*ses with a brilliant, natural wit to write humourous and incisive novels and short stories. Wharton was well acquainted with many of her era’s literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Besides her writing, she was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses 1897, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens 1904. The Age of Innocence 1920, perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. Her other works include: The Greater Inclination 1899, The Touchstone 1900, Sanctuary 1903, The Descent of Man, and Other Stories 1904, The House of Mirth 1905, Madame De Treymes 1907, The Fruit of the Tree 1907, The Hermit and the Wild Woman, and Other Stories 1908, Ethan Frome 1912, In Morocco 1921, and The Glimpses of the Moon 1921.

The Valley of Decision

Edith Wharton 1862 1937, born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged clas*ses with a brilliant, natural wit to write humourous and incisive novels and short stories. Wharton was well acquainted with many of her era’s literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Besides her writing, she was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses 1897, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens 1904. The Age of Innocence 1920, perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. Her other works include: The Greater Inclination 1899, The Touchstone 1900, Sanctuary 1903, The Descent of Man and Other Stories 1904, The House of Mirth 1905, Madame de Treymes 1907, The Fruit of the Tree 1907, The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories 1908, Ethan Frome 1912, In Morocco 1921, and The Glimpses of the Moon 1921.

Sanctuary

Kate Orme is a young woman whose illusions of marital bliss are shattered when she comes face to face with the dark secret harbored by her fiance, the wealthy and deceptively ebullient Denis. Kate decides to go ahead and marry Denis, however, as a selfless gesture to protect any child he may conceive from inheriting their father’s moral weakness. The couple does have a child, Dick, and in a marriage with a man that Kate has admittedly ceased to love, she transfers her original affections for Denis to their son. Denis dies suddenly and Kate is left to raise their young son. Knowing that Dick could have inherited the faults of his father, Kate anticipates a time when Dick’s morality will be severely tested. That time comes years later when Dick, an eligible bachelor and aspiring professional, is faced with a dilemma that will affect the course of his life. With the precision, beauty, and sharp awareness of the cracks in upper class New York society that made her one of the great writers of the twentieth century, Edith Wharton offers a subtle critique of the nature versus nurture debate that raged in the early 1900s. Sanctuary is a spare and moving investigation of the forces that impel human beings toward sin, self doubt, and redemption.

The House of Mirth

The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: New introductions commissioned from today’s top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader’s viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences biographical, historical, and literary to enrich each reader’s understanding of these enduring works. Edith Wharton‘s dark view of society, the somber economics of marriage, and the powerlessness of the unwedded woman in the 1870s emerge dramatically in the tragic novel The House of Mirth. Faced with an array of wealthy suitors, New York socialite Lily Bart falls in love with lawyer Lawrence Selden, whose lack of money spoils their chances for happiness together. Dubious business deals and accusations of liaisons with a married man diminish Lily s social status, and as she makes one bad choice after another, she learns how venal and brutally unforgiving the upper crust of New York can be.

One of America s finest novels of manners, The House of Mirth is a beautifully written and ultimately tragic account of the human capacity for cruelty.
Jeffrey Meyers, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has published forty three books, including biographies of Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, and George Orwell.

The Fruit of the Tree

Originally published in 1907, this little known novel by Edith Wharton 1862 1937, the author of ‘The Age of Innocence’ and ‘Ethan Frome’, was considered controversial for its frank treatment of such issues as labour and industrial condition, drug addiction, mercy killing, desire, and divorce and second marriages. John Amherst, an idealistic middle manager in a New England textile mill, is committed to improving the deplorable working conditions of the laborers in his charge. But upper management, whose only concern is maximizing profits, frustrates his efforts. When Amherst eventually marries Bessy Westmore, the widow of the former mill owner, he is able at last to initiate an ambitious project of reform. But happiness for John and Bessy proves to be short lived. It quickly becomes clear that Bessy does not understand and cannot share her new husband’s passion for fair labor conditions and industrial reform. She even resents the time he devotes to his work and the way in which his expenditures impact her extravagant lifestyle. Complicating the situation is the strong friendship that Bessy’s old friend Justine develops with Amherst. Employed as a live in tutor for Bessy’s daughter, Justine eventually finds herself in an untenable position. How she reacts under pressure has lasting consequences for herself and those around her. In ‘The Fruit of the Tree‘, Wharton has created a gripping tale of full psychological insights, deft social portraiture, and profound ethical questions that remain challenging even today.

Madame de Treymes

Edith Wharton 1862 1937, born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged clas*ses with a brilliant, natural wit to write humourous and incisive novels and short stories. Wharton was well acquainted with many of her era’s literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Besides her writing, she was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses 1897, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens 1904. The Age of Innocence 1920, perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. Her other works include: The Greater Inclination 1899, The Touchstone 1900, Sanctuary 1903, The Descent of Man, and Other Stories 1904, The House of Mirth 1905, Madame de Treymes 1907, The Fruit of the Tree 1907, The Hermit and the Wild Woman, and Other Stories 1908, Ethan Frome 1912, In Morocco 1921, and The Glimpses of the Moon 1921.

Ethan Frome

ENDURING LITERATURE ILLUMINATED BY PRACTICAL SCHOLARSHIP 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 characteristic and most celebrated book. EACH ENRICHED CLASSIC EDITION INCLUDES: A concise introduction that gives readers important background information A chronology of the author’s life and work A timeline of significant events that provides the book’s historical context An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations Detailed explanatory notes Critical analysis, including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader’s experience Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world’s finest books to their full potential. SERIES EDITED BY CYNTHIA BRANTLEY JOHNSON

The Reef

Edith Wharton’s insightful classic, first published in 1912, was a daring challenge to the social and sexual conventions of the time, and its penetrating look into the nature of male female relationships is still provocative today. When George Darrow, a young American diplomat in Paris, is slighted by the woman he intends to propose marriage to, he has a brief, seemingly inconsequential affair with a spirited young woman whom he has taken under his wing. Months later, Darrow and the widowed Anna Leath mend their relationship and make plans to wed. But before they can announce their plans, Darrow learns that the engagement of Anna’s stepson threatens to have a profound effect on his own. Edith Wharton has long been one of America’s most celebrated and popular novelists. Her works include The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. Edith Wharton’s insightful classic, first published in 1912, was a daring challenge to the social and sexual conventions of the time, and its penetrating look into the nature of male female relationships is still provocative today. Edith Wharton’s insightful classic, first published in 1912, was a daring challenge to the social and sexual conventions of the time, and its penetrating look into the nature of male female relationships is still provocative today. When George Darrow, a young American diplomat in Paris, is slighted by the woman he intends to propose marriage to, he has a brief, seemingly inconsequential affair with a spirited young woman whom he has taken under his wing. Months later, Darrow and the widowed Anna Leath mend their relationship and make plans to wed. But before they can announce their plans, Darrow learns that the engagement of Anna’s stepson threatens to have a profound effect on his own. Edith Wharton has long been one of America’s most celebrated and popular novelists. Her works include The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize.

The Custom of the Country

Edith Wharton 1862 1937, born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged clas*ses with a brilliant, natural wit to write humourous and incisive novels and short stories. Wharton was well acquainted with many of her era’s literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Besides her writing, she was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses 1897, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens 1904. The Age of Innocence 1920, perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. Her other works include: The Greater Inclination 1899, The Touchstone 1900, Sanctuary 1903, The Descent of Man and Other Stories 1904, The House of Mirth 1905, Madame de Treymes 1907, The Fruit of the Tree 1907, The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories 1908, Ethan Frome 1912, In Morocco 1921, and The Glimpses of the Moon 1921.

Summer

OF INTEREST TO: readers of modern American literature, Wharton fans She lay on the warm ridge, thinking of many thing that the woodsman’s appearance had stirred up in her. She knew nothing of her early life, and had never felt any curiosity about it: only a sullen reluctance to explore the corner of her memory where certain blurred images lingered. But all that had happened to her within the last few weeks had stirred her to the sleeping depths…
from Summer The sly wit and penetrating wisdom of Edith Wharton one of the most celebrated novelists in the English language shines through in this 1917 work, one of her rare ‘country’ novels. Here, small town librarian Charity Royall is awakened to the limitations of her life and introduced to the power of passion by the seductive Lucius Harney, but even far from Wharton’s familiar urban ground, she will fall victim to the sexual and social politics that enslave society everywhere. Considered by some a companion novel to Wharton’s Ethan Frome, this is an astonishing tale of doomed romance from a master storytelling at the height of her ability. American author EDITH WHARTON 1862 1937 was born into a wealthy New York family and made a career of criticizing and satirizing her own high society in fiction. Her best known novels include The House of Mirth 1905, Ethan Frome 1911, and The Age of Innocence 1920, which won the Pulitzer Prize. ALSO FROM COSIMO: Wharton’s The Descent of Man and Other Stories, and Madame De Treymes

The Marne

a selection from the beginning of: CHAPTER I EVER since the age of six Troy Belknap of New York had embarked for Europe every June on the fastest steamer of one of the most expensive lines. With his family he had descended at the dock from a large noiseless motor, had kissed his father good bye, turned back to shake hands with the chauffeur a particular friend, and trotted up the gang plank behind his mother’s maid, while one welcoming steward captured Mrs. Belknap’s bag and another led away her miniature French bull dog also a particular friend of Troy’s. From that hour all had been delight. For six golden days Troy had ranged the decks, splashed in the blue salt water brim*ming his huge porcelain tub, lunched and dined with the grown ups in the Ritz restaurant, and swaggered about in front of the children who had never crossed before and didn’t know the stewards, or the purser, or the captain’s cat, or on which deck you might exercise your dog, or how to induce the officer on the watch to let you scramble up for a minute to the bridge. Then, when these joys began to pall, he had lost himself in others deeper and dearer. Another of his cronies, the library steward, had unlocked the bookcase doors for him, and buried for hours in the depths of a huge library armchair there weren’t any to compare with it on land he had ranged through the length and breadth of several literatures. These six days of bliss would have been too soon over if they had not been the mere prelude to intenser sensations. On the seventh morning generally at Cherbourg Troy Belknap followed his mother, and his mother’s maid, and the French bull, up the gang plank and into another large noiseless motor, with another chauffeur French this one to whom he was also deeply attached, and who sat grinning and cap touching at the wheel. And then in a few minutes, so swiftly and smilingly was the way of Mrs. Belknap smoothed the noiseless motor was off, and they were rushing eastward through the orchards of Normandy. The little boy’s happiness would have been complete if there had been more time to give to the beautiful things that flew past them; thatched villages with square towered churches in hollows of the deep green country, or grey shining towns above rivers on which cathedrals seemed to be moored like ships; miles and miles of field and hedge and park falling away from high terraced houses, and little embroidered stone manors reflected in reed grown moats under ancient trees. Unfortunately Mrs. Belknap always had pressing engagements in Paris. She had made appointments beforehand with all her dressmakers, and, as Troy was well aware, it was impossible, at the height of the season, to break such engagements without losing one’s turn, and having to wait weeks and weeks to get a lot of nasty rags that one had seen, by that time, on the back of every other woman in the place.

The Age of Innocence

Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: New introductions commissioned from today’s top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader’s viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences biographical, historical, and literary to enrich each reader’s understanding of these enduring works. 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. Maureen Howard is a critic, teacher, and writer of fiction. Her seven novels include Bridgeport Bus, Natural History, and A Lover s Almanac. Her memoir, Facts of Life, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has taught at Yale and Columbia University.

The Glimpses Of The Moon

I
I T rose for them-their honey-moon-over the
,vaters of a lake so famed as the scene of rolllantic
raptures that they were rather proud
of not having been afraid to choose it as the setting
of their own.
‘It required a total lack of humour, or as great
a gift for it as ours, to risk the experiment,’ Susy
Lansing opined, as they hung over the inevitable
nlarble balustrade and watched their tutelary orb
roll its magic carpet across the ‘waters to their
feet.
~ ‘Yes-or the loan of Strefford’s villa,’ her
husband emended, glancing upward through the
branches at a long lov patch of paleness to which
the lTIoonlight was beginning to give the form Qf a
white house-front.
~’Oh, come–when we’d five to choose from. At
least if you count the Chicago flat.’
‘So we had-you vonder!!’ lIe laid his hand
on hers, and his touch renewed the sense of marvelling
exultation which the deliberate survey of
their adventure always roused. in her…
. It
was characteristic

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A Son at the Front

Wharton’s antiwar masterpiece, now once again available, probes the devastation of World War I on the home front. Interweaving her own experiences of the Great War with themes of parental and filial love, art and self sacrifice, national loyalties and class privilege, Wharton tells an intimate and captivating story of war behind the lines.

The Mother’s Recompense

Opening on the French Riviera among a motley community of American expatriates, The Mother’s Recompense tells the story of Kate Clephane and her reluctant return to New York society after being exiled years before for abandoning her husband and infant daughter.

Oddly enough, Kate has been summoned back by that same daughter, Anne, now fully grown and intent on marrying Chris Fenno, a war hero, dilettante, and social opportunist. Chris’s questionable intentions toward her daughter are, however, the least of Kate’s worries since she was once, and still is, deeply in love with him. Kate’s moral quandary and the ensuing drama evoke comparison with Oedipus and Hamlet and lead to an ending that startled the mores of the day.

Twilight Sleep

1927. Wharton, American author, is best known for her stories and ironic novels about upper class people. Wharton’s central subjects were the conflict between social and individual fulfillment, repressed sexuality, and the manners of old families and the nouveau riche, who had made their fortunes in more recent years. Among her numerous novels, short stories, and travel writings are The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and the Pulitzer prize winning Age of Innocence. The Twilight Sleep deals with the postwar, Jazz Age frenzy of a middle aged American clubwoman and do gooder, Pauline Manford. The story is understood through the eyes of Pauline who schedules an almost supernatural round of meetings, social engagements, and self improvement sessions completely distracting her from the collapse of her family. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

The Children

A bestseller when it was first published in 1928, Edith Wharton’s The Children is a comic, bittersweet novel about the misadventures of a bachelor and a band of precocious children. The seven Wheater children, stepbrothers and stepsisters grown weary of being shuttled from parent to parent ‘like bundles,’ are eager for their parents’ latest reconciliation to last. A chance meeting between The Children and the solitary forty six year old Martin Boyne leads to a series of unforgettable encounters. Among the colorful cast of characters are the Wheater adults, who play out their own comedy of marital errors; the flamboyant Marchioness of Wrench; and the vivacious fifteen year old Judith Wheater, who captures Martin’s heart. With deft humor and touching drama, Wharton portrays a world of intrigues and infidelities, skewering the manners and mores of Americans abroad.

Hudson River Bracketed

One of Edith Wharton’s unjustly neglected novels, Hudson River Bracketed features two strong protagonists – Vance Weston and Halo Spear. The former is an undereducated young man who arrives in New York with a keen desire to write. Halo Spear is a brilliant, accomplished young woman who introduces Vance to literature and they form a deep bond, which flourishes and endures despite the hardships of Vance’s life, the disappointments of Halo’s – and their respective marriages.

Certain People

Edith Wharton 1862-1937, born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged clas*ses with a brilliant, natural wit to write humourous and incisive novels and short stories. Wharton was well-acquainted with many of her era’s literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Besides her writing, she was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste-maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses 1897, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens 1904. The Age of Innocence 1920, perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. Her other works include: The Greater Inclination 1899, The Touchstone 1900, Sanctuary 1903, The Descent of Man and Other Stories 1904, The House of Mirth 1905, Madame de Treymes 1907, The Fruit of the Tree 1907, The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories 1908, Ethan Frome 1912, In Morocco 1921, and The Glimpses of the Moon 1921.

The Gods Arrive

Halo Tarrant, abandoning her failed marriage, elopes to Europe with the brilliant young writer, Vance Weston. As they travel around, her only wish is to serve him and his genius. But, ignoring the pain her amiguous status brings, Vance takes her loving attentions for granted and rejects the critical advice he had formerly welcomed. This distinguished novel, companion piece to HUDSON RIVER BRACKETED, first published in 1932, shows a writer’s struggle for integrity and maturity, and the difficulties which, even in the most idealistic relationship, beset men and women in a changing but hypocritical moral climate.

The Buccaneers

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. NYT.

Souls Belated

She stayed there for a long time, in the hypnotized contemplation, not of Mrs. Cope’s present, but of her own past. Gannett, early that morning, had gone off on a long walk he had fallen into the habit of taking these mountain tramps with various fellow lodgers; but even had he been within reach she could not have gone to him just then. She had to deal with herself first. She was surprised to find how, in the last months, she had lost the habit of introspection. Since their coming to the Hotel Bellosguardo she and Gannett had tacitly avoided themselves and each other.

The Lady’s Maid’s Bell

After a while I slept; but suddenly a loud noise wakened me. My bell had rung. I sat up, terrified by the unusual sound, which seemed to go on jangling through the darkness. My hands shook so that I couldn’t find the matches. At length I struck a light and jumped out of bed. I began to think I must have been dreaming; but I looked at the bell against the wall, and there was the little hammer still quivering.

The Quicksand

On the Fenno threshold a sudden sense of the futility of the attempt had almost driven Mrs. Quentin back to her carriage; but the door was already opening, and a parlor maid who believed that Miss Fenno was in led the way to the depressing drawing room. It was the kind of room in which no member of the family is likely to be found except after dinner or after death.

The Other Two

The scene left Waythorn deeply shaken. Shamefacedly, in indirect ways, he had been finding out about Haskett; and all that he had learned was favorable. The little man, in order to be near his daughter, had sold out his share in a profitable business in Utica, and accepted a modest clerkship in a New York manufacturing house. He boarded in a shabby street and had few acquaintances. His passion for Lily filled his life. Waythorn felt that this exploration of Haskett was like groping about with a dark lantern in his wife’s past.

The Mission of Jane

The blow was bitter to Mrs. Lethbury; but she consoled herself with the idea that Jane had failed because she was too clever. Jane probably shared this conviction; at all events she betrayed no consciousness of failure. She had developed a pronounced taste for society, and went out, unweariedly and obstinately, winter after winter, while Mrs. Lethbury toiled in her wake, showering attentions on oblivious hostesses.

The Bolted Door

Good God as if he were likely to forget it! He re lived it all now in a drowning flash: the persistent rejection of the play, his sudden resolve to put it on at his own cost, to spend ten thousand dollars of his inheritance on testing his chance of success the fever of preparation, the dry mouthed agony of the ‘first night,’ the flat fall, the stupid press, his secret rush to Europe to escape the condolence of his friends!

Afterward

‘Or, rather,’ Ned answered, in the same strain, ‘why, amid so much that’s ghostly, it can never affirm its separate existence as THE ghost.’ And thereupon their invisible housemate had finally dropped out of their references, which were numerous enough to make them promptly unaware of the loss.

The Eyes

Phil, my dear boy, really what’s the matter? Why don’t you answer? Have you seen The Eyes?’ Frenham’s face was still hidden, and from where I stood behind Culwin I saw the latter, as if under the rebuff of this unaccountable attitude, draw back slowly from his friend. As he did so, the light of the lamp on the table fell full on his congested face, and I caught its reflection in the mirror behind Frenham’s head.

Bunner Sisters

Purchase one of 1st World Library’s Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www. 1stWorldLibrary. ORG In the days when New York’s traffic moved at the pace of the drooping horse car, when society applauded Christine Nilsson at the Academy of Music and basked in the sunsets of the Hudson River School on the walls of the National Academy of Design, an inconspicuous shop with a single show window was intimately and favourably known to the feminine population of the quarter bordering on Stuyvesant Square. It was a very small shop, in a shabby baseme*nt, in a side street already doomed to decline; and from the miscellaneous display behind the window pane, and the brevity of the sign surmounting it merely ‘Bunner Sisters‘ in blotchy gold on a black ground it would have been difficult for the uninitiated to guess the precise nature of the business carried on within. But that was of little consequence, since its fame was so purely local that the customers on whom its existence depended were almost congenitally aware of the exact range of ‘goods’ to be found at Bunner Sisters‘.

Kerfol

I left my light burning all night, as he had predicted; but it was chiefly because, till near dawn, I was absorbed in my reading. The account of the trial of Anne de Cornault, wife of the lord of Kerfol, was long and closely printed. It was, as my friend had said, probably an almost literal transcription of what took place in the court room; and the trial lasted nearly a month. Besides, the type of the book was detestable.

The Last Asset

She received the tribute with complacency. ‘The rooms are not bad, are they? We came over with the Woolsey Hubbards you’ve heard of them, of course? they’re from Detroit, and really they do things very decently. Their motor car met us at Boulogne, and the courier always wires ahead to have the rooms filled with flowers. This salon, is really a part of their suite. I simply couldn’t have afforded it myself.’

The Rembrandt

Mrs. Fontage’s smile took my homage for granted. ‘It is always,’ she conceded, ‘a privilege to be in the presence of the great masters.’ Her slim wrinkled hand waved me to a dusky canvas near the window.

In Trust

He’s quite right to do nothing in a hurry to take advice and compare ideas and points of view to collect and classify his material in advance,’ Halidon argued, in answer to a taunt of mine about Paul’s perpetually reiterated plea that he was still waiting for So and so’s report; ‘but now that the plan’s mature and such a plan! You’ll grant it’s magnificent? I should think he’d burn to see it carried out, instead of pottering over it till his enthusiasm cools and the whole business turns stale on his hands.

The Recovery

They moved about from room to room without exchanging a word. The vast noiseless space seemed full of sound, like the roar of a distant multitude heard only by the inner ear. Had their speech been articulate their language would have been incomprehensible; and even that far off murmur of meaning pressed intolerably on Claudia’s throbbing nerves. Keniston took the onset without outward sign of disturbance.

The Introducers

‘Oh, yes, you can. That’s my reason for asking you. You see, I really can’t help Magraw much. It takes a woman to give a man a start. Aline will say, ‘Oh, bring him, if you choose’ but when he comes she won’t take any notice of him, or introduce him to any of the nice women. He was too shy to go to the Summertons’ last night he’s really very shy under his loudness so Aline’s dance will be his first appearance in Newport.

The Seed of the Faith

‘In any Christian country,’ he mused, ‘this would mean a thunder storm and a cool off. Here it just means months and months more of the same thing.’ And he thought enviously of Spink, who, in two or three days, his ‘deal’ concluded, would be at sea again, heading for the north.

The Best Man

Mornway related the incident of Gregg’s visit. ‘I could hardly buy my information at that price,’ he said, ‘and, besides, it is really Fleetwood’s business this time. I suppose he has heard the report, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. I rather thought he would have looked in to day to talk things over, but I haven’t seen him.’

The Refugees

He had in truth a dramatic imagination without the power of expression. Instead of writing novels he read them; instead of living adventures he dreamed them. Being naturally modest he had long since discovered his limitations, and decided that all his imagination would ever do for him was to give him a greater freedom of judgment than his neighbors had. Even that was something to be thankful for; but now he began to ask himself if it was enough.

The Triumph of Night, and Xingu

Edith Wharton 1862 1937, born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged clas*ses with a brilliant, natural wit to write humourous and incisive novels and short stories. Wharton was well acquainted with many of her era’s literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Besides her writing, she was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses 1897, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens 1904. The Age of Innocence 1920, perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. Her other works include: The Greater Inclination 1899, The Touchstone 1900, Sanctuary 1903, The Descent of Man and Other Stories 1904, The House of Mirth 1905, Madame de Treymes 1907, The Fruit of the Tree 1907, The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories 1908, Ethan Frome 1912, In Morocco 1921, and The Glimpses of the Moon 1921.

Mr. Jones

Edith Wharton 1862 1937, born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged clas*ses with a brilliant, natural wit to write humourous and incisive novels and short stories. Wharton was well acquainted with many of her era’s literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Besides her writing, she was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses 1897, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens 1904. The Age of Innocence 1920, perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. Her other works include: The Greater Inclination 1899, The Touchstone 1900, Sanctuary 1903, The Descent of Man and Other Stories 1904, The House of Mirth 1905, Madame de Treymes 1907, The Fruit of the Tree 1907, The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories 1908, Ethan Frome 1912, In Morocco 1921, and The Glimpses of the Moon 1921.

The Duchess at Prayer and Other Stories

Edith Wharton 1862 1937, born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged clas*ses with a brilliant, natural wit to write humourous and incisive novels and short stories. Wharton was well acquainted with many of her era’s literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Besides her writing, she was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses 1897, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens 1904. The Age of Innocence 1920, perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. Her other works include: The Greater Inclination 1899, The Touchstone 1900, Sanctuary 1903, The Descent of Man and Other Stories 1904, The House of Mirth 1905, Madame de Treymes 1907, The Fruit of the Tree 1907, The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories 1908, Ethan Frome 1912, In Morocco 1921, and The Glimpses of the Moon 1921.

The Descent of Man, and Other Stories

Lethbury, surveying his wife across the dinner table, found his transient glance arrested by an indefinable change in her appearance. ‘How smart you look! Is that a new gown?’ he asked. Her answering look seemed to deprecate his charging her with the extravagance of wasting a new gown on him, and he now perceived that the change lay deeper than any accident of dress. from ‘The Mission of Jane’ The sly wit and penetrating wisdom of Edith Wharton one of the most celebrated novelists in the English language is ever on tap in this essential collection of her short fiction. The social chronicler of the Gilded Age, she exposed the excesses and hypocrisies of refined society in fiction replete with passion, sexual politics, and the rumblings of incipient feminism…
as well as astonishingly dramatic storytelling. Here in one volume is a treasure trove of Wharton’s short fiction. The Descent of Man, and Other Stories, first published as a collection in 1904, features short stories that appeared in fashionable publications including Scribner’s, Cosmopolitan, and Collier’s Weekly. Also in this volume is the novella ‘Madame De Treymes,’ first published in 1907, the tale of an American woman in the unpleasant thrall of a French aristocrat.

The Daunt Diana and Other Stories

Edith Wharton 1862 1937, born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged clas*ses with a brilliant, natural wit to write humourous and incisive novels and short stories. Wharton was well acquainted with many of her era’s literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Besides her writing, she was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses 1897, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens 1904. The Age of Innocence 1920, perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. Her other works include: The Greater Inclination 1899, The Touchstone 1900, Sanctuary 1903, The Descent of Man and Other Stories 1904, The House of Mirth 1905, Madame de Treymes 1907, The Fruit of the Tree 1907, The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories 1908, Ethan Frome 1912, In Morocco 1921, and The Glimpses of the Moon 1921.

Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses

Edith Wharton 1862 1937, born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged clas*ses with a brilliant, natural wit to write humourous and incisive novels and short stories. Wharton was well acquainted with many of her era’s literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Besides her writing, she was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses 1897, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens 1904. The Age of Innocence 1920, perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. Her other works include: The Greater Inclination 1899, The Touchstone 1900, Sanctuary 1903, The Descent of Man and Other Stories 1904, The House of Mirth 1905, Madame de Treymes 1907, The Fruit of the Tree 1907, The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories 1908, Ethan Frome 1912, In Morocco 1921, and The Glimpses of the Moon 1921.

Tales of Men and Ghosts

EDITH WHARTON 1862 1937 was one of the most remarkable women of her time, and her immense commercial and critical success most notably with her novel ‘The Age of Innocense’ 1920, which won a Pulitzer Prize have long overshadowed her small but distinguished body of supernatural fiction. Some of her finest fantastic and detective work which oft times overlap was first collected in 1909 in ‘Tales of Men and Ghosts‘. The psychological horror is as important as the literal one here, and subtle ambiguities characterized by the best of Henry James’s work such as ‘The Turn of the Screw’ are also present in Wharton’s character studies, such as ‘The Bolted Door.’ Is the protagonist a murderer, or is he mad? In the end it may not matter, for it is his descent into madness and obsession that gives the story its chilling frisson. Other tales present men or ghosts, or what men believe to be ghosts in a variety of lights, from misunderstood monsters to vengeful spirits to insecure artists. If you have never read Edith Wharton’s fantasy work before, you will be captivated and delighted. Without a doubt, this is a landmark book, and an important addition to the Wildside Fantasy Classics line.

Collected Stories, 1891-1910

A master of the American short story, in a two volume collector’s editionOver 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 presents the finest of Wharton’s achievement in short fiction: 67 stories drawn from the entire span of her writing life, including the novella length works The Touchstone, Sanctuary, and Bunner Sisters, eight shorter pieces never collected by Wharton, and many stories long out of print. Her range of setting and subject matter is dazzling, and her mastery of style consistently sure. Here are all the aspects of Wharton’s art: her satire, sometimes gentle, sometimes dark and despairing, of upper class manners; her unblinking recognition of the power of social convention and the limits of passion; her merciless exposure of commercial motivations; her candid exploration of relations between the sexes. The stories range with cosmopolitan ease from her native New York to the salons and summer hotels of Newport, Paris, and the Italian lakes. The depth of her response to World War I is registered in such works as ‘The Marne.’ Of particular interest are the remarkable stories, which treat occult and supernatural themes rarely encountered in her novels, such as the classic ghost stories ‘The Eyes’ and ‘Pomegranate Seed.’

Ethan Frome and Other Short Fiction

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.

Xingu

Xingu AND OTHER STORIES 1916 TABLE OF C O N T E N T S Coming Home r 111 Autres Temps…
IV Kerf 02 v The Long Run VI The Triumph of Night v11 The Choice VIII Bunner Sisters Xingu RS. BALLINGER is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had . founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition. The Lunch Club, after three or four winters of lunching and debate, had acquired such local distinction that the entertainment of. distinguished strangers became one of its accepted functions in recognition of which it duly extended to the celebrated Osric Dane, on the day of her arrival in Hillbr i . d ge, an invitation to be present at the next meeting. The club was to meet at Mrs. Ballingers. The other members, behind her back, were of one voice in deploring her unwillingness to cede her rights in favor of Mrs. Plinth, whose house made a more impressive setting for 4 the entertainment of celebrities while, as Mrs. Leveret observed, there was always the picture gallery to fa11 back on. Mrs. Plinth made no secret of sharing this view. She had always regarded it as one ofPher obligations to enter P I X I N G U tain the Lulich Clob i ilisthguished guests. Mrs.. Plinth was almost as proud of her obligations as she was of her picture gallery she was in fact fond of implying that tlie one possession implied the other, and that only a woman of her wealth could afford to live up to a standard as high as that which she had set herself. An all round sense ok duty, roughly adaptable to various ends, was, in her opinion, all that Providence exacted of the more humbly stationed but the power which had predestined Mrs. Plinth to keep a footman clearly intended her to maintain an equally specialized staff of responsibilities. It was the more to be regretted that Mrs. Ballinger, whose obligations to society were bounded by the narrow scope of two parlour maids, should have been so tenacious of the right to entertain Osric Dane. The question of that ladys reception had for a month past profoundly moved the members of the Lunch Club. It was not that they felt themselves unequal to the task, but that their sense of the opportunity plunged them into the agreeable uncertainty of the lady who weighs the alternatives of a well stocked wardrobe. If such subsidiary members as Mrs. Leveret were fluttered by the thought of exchanging ideas with the author of The Wings of Death, no forebodings disturbed the conscious adequacy of Mrs. Plinth, Mrs. Ballinger and Miss Van Vluyck. The Wings of Death had, in fact, at Miss Van Vluycks suggestion, been chosen as the subject of 4 1 Xingu discussion at the last club meeting, and each membcr had thus been enabled to express her own opinion or to appropriate whatever sounded well in the comments of the others. Mrs. Roby alone had abstained from profiting by the opportunity but it was now openly recognised that, as a member of the Lunch Club, Mrs.. Roby was a failure. It a11 comes, as Miss Van Vluyck put it, of accepting a woman on a mans estimation. Mrs. Roby, returning to Hillbridge from a prolonged sojourn in exotic landsthe other ladies no longer took the trouble to remember where had been heralded by the distinguished biologist, Professor Foreland, as the most agreeable woman he had ever met and the members of the Lunch Club, impressed by an encomium that carried the weight of a diploma, and rashly assuming that the Professors social sympathies would follow the line of his professional bent, had seized the chance of annexing a biological member. Their disillusionment was complete. At Miss Van Vluycks first off hand mention of the pterodactyl Mrs…

Madame de Treymes and Three Novellas

Madame de Treymes, Edith Wharton’s first publication after the highly successful The House of Mirth, is a captivating portrait of turn of the century American and French culture. Inspired by Wharton’s own entr into Parisian society in 1906 and reminiscent of the works of Henry James, it tells the story of two young innocents abroad: Fanny Frisbee of New York, unhappily married to the dissolute Marquis de Malrive, and John Durham, her childhood friend who arrives in Paris intent on convincing Fanny to divorce her husband and marry him instead.

A subtle investigation of the clash of cultures and the role of women in the social hierarchy, Madame de Treymes confirms Edith Wharton’s position, as Edmund Wilson wrote, as ‘an historian of the American society of her time.’

This Scribner edition of Madame de Treymes also includes three novellas: The Touchstone, Sanctuary, and Bunner Sisters. These short works are rich in the social satire and cunning insight that characterized Wharton’s highly acclaimed novels The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth.

Xingu and Other Stories

Xingu and Other Stories 1916 TABLE OF C O N T E N T S Coming Home r 111 Autres Temps…
IV Kerf 02 v The Long Run VI The Triumph of Night v11 The Choice VIII Bunner Sisters XINGU RS. BALLINGER is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had . founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition. The Lunch Club, after three or four winters of lunching and debate, had acquired such local distinction that the entertainment of. distinguished strangers became one of its accepted functions in recognition of which it duly extended to the celebrated Osric Dane, on the day of her arrival in Hillbr i . d ge, an invitation to be present at the next meeting. The club was to meet at Mrs. Ballingers. The other members, behind her back, were of one voice in deploring her unwillingness to cede her rights in favor of Mrs. Plinth, whose house made a more impressive setting for 4 the entertainment of celebrities while, as Mrs. Leveret observed, there was always the picture gallery to fa11 back on. Mrs. Plinth made no secret of sharing this view. She had always regarded it as one ofPher obligations to enter P I X I N G U tain the Lulich Clob i ilisthguished guests. Mrs.. Plinth was almost as proud of her obligations as she was of her picture gallery she was in fact fond of implying that tlie one possession implied the other, and that only a woman of her wealth could afford to live up to a standard as high as that which she had set herself. An all round sense ok duty, roughly adaptable to various ends, was, in her opinion, all that Providence exacted of the more humbly stationed but the power which had predestined Mrs. Plinth to keep a footman clearly intended her to maintain an equally specialized staff of responsibilities. It was the more to be regretted that Mrs. Ballinger, whose obligations to society were bounded by the narrow scope of two parlour maids, should have been so tenacious of the right to entertain Osric Dane. The question of that ladys reception had for a month past profoundly moved the members of the Lunch Club. It was not that they felt themselves unequal to the task, but that their sense of the opportunity plunged them into the agreeable uncertainty of the lady who weighs the alternatives of a well stocked wardrobe. If such subsidiary members as Mrs. Leveret were fluttered by the thought of exchanging ideas with the author of The Wings of Death, no forebodings disturbed the conscious adequacy of Mrs. Plinth, Mrs. Ballinger and Miss Van Vluyck. The Wings of Death had, in fact, at Miss Van Vluycks suggestion, been chosen as the subject of 4 1 XINGU discussion at the last club meeting, and each membcr had thus been enabled to express her own opinion or to appropriate whatever sounded well in the comments of the others. Mrs. Roby alone had abstained from profiting by the opportunity but it was now openly recognised that, as a member of the Lunch Club, Mrs.. Roby was a failure. It a11 comes, as Miss Van Vluyck put it, of accepting a woman on a mans estimation. Mrs. Roby, returning to Hillbridge from a prolonged sojourn in exotic landsthe other ladies no longer took the trouble to remember where had been heralded by the distinguished biologist, Professor Foreland, as the most agreeable woman he had ever met and the members of the Lunch Club, impressed by an encomium that carried the weight of a diploma, and rashly assuming that the Professors social sympathies would follow the line of his professional bent, had seized the chance of annexing a biological member. Their disillusionment was complete. At Miss Van Vluycks first off hand mention of the pterodactyl Mrs…

The Book of the Homeless

Although Edith Wharton may be best known for her novels analyzing New York’s upper crust, the author lived in France from 1907 until her death in 1937. There, she witnessed the ravages of World War I, especially the hardships endured by refugees. She helped by establishing The Children of Flanders Relief Committee and The American Hostels for Refugees. To raise money for her charities, she edited this work of poems, essays, and pictures.

Contributors include some of the brightest names of the time Joseph Conrad, Jean Cocteau, Paul Claudel, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Maurice Maeterlinck, George Santayana, Igor Stravinsky, and W.B. Yeats. Theodore Roosevelt provided the introduction, in which he wrote: ‘We owe to Mrs. Wharton all the assistance we can give. We owe this assistance to the good name of America, and above all for the cause of humanity we owe it to the children, the women and the old men who have suffered such dreadful wrong for absolutely no fault of theirs.’

Roman Fever and Other Stories

A side from her Pulitzer Prize winning talent as a novel writer, Edith Wharton also distinguished herself as a short story writer, publishing more than seventy two stories in ten volumes during her lifetime. The best of her short fiction is collected here in Roman Fever and Other Stories. From her picture of erotic love and illegitimacy in the title story to her exploration of the aftermath of divorce detailed in ‘Souls Belated’ and ‘The Last Asset,’ Wharton shows her usual skill ‘in dissecting the elements of emotional subtleties, moral ambiguities, and the implications of social restrictions,’ as Cynthia Griffin Wolff writes in her introduction. Roman Fever and Other Stories is a surprisingly contemporary volume of stories by one of our most enduring writers.

The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

A New York Review Books OriginalEdith Wharton wrote about New York as only a native can. Her Manhattan is a city of well appointed drawing rooms, hansoms and broughams, all night cotillions, and resplendent Fifth Avenue flats. Bishops nieces mingle with bachelor industrialists; respectable wives turn into excellent mistresses. All are governed by a code of behavior as rigid as it is precarious. What fascinates Wharton are the points of weakness in the structure of Old New York: the artists and writers at its fringes, the free love advocates testing its limits, widows and divorc es struggling to hold their own. The New York Stories of Edith Wharton gathers twenty stories of the city, written over the course of Wharton’s career. From her first published story, Mrs. Manstey s View, to one of her last and most celebrated, Roman Fever, this new collection charts the growth of an American master and enriches our understanding of the central themes of her work, among them the meaning of marriage, the struggle for artistic integrity, the bonds between parent and child, and the plight of the aged. Illuminated by Roxana Robinson s Introduction, these stories showcase Wharton s astonishing insight into the turbulent inner lives of the men and women caught up in a rapidly changing society.

Novellas and Other Writings

Collected here in one volume are six works that represent nearly a quarter century in the productive life of one of the most accomplished and admired of American writers. They explore the private worlds of our ‘Gilded Age.’ A once free spirited American woman in Paris tries to extricate herself from her marriage to a French aristocrat in ‘Madame de Treymes.’ A divorced mother finds herself in a strange romantic triangle in ‘The Mother’s Recompense.’ Repressed passions smolder in small town New England in the classic ‘Ethan Frome,’ a tale of unhappy marriage and desperate love which erupts in an act of shattering violence, and in ‘Summer,’ which Wharton called the ‘hot ‘Ethan.” Also included here are ‘Old New York,’ four linked novellas set in succeeding decades from the 1840s to the 1870s, Wharton’s renowned autobiography ‘A Backward Glance,’ and ‘Life and I,’ a fascinating autobiographical fragment published here for the first time.

The Ghost-Feeler

Readers of The Buccaneers, The House of Mirth, and the recently filmed The Age of Innocence may be surprised to learn that Edith Wharton, known for her elegant narrative style, described herself as someone with an intense Celtic sense of the supernatural.” As a ”ghost feeler,” she wrote a number of chilling tales that objectify this sense of unease, even terror. With themes of vampirism, isolation and hallucination, they reflect the author’s internalized fears and her unhappy experience with marriage. Some of these nine stories appeared in magazines and one, ”The Duchess at Prayer,” is published again, for the first time since the nineteenth century.

The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton

Traumatised by ghost stories in her youth, Pulitzer Prize winning author Edith Wharton 1862 1937 channelled her fear and obsession into creating a series of spine tingling tales filled with spirits beyond the grave and other supernatural phenomena. While claiming not to believe in ghosts, paradoxically she did confess that she was frightened of them. Wharton imbues this potent irrational and imaginative fear into her ghostly fiction to great effect. In this unique collection of finely wrought tales Wharton demonstrates her mastery of the ghost story genre. Amongst the many supernatural treats within these pages you will encounter a married farmer bewitched by a dead girl; a ghostly bell which saves a woman’s reputation; the weird spectral eyes which terrorise the midnight hours of an elderly aesthete; the haunted man who receives letters from his dead wife; and the frightening power of a doppelganger which foreshadows a terrible tragedy. Compelling, rich and strange, The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, like vintage wine, have matured and grown more potent with the passing years.

The Collected Stories

Combining two volumes of Wharton’s short stories in a brand new edition, this outstanding selection is the most comprehensive available. Although Edith Wharton is best known for her novels The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, this extensive collection of her short fiction shows her to be a master of all its varieties. Wharton’s stories…
owe their enduring power to portray the emotional consequences of life in a rarefied world.’ The New York Times

Collected Stories, 1911-1937

A master of the American short story, in a two volume collector’s edition

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 presents the finest of Wharton’s achievement in short fiction: 67 stories drawn from the entire span of her writing life, including the novella length works The Touchstone, Sanctuary, and Bunner Sisters, eight shorter pieces never collected by Wharton, and many stories long out of print.

Her range of setting and subject matter is dazzling, and her mastery of style consistently sure. Here are all the aspects of Wharton’s art: her satire, sometimes gentle, sometimes dark and despairing, of upper class manners; her unblinking recognition of the power of social convention and the limits of passion; her merciless exposure of commercial motivations; her candid exploration of relations between the sexes.

The stories range with cosmopolitan ease from her native New York to the salons and summer hotels of Newport, Paris, and the Italian lakes. The depth of her response to World War I is registered in such works as ‘The Marne.’ Of particular interest are the remarkable stories, which treat occult and supernatural themes rarely encountered in her novels, such as the classic ghost stories ‘The Eyes’ and ‘Pomegranate Seed.’

The Best Short Stories of Edith Wharton

1916. Wharton, American author, is best known for her stories and ironic novels about upper class people. Wharton’s central subjects were the conflict between social and individual fulfillment, repressed sexuality, and the manners of old families and the nouveau riche, who had made their fortunes in more recent years. Among her numerous novels, short stories, and travel writings are The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and the Pulitzer prize winning Age of Innocence. In this volume Wharton explores the anguish and hypocrisy hanging over the lives of divorced women in The Other Two, Souls Belated, Autres Temps and The Last Asset. In Roman Fever she points out that defiance is often the weakest defense for a woman. She takes gentle jabs at women’s clubs in Xingu, an old snob in After Holbein and the musty odor of New England’s Indian Summer in Angel at the Grave. No collection of Wharton’s stories would be complete without one of her ghost stories, Pomegranate Seed being one of her best. And finally, in Bunner Sisters she reminds us that she occasionally strayed down streets where no calling cards were ever left. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

Ethan Frome and Selected Stories

Ethan Frome and Selected Stories, by Edith Wharton, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: New introductions commissioned from today’s top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader’s viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences biographical, historical, and literary to enrich each reader’s understanding of these enduring works.
One of Edith Wharton’s few works of fiction that takes place outside of an urban, upper class setting, Ethan Frome draws upon the bleak, barren landscape of rural New England. A poor farmer, Ethan finds himself stuck in a miserable marriage to Zeenie, a sickly, tyrannical woman, until he falls in love with her visiting cousin, the vivacious Mattie Silver. As Mattie is forced to leave his household, Frome steals one last afternoon with her one that culminates in a ruinous sled ride with unspeakably tragic results.

Unhappily married herself, Edith Wharton projected her dark views of love onto people far removed from her social class in Ethan Frome. Her sensitivity to natural beauty and human psychology, however, make this slim novel a convincing and compelling portrait of rural life. A powerful tale of passion and loss and the wretched consequences thereof Ethan Frome is one of American literatures great tragic love stories.
Also included in this volume are four of Edith Wharton s finest short stories: The Pretext, Afterward, The Legend, and Xingu.

Kent P. Ljungquist, Professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is the author of The Grand and the Fair: Poe s Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques, co editor of the SUNY Press edition of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer, and editor of several reference works of American fiction.

The Pelican and Other Stories

Edith Wharton 1862 1937, born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged clas*ses with a brilliant, natural wit to write humourous and incisive novels and short stories. Wharton was well acquainted with many of her era’s literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Besides her writing, she was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses 1897, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens 1904. The Age of Innocence 1920, perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. Her other works include: The Greater Inclination 1899, The Touchstone 1900, Sanctuary 1903, The Descent of Man and Other Stories 1904, The House of Mirth 1905, Madame de Treymes 1907, The Fruit of the Tree 1907, The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories 1908, Ethan Frome 1912, In Morocco 1921, and The Glimpses of the Moon 1921.

The Dilettante and Other Stories

Edith Wharton 1862 1937, born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged clas*ses with a brilliant, natural wit to write humourous and incisive novels and short stories. Wharton was well acquainted with many of her era’s literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Besides her writing, she was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses 1897, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens 1904. The Age of Innocence 1920, perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. Her other works include: The Greater Inclination 1899, The Touchstone 1900, Sanctuary 1903, The Descent of Man and Other Stories 1904, The House of Mirth 1905, Madame de Treymes 1907, The Fruit of the Tree 1907, The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories 1908, Ethan Frome 1912, In Morocco 1921, and The Glimpses of the Moon 1921.

His Father’s Son and Other Stories

Edith Wharton 1862 1937, born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged clas*ses with a brilliant, natural wit to write humourous and incisive novels and short stories. Wharton was well acquainted with many of her era’s literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Besides her writing, she was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses 1897, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens 1904. The Age of Innocence 1920, perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. Her other works include: The Greater Inclination 1899, The Touchstone 1900, Sanctuary 1903, The Descent of Man and Other Stories 1904, The House of Mirth 1905, Madame de Treymes 1907, The Fruit of the Tree 1907, The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories 1908, Ethan Frome 1912, In Morocco 1921, and The Glimpses of the Moon 1921.

The Last Asset and Other Stories

Edith Wharton 1862 1937, born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged clas*ses with a brilliant, natural wit to write humourous and incisive novels and short stories. Wharton was well acquainted with many of her era’s literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Besides her writing, she was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses 1897, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens 1904. The Age of Innocence 1920, perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. Her other works include: The Greater Inclination 1899, The Touchstone 1900, Sanctuary 1903, The Descent of Man and Other Stories 1904, The House of Mirth 1905, Madame de Treymes 1907, The Fruit of the Tree 1907, The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories 1908, Ethan Frome 1912, In Morocco 1921, and The Glimpses of the Moon 1921.

Mrs. Manstey’s View and Other Stories

Edith Wharton 1862 1937, born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged clas*ses with a brilliant, natural wit to write humourous and incisive novels and short stories. Wharton was well acquainted with many of her era’s literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Besides her writing, she was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses 1897, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens 1904. The Age of Innocence 1920, perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. Her other works include: The Greater Inclination 1899, The Touchstone 1900, Sanctuary 1903, The Descent of Man and Other Stories 1904, The House of Mirth 1905, Madame de Treymes 1907, The Fruit of the Tree 1907, The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories 1908, Ethan Frome 1912, In Morocco 1921, and The Glimpses of the Moon 1921.

Coming Home And Other Stories

Edith Wharton 1862 1937, born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged clas*ses with a brilliant, natural wit to write humourous and incisive novels and short stories. Wharton was well acquainted with many of her era’s literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Besides her writing, she was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses 1897, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens 1904. The Age of Innocence 1920, perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. Her other works include: The Greater Inclination 1899, The Touchstone 1900, Sanctuary 1903, The Descent of Man and Other Stories 1904, The House of Mirth 1905, Madame de Treymes 1907, The Fruit of the Tree 1907, The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories 1908, Ethan Frome 1912, In Morocco 1921, and The Glimpses of the Moon 1921.

The Blond Beast and Other Stories

Edith Wharton 1862 1937, born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged clas*ses with a brilliant, natural wit to write humourous and incisive novels and short stories. Wharton was well acquainted with many of her era’s literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Besides her writing, she was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses 1897, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens 1904. The Age of Innocence 1920, perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. Her other works include: The Greater Inclination 1899, The Touchstone 1900, Sanctuary 1903, The Descent of Man and Other Stories 1904, The House of Mirth 1905, Madame de Treymes 1907, The Fruit of the Tree 1907, The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories 1908, Ethan Frome 1912, In Morocco 1921, and The Glimpses of the Moon 1921.

The Mission of Jane and Other Stories

Edith Wharton 1862 1937, born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged clas*ses with a brilliant, natural wit to write humourous and incisive novels and short stories. Wharton was well acquainted with many of her era’s literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Besides her writing, she was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses 1897, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens 1904. The Age of Innocence 1920, perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. Her other works include: The Greater Inclination 1899, The Touchstone 1900, Sanctuary 1903, The Descent of Man and Other Stories 1904, The House of Mirth 1905, Madame de Treymes 1907, The Fruit of the Tree 1907, The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories 1908, Ethan Frome 1912, In Morocco 1921, and The Glimpses of the Moon 1921.

Margaret of Cortona and Other Stories

Edith Wharton 1862 1937, born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged clas*ses with a brilliant, natural wit to write humourous and incisive novels and short stories. Wharton was well acquainted with many of her era’s literary and public figures, including Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt. Besides her writing, she was a highly regarded landscape architect, interior designer, and taste maker of her time. She wrote several influential books, including The Decoration of Houses 1897, her first published work, and Italian Villas and Their Gardens 1904. The Age of Innocence 1920, perhaps her best known work, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making her the first woman to win the award. Her other works include: The Greater Inclination 1899, The Touchstone 1900, Sanctuary 1903, The Descent of Man and Other Stories 1904, The House of Mirth 1905, Madame de Treymes 1907, The Fruit of the Tree 1907, The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories 1908, Ethan Frome 1912, In Morocco 1921, and The Glimpses of the Moon 1921.

The Greater Inclination

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

The Descent of Man

Lethbury, surveying his wife across the dinner table, found his transient glance arrested by an indefinable change in her appearance. ‘How smart you look! Is that a new gown?’ he asked. Her answering look seemed to deprecate his charging her with the extravagance of wasting a new gown on him, and he now perceived that the change lay deeper than any accident of dress. from ‘The Mission of Jane’ The sly wit and penetrating wisdom of Edith Wharton one of the most celebrated novelists in the English language is ever on tap in this essential collection of her short fiction. The social chronicler of the Gilded Age, she exposed the excesses and hypocrisies of refined society in fiction replete with passion, sexual politics, and the rumblings of incipient feminism…
as well as astonishingly dramatic storytelling. Here in one volume is a treasure trove of Wharton’s short fiction. The Descent of Man, and Other Stories, first published as a collection in 1904, features short stories that appeared in fashionable publications including Scribner’s, Cosmopolitan, and Collier’s Weekly. Also in this volume is the novella ‘Madame De Treymes,’ first published in 1907, the tale of an American woman in the unpleasant thrall of a French aristocrat.

Artemis to Actaeon

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Italian Villas and Their Gardens

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www. million books. com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FLORENTINE VILLAS OR centuries Florence has been celebrated for her villa clad hills. According to an old chronicler, the country houses were more splendid than those in the town, and stood so close set among their olive orchards and vineyards that the traveller ‘thought himself in Florence three leagues before reaching the city.’ Many of these houses still survive, strongly planted on their broad terraces, from the fifteenth century farmhouse villa, with its projecting eaves and square tower, to the many windowed maison de plaisance in which the luxurious nobles of the seventeenth century spent the gambling and chocolate drinking weeks of the vintage season. It is characteristic of Florentine thrift and conservatism that the greater number of these later and more pretentious villas are merely additions to the plain old buildings, while, even in the rare cases where the whole structure is new, the baroque exuberance which became fashionable in the seventeenth century is tempered by a restraint and severity peculiarly Tuscan. So numerous and well preserved are the buildingsof this order about Florence that the student who should attempt to give an account of them would have before him a long and laborious undertaking; but where the villa is to be considered in relation to its garden, the task is reduced to narrow limits. There is perhaps no region of Italy so rich in old villas and so lacking in old VILLA GAMBERA1A, AT SETTIGNANO, NEAR FLORENCE gardens as the neighbourhood of Florence. Various causes have brought about this result. The environs of Florence have always been frequented by the wealthy clas*ses, not only Italian but foreign. The Tuscan nobility have usually been rich enough to alter their gardens in accordance with the varying horticulturalfashions i…

Italian Backgrounds

To the mind curious in contrasts-surely one of
the chief pleasures of travel-there can be
no better preparation for a descent into
Italy than a sojourn among the upper Swiss valleys.
To pass from the region of the obviously picturesque
-the country contrived, it would seem, for the delectation
of the creur a poesie facile-to that sophisticated
landscape where the face of nature seems
moulded by the passions and imaginings of man, is
one of the most suggestive transitions in the rapidly
diminishing range of such experiences.
Nowhere is this contrast more acutely felt than in
one of the upper Grisons villages. The anecdotic
Switzerland of the lakes is too remote from Italy,
geographically and morally, to evoke a comparison.
The toy chalet, with its air of self-conscious neatness,
making one feel that if one lifted the roof it would
~isclose a row of tapes and scissors, or the shining
[ 3

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS; PAGE; AN ALPINE POSTING-INN 1; A MIDSUMMER WEEK’S DREAM 15; THE SANCTUARIES OF THE PENNINE ALPS 39; WHAT THE HERMITS SAW 63; A TUSCAN SHRINE; SUB UMBRA LILIORUM; MARCH IN ITALY ; PICTURESQUE MILAN; Italian Backgrounds; 83; 107; 125; 153; 171

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, History, Folklore and Mythology.

Forgotten Books’ Classic Reprint Series utilizes the latest technology to regenerate facsimiles of historically important writings. Careful attention has been made to accurately preserve the original format of each page whilst digitally enhancing the difficult to r

A Motor-Flight Through France

A MOTOR – FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE PART I I BOULOGNE TO AMIENS THE motor-car’ has restored the romance of travel. Freeing us from all the compulsions and contacts of the railway, the bondage to fixed hours and the beaten track, the approach to each town through the area of ugliness and desolation created by the railway itself, it has given us back the wonder, the adventure and the novelty ? which enlivened the way of our posting grandparents. Above all these recovered pleasures must be ranked the delight of taking a town unawares, stealing on it by back ways and unchronicled paths, and surprising in it some intimate aspect of past time, some silhouette hidden for half a century or more by the ugly mask of [ 1

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, History, Folklore and Mythology.

Forgotten Books’ Classic Reprint Series utilizes the latest technology to regenerate facsimiles of historically important writings. Careful attention has been made to accurately preserve the original format of each page whilst digitally enhancing the difficult to read text. Read books online for free at http://www. forgottenbooks. org

The Cruise of The Vanadis

In collaboration with Edith Wharton Restoration, Rizzoli is proud to participate in a rare literary event-the publication of a recently discovered manuscript by Edith Wharton, one of America’s greatest writers.
It was the winter of 1888. Edith Wharton was 26 and had been married three years. She confided in a Newport friend and cousin-in-law, James Van Alen, that there was nothing she wanted more than to make a cruise in the Mediterranean. Van Alen arranged for the charter of a yacht called the Vanadis, and Edith and her husband set off on the trip of a lifetime.
During the cruise Wharton elegantly recorded her reactions to each place along the route. Afterwards, she put the manuscript aside and began to work on her first novel. The manuscript lay untouched and undiscovered for the next one hundred years.
Annotated with timeless photographs and commentary by award-winning photographer Jonas Dovydenas, who faithfully retraced Wharton’s route, and with a new introduction by renowned novelist Louis Auchincloss, this will be a gift edition for Wharton fans to cherish.

French Ways and Their Meaning

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www. million books. com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: n REVERENCE TAKE care! Don’t eat blackberries! Don’t you know they’ll give you the fever?’ Any American soldier who stops to fill his cap with the plump blackberries loading the hedgerows of France is sure to receive this warning from a passing peasant. Throughout the length and breadth of France, the most fruit loving and fruit cultivating of countries, the same queer conviction prevails, and year after year the great natural crop of blackberries, nowhere better and more abundant, is abandoned to birds and insects because in some remote and perhaps prehistoric past an ancient Gaul once decreed that ‘blackberries give the fever.’ An hour away, across the Channel, fresh blackberries and blackberry jam form one of the staples of a great ally’s diet; but the French have not yet found out that millions of Englishmen have eaten blackberries for generations without having ‘the fever.’ Even if they did find it out they would probably say: ‘The English are different. Blackberries have always given us the fever.’ Or the more enlightened might ascribe it to the climate: ‘The air may be different in England. Blackberries may not be unwholesome there, but here they are poison.’ There is not the least foundation for the statement, and the few enterprising French people who have boldly risked catching ‘the fever’ consume blackberries in France with as much enjoyment, and as little harm, as their English neighbours. But one could no more buy a blackberry in a French market than one could buy the fruit of the nightshade; the one is considered hardly less deleterious than the other. The prejudice is all the queerer because the thrifty, food loving French peasant has discovered the innocuousness of so many dangerous looking funguses that frighten the Anglo Saxon by their cl…

In Morocco

Edith Wharton journeyed to Morocco in the final days of the First World War, at a time when there was no guidebook to the country. In Morocco is the classic account of her expedition. A seemingly unlikely chronicler, Wharton, more usually associated with American high society, explored the country for a month by military vehicle. Travelling from Rabat and Fez to Moulay Idriss and Marrakech, she recorded her encounters with Morocco’s people, traditions and ceremonies, capturing a country at a moment of transition from an almost unknown, road less empire to a popular tourist destination. Her descriptions of the places she visited mosques, palaces, ruins, markets and harems are typically observant and brim with color and spirit, whilst her sketches of the country’s history and art are rigorous but accessible. This is a wonderful account by one of the most celebrated novelists and travel writers of the 20th century and is a fascinating portrayal of an extraordinary country. Stanfords Travel Classics feature some of the finest historical travel writing in the English language, with authors hailing from both sides of the Atlantic. Every title has been rest in a contemporary typeface and has been printed to a high quality production specification, to create a series that every lover of fine travel literature will want to collect and keep.

Edith Wharton Abroad

In Edith Wharton Abroad, Sarah Bird Wright has carefully chosen selections from Edith Wharton’s travel writing that convey the writer’s control of her craft. Wharton disliked the generality of guidebooks and focused instead on the ‘parentheses of travel’ the undiscovered hidden corners of Europe, Morocco, and the Mediterranean. This collection spans a period of three decades and takes the reader with Wharton from France to Italy and to Greece. Included is an excerpt from her unpublished memoir, THE CRUISE OF THE VANDIS, as well as front line depictions of Lorraine and the Vosges during World War I.

The Writing of Fiction

A rare work of nonfiction from Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction contains brilliant advice on writing from the first woman ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for her first 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.

A Backward Glance

A Backward Glance is Edith Wharton’s vivid account of both her public and her private life. With richness and delicacy, it describes the sophisticated New York society in which Wharton spent her youth, and chronicles her travels throughout Europe and her literary success as an adult. Beautifully depicted are her friendships with many of the most celebrated artists and writers of her day, including her close friend Henry James.

In his introduction to this edition, Louis Auchincloss calls the writing in A Backward Glance ‘as firm and crisp and lucid as in the best of her novels.’ It is a memoir that will charm and fascinate all readers of Wharton’s fiction.

The Decoration of Houses

Individuality in house furnishing has seldom been more harped upon than at the present time. The cheap originality which finds expression in putting things to uses for which they were not intended is often confounded with individuality; whereas the latter consists not in an attempt to be different from other people at the cost of comfort, but in the desire to be comfortable in one’s own way, even though it be the way of a monotonously large majority. It seems easier to most people to arrange a room like some one else’s than to analyze and express their own needs. from Chapter II: ‘Rooms in General’ This classic 1898 manual of interior design is considered a standard reference of the art, and perfectly useful more than a century later. Here, renowned American architect OGDEN CODMAN, JR. 1863 1951 is joined by American author EDITH WHARTON 1862 1937, whose novels, including The House of Mirth 1905 and the Pulitzer Prize winning The Age of Innocence 1920, took us into the wealthy and tasteful New York society she hailed from. Together, they offer timeless advice on such matters as: the importance of balance and symmetry how to avoid the superficial application of ornament the necessity of adhering to proportion the proper material for fireplace andirons the usages of cornices the decoration of windows and much, much more.

50 Great Short Stories

50 Great Short Stories is a comprehensive selection from the world’s finest short fiction. The authors represented range from Hawthorne, Maupassant, and Poe, through Henry James, Conrad, Aldous Huxley, and James Joyce, to Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Faulkner, E.B. White, Saroyan, and O Connor. The variety in style and subject is enormous, but all these stories have one point in common the enduring quality of the writing, which places them among the masterpieces of the world s fiction.

Great American Ghost Stories

Sixteen spine-tingling tales from the dark side of our nation’s literary history include ‘The Gray Champion’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘Ligeia’ by Edgar Allan Poe, plus fables by Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry James, Mark Twain, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Frank R. Stockton, Parke Godwin, and others.

Unforgettable Ghost Stories by Women Writers

Assembled by a noted anthologist, this unique collection presents 18 supernatural fables by female masters of the genre. Haunting tales include ‘The Lost Ghost,’ by Mary Wilkins Freeman, ‘Kerfol’ by Edith Wharton, Mary Molesworth’s ‘The Shadow in the Moonlight,’ and ‘From the Dead’ by E. Nesbit. Each story features a brief author biography.

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