Edith Wharton

This tragic love story reveals the destructive effects of wealth and social hypocrisy on Lily Bart, a ravishing beauty. Impoverished but well-born, Lily realizes a secure future depends on her acquiring a wealthy husband. Her downfall begins with a romantic indiscretion, intensifies with an accumulation of gambling debts, and climaxes in a maelstrom of social disasters.

Perhaps the best-known and most popular of Edith Wharton's novels, Ethan Frome is widely considered her masterpiece. Set against a bleak New England background, the novel tells of Frome, his ailing wife Zeena and her companion Mattie Silver, superbly delineating the characters of each as they are drawn relentlessly into a deep-rooted domestic struggle. Burdened by poverty and spiritually dulled by a loveless marriage to an older woman. Frome is emotionally...

Edith Wharton was an American novelist, poet and short story writer whose works display her mastery over the realistic fiction genre. In 1922, two years after winning the Pulitzer Prize for "The Age of Innocence", Wharton wrote "The Glimpses of the Moon". The novel centered around two young newlyweds, who arranged their marriage in order to take advantage of their wealthy friends' generosity. However, things do not end quite as they planned when they...

"The wave of recent attention to Edith Wharton as an arbiter of taste and correct usage in the making of domestic interior rooms and to Ogden Codman, Jr., as a revivalist architect of the first rank has made their reputations in those fields seem more secure than ever." "Yet the original text of The Decoration of Houses continues without revision as an authentic classic; it can be argued that this book is the most important of its kind ever published....

Mrs. Pauline Manford is a busy woman, as any upstanding New York society lady should be. Parties, dinners, charity luncheons, balls, and strict exercise and beauty regimes fill her daily schedule to an exhausting degree. Her secretary can hardly keep up. To manage a modern household is to hold the family together, staying on trend with all things helpful, but her daughter has horrible taste in married men, her ex-husband is unwell, and her son is...

First published in 1924, "Old New York" is a collection of four short stories set in the New York of the 1840s, 50s, 60s, and 70s by American author Edith Wharton. These stories are often considered a companion to Wharton's celebrated novel "The Age of Innocence", as many of the same characters and settings appear. "Old New York" is Wharton at her best as she explores the social issues that were often at the center of her works: infidelity, the class...

This early work on Italian Villas and their Gardens is a beautifully illustrated look at the subject. Chapters include; Florentine Villas, Sienese Villas, Roman Villas, Villas near Rome, Genoese Villas, Lombard Villas and Villas of Venetia. This fascinating work is thoroughly recommended for inclusion on the bookshelf of all historians Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900's and before, are now extremely scarce and...

A new edition of Edith Wharton's war reportage from the First World War. Edith Wharton was one of the first woman writers to be allowed to visit the war zones in France. This resulting collection of 6 essays presents a fascinating and unique perspective on wartime France by one of America's great novelists. Written with Wharton's distinctive literary skills to advocate American intervention in the war, this little-known war text demonstrates that...

Edith Wharton was one of the most successful authors of the early 20th century. In 1921, she became the first woman to ever receive the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence. Aside from her literary fiction, Wharton was widely respected as a writer of ghost stories. Collected here are her best tales, including 'The Duchess at Prayer', 'The Triumph of the Night', 'A Journey and many more'.

Edith Wharton was an American novelist, poet and short story writer whose works display her mastery over the realistic fiction genre. Although she grew up in a world of refined manners and fashionable people, she was also aware of its superficiality, a theme that frequently appeared in her works. Her stories range widely from powerful social commentary to titillating ghost stories that made Wharton extremely popular beyond her living years. This collection...