The Age of Innocence

Description

Earning Wharton the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a woman, The Age of Innocence is a powerful novel that explores the constraints imposed on love and marriage in nineteenth century high society. It tells the story of Newland Archer, a New York socialite whose impending marriage and infatuation with his fiancé’s European cousin causes him to become disillusioned with society and its myriad affectations. A powerful rumination on love and loss, The Age of Innocence remains a compelling and relatable novel even today.

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Somewhere in this book, Wharton observes that clever liars always come up with good stories to back up their fabrications, but that really clever liars don't bother to explain anything at all. This is the kind of insight that makes The Age of Innocence so indispensable. Wharton's story of the upper classes of Old New York, and Newland Archer's impossible love for the disgraced Countess Olenska, is a perfectly wrought book about an era when upper-class culture in this country was still a mixture of American and European extracts, and when "society" had rules as rigid as any in history.

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The House of Mirth

Description

Lily Bart must choose between her desire for a husband with wealth and standing, and her desire for respect and love. After rejecting several offers of marriage, she ultimately betrays her heart and destroys her reputation. With “The House of Mirth,” Wharton transforms the novel of manners into an incisive and disturbing portrait of the strictures imposed upon women in the upper class of 1890’s New York society.

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"The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth," warns Ecclesiastes 7:4, and so does the novel by Edith Wharton that takes its title from this call to heed. New York at the turn of the century was a time of opulence and frivolity for those who could afford it. But for those who couldn't and yet wanted desperately to keep up with the whirlwind, like Wharton's charming Lily Bart, it was something else altogether: a gilded cage rather than the Gilded Age.

One of Wharton's earliest descriptions of her heroine, in the library of her bachelor friend and sometime suitor Lawrence Selden, indicates that she appears "as though she were a captured dryad subdued to the conventions of the drawing room." Indeed, herein lies Lily's problem. She has, we're told, "been brought up to be ornamental," and yet her spirit is larger than what this ancillary role requires. By today's standards she would be nothing more than a mild rebel, but in the era into which Wharton drops her unmercifully, this tiny spark of character, combined with numerous assaults by vicious society women and bad luck, ultimately renders Lily persona non grata. Her own ambivalence about her position serves to open the door to disaster: several times she is on the verge of "good" marriage and squanders it at the last moment, unwilling to play by the rules of a society that produces, as she calls them, "poor, miserable, marriageable girls.

Lily's rather violent tumble down the social ladder provides a thumbnail sketch of the general injustices of the upper classes (which, incidentally, Wharton never quite manages to condemn entirely, clearly believing that such life is cruel but without alternative). From her start as a beautiful woman at the height of her powers to her sad finale as a recently fired milliner's assistant addicted to sleeping drugs, Lily Bart is heroic, not least for her final admission of her own role in her downfall. "Once--twice--you gave me the chance to escape from my life and I refused it: refused it because I was a coward," she tells Selden as the book draws to a close. All manner of hideous socialite beasts--some of whose treatment by Wharton, such as the token social-climbing Jew, Simon Rosedale, date the book unfortunately--wander through the novel while Lily plummets. As her tale winds down to nothing more than the remnants of social grace and cold hard cash, it's hard not to agree with Lily's own assessment of herself: "I have tried hard--but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else." Nevertheless, it's even harder not to believe that she deserved better, which is why The House of Mirth remains so timely and so vital in spite of its crushing end and its unflattering portrait of what life offers up. --Melanie Rehak

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The Custom Of The Country

Description

This collection chronicles the fiction and non fiction classics by the greatest writers the world has ever known. The inclusion of both popular as well as overlooked pieces is pivotal to providing a broad and representative collection of classic works.

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The Works of Edith Wharton

Description

Works of Edith Wharton with active table of contents to navigate easily. Works include:

Afterward
The Age of Innocence
Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses
Autres Temps...
Bunner Sisters
The Choice
Coming Home
Crucial Instances
The Custom of the Country
The Descent of Man & Other Stories
The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Volume 1
The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Volume 2
Ethan Frome
Fighting France
The Fruit of the Tree
The Glimpses of the Moon
The Greater Inclination
The Hermit and the Wild Woman
The House of Mirth
In Morocco
Kerfol
The Long Run
Madame de Treymes
The Reef
Sanctuary
Summer
Tales of Men and Ghosts
The Touchstone
The Triumph of Night
The Valley of Decision
Xingu

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Works of Edith Wharton with active table of contents to navigate easily. Works include:

Afterward
The Age of Innocence
Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses
Autres Temps...
Bunner Sisters
The Choice
Coming Home
Crucial Instances
The Custom of the Country
The Descent of Man & Other Stories
The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Volume 1
The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Volume 2
Ethan Frome
Fighting France
The Fruit of the Tree
The Glimpses of the Moon
The Greater Inclination
The Hermit and the Wild Woman
The House of Mirth
In Morocco
Kerfol
The Long Run
Madame de Treymes
The Reef
Sanctuary
Summer
Tales of Men and Ghosts
The Touchstone
The Triumph of Night
The Valley of Decision
Xingu

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Ethan Frome

Description

Stranded in Ethan Frome’s house during a snow storm, the narrator of Edith Wharton’s novel pieces together the story of his host’s broken dreams. A love-triangle between Ethan, his wife Zeena, and her cousin Mattie reached a tragic crisis years before, and Ethan has been living with the consequences ever since. Set in the bleak New England town of Starkfield, Wharton’s tale of disappointment and endurance is a compelling study.

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Summer

Description

"Summer" by Edith Wharton was published in 1917. The novel details sexual discovery of the protagonist, Charity. The novel experienced a surge in popularity after the author's death, in the 1960s. Wharton's important work is now available in this new edition.

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