An immensely popular bestseller upon its publication in 1905, The House of Mirth was Edith Wharton's first great novel. Set among the elegant brownstones of New York City and opulent country houses like gracious Bellomont on the Hudson, the novel creates a satiric portrayal of what Wharton herself called “a society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers” with a precision comparable to that of Proust. And her brilliant and complex characterization of the doomed Lily Bart, whose stunning beauty and dependence on marriage for economic survival reduce her to a decorative object, becomes an incisive commentary on the nature and status of women in that society. From her tragic attraction to bachelor lawyer Lawrence Selden to her desperate relationship with social-climbing Rosedale, Lily is all too much a product of the world indicated by the title, a phrase taken from Ecclesiastes: “The heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” For it is Lily's very specialness that threatens the elegance and fulfillment she seeks in life. Along with the author's other masterpiece, The Age of Innocence, this novel claims a place among the finest American novels of manners.

First published in 1913 and regarded by many critics as her most substantial novel, The Custom of the Country is Edith Wharton's powerful saga about the beautiful, ruthless Undine Spragg. A woman of extraordinary ambition and exuberant vitality, Undine is consigned by virtue of her sex to the shadow world of the drawing room and boudoir. Marriage remains the one institution through which she can exercise her will as she entrances man after man, marrying one after the other with protean facility and almost monstrous avidity. A novel that ranges from New York to Paris, from Apex City, Kansas, to Reno, Nevada, The Custom of the Country stands as a dark satire of American business, society, and the nouveaux riches, and as Edith Wharton's contribution to the tradition of the American epic.

ENDURING LITERATURE ILLUMINATED BY PRACTICAL SCHOLARSHIP

An incisive portrait of New York high society and the somber economics of marriage during the late nineteenth century, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth tells the story of beguiling socialite Lily Bart's ill-fated attempt to find happiness.

THIS ENRICHED CLASSIC EDITION INCLUDES:

• A concise introduction that gives the reader 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 guide the reader's own interpretations

• Detailed explanatory notes

• Critical analysis 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

Simon & Schuster 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.

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.

First published in 1911, Ethan Frome is widely regarded as Edith Wharton's most revealing novel and her finest achievement in fiction. Set in the bleak, barren winter landscape of New England, it is the tragic tale of a simple man, bound to the demands of his farm and his tyrannical, sickly wife, Zeena, and driven by his star-crossed love for Zeena's young cousin, Mattie Silver. 'In its spare, chilling creation of rural isolation, hardscrabble poverty and wintry landscape,' writes Alfred Kazin in his afterword, 'Ethan Frome overwhelms the reader as a drama of irresistible necessity.' An exemplary work of literary realism in setting and character, Ethan Frome stands as one of the great classics of twentieth-century American literature.

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.

Set in the 1920s, The Glimpses of the Moon details the romantic misadventures of Nick Lansing and Susy Branch, a couple with the right connections but not much in the way of funds. They devise a shrewd bargain: they'll marry and spend a year or so sponging off their wealthy friends, honeymooning in their mansions and villas. As Susy explains, 'We should really, in a way, help more than hamper each other. We both know the ropes so well; what one of us didn't see the other might -- in the way of opportunities, I mean.' The other part of the plan states that if either one of them meets someone who can advance them socially, they're each free to dissolve the marriage. How their plan unfolds is a comedy of eros that will charm all fans of Wharton's work.

Collects four novels dealing with turn-of-the-century New York society.

'I put most of myself into that opus,' Edith Wharton said of The Reef, possibly her most autobiographical novel. Published in 1912, it was, Bernard Berenson told Henry Adams, 'better than any previous work excepting Ethan Frome.'

A challenge to the moral climate of the day, The Reef follows the fancies of George Darrow, a young diplomat en route from London to France, intent on proposing to the widowed Anna Leath. Unsettled by Anna's reticence, Darrow drifts into an affair with Sophy Viner, a charmingly naive and impecunious young woman whose relations with Darrow and Anna's family threaten his prospects for success.

For its dramatic construction and acute insight into social mores and the multifaceted problem of sexuality, The Reef stands as one of Edith Wharton's most daring works of fiction.

A New England farmer must choose between his duty to care for his invalid wife and his love for her cousin.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Edith Wharton was at the height of her enormous literary powers when she published The Reef in 1912, and everything about this novel suggests a mastery so complete that it can achieve nothing higher. The plot, which tells of the drastic effects of a casual sexual betrayal on the lives of four Americans in France, is expertly turned, suspenseful, continually compelling. An assured, unhurried dramatic instinct governs the great moments of confrontation and revelation. The central characters, two of whom are innocents and two of whom are burdened by experience and tinged with desperation, are perfectly delineated: their relationships to one another are constructed with a classical feeling for harmony, proportion, and balance. And the entire novel is imbued with a clear-eyed wisdom about both the possibilities and the limitations of human love. Wharton would go on to write splendid books after completing The Reef, but nowhere does she display a finer command of her art than she does here.

Edith Wharton's masterpiece brings to life the grandeur and hypocrisy of a gilded age. Set among the very rich in 1870s New York, it tells the story of Newland Archer, a young lawyer engaged to marry virginal socialite May Welland, when he meets her cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, a woman unbound by convention and surrounded by scandal. As all three are drawn into a love triangle filled with sensuality, subtlety, and betrayal, Archer faces a harrowing choice between happiness and the social code that has ruled his life. The resulting tale of thwarted love is filled with irony and surprise, struggle and acceptance. Recipient of the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction ever awarded to a woman, this great novel paints a timeless portrait of “society” still unmatched in American literature—an arbitrary, capricious social elite that professes inviolable standards but readily abandons them for greed and desire.

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.

As Newland Archer prepares to marry docile May Welland, the return of the mysterious Countess Olenska turns his life upside down.

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 entré 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.

A literary sensation when it was published by Scribners in 1905, The House of Mirth quickly established Edith Wharton as the most important American woman of letters in the twentieth century. The first American novel to provide a devastatingly accurate portrait of New York's aristocracy, it is the story of the beautiful and beguiling Lily Bart and her ill-fated attempt to rise to the heights of a heartless society in which, ultimately, she has no part.

From the staid conventionality of Old New York to the forced conviviality of the French Riviera, from the drawing room of Gus Trenor's Bellomont to the dreary resort of a downtown boardinghouse, Wharton created her 'first full-scale survey,' as her biographer R.W.B. Lewis put it, 'of the comédie humaine, American style.' A brilliantly satiric yet sensitive exploration of manners and morality, The House of Mirth marked Wharton's transformation from an amateur into a professional writer and figures among her most important works.

The four novellas collected here, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Age of Innocence, brilliantly capture New York of the 1840s, '50s, '60s, and '70s. Originally published in 1924, this outstanding quartet includes False Dawn, about a rocky father/son relationship; The Old Maid, the best known of the four, in which a young woman's hidden illegitimate child is adoted by her best friend, with devastating results; The Spark, involving a young man and his moral rehabilitation -- 'sparked' by a chance encounter with Walt Whitman; and New Year's Day, an O. Henryesque tale of a married woman suspected of adultery. Each reveals the codes and customs that ruled society of the time, drawn with the perspicacious eye and style that is uniquely Edith Wharton's.

Pocket Books' enriched Classics present the great works of world literature enhanced for the contemporary reader. This valume reprints the orginal New York Times Book Review feature on Old New York, a piece that helps fix the stories in the contemporary critical landscape. Also included are critical perspectives, suggestions for further reading, and a visual essay composed of authentic period illustrations and photographs.

It is fully annotated for undergraduate readers.

'Backgrounds and Contexts' includes a rich selection of materials, somepreviously unavailable, for the study of contemporary psychological,social, and economic issues, as well as Wharton's privatecorrespondence and writings and biographical accounts of the author.

Arranged under two headings, 'Criticism' reveals Ethan Frome's impact asboth a literary work and a social commentary.'Contemporary Reviews' consists of eight prominent assessments of EthanFrome, including reviews from the New York Times Book Review, Outlook,The Nation, the Saturday Review, and those penned by Frederic TaberCooper and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, among others. 'Modern Criticism' (1956-1991) includes seven interpretations of thenovella by Lionel Trilling, Elizabeth Ammons, Judith Fryer, Jean FrantzBlackall, Lev Raphael, Candace Waid, and Cynthia Griffin Wolff.

A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are also included.

E' la storia dell'impossibile desiderio di felicità amorosa di un agricoltore delle foreste del Massachusetts che, nel gelo di un insolito inverno, si innamora perdutamente di una giovane donna venuta per curare la moglie, una inacidita malata immaginaria. Il confronto tra i tre personaggi si compie con un'analisi del vivere comune: il triangolo, la quotidiana miseranda fatica del 'sopportarsi', l'inattesa pulsione amorosa. Onnipresente è la sensazione di imprigionamento, di infelicità e, infine, di assoluta autodistruttività.

Un giovane scrittore e la moglie di un uomo molto in vista decidono di sfidare tutte le convenzioni e lasciano New York per cominciare una vita insieme in Europa. Lei è la sua musa ispiratrice, la sua consigliera, l'organizzatrice del viaggio e della quotidianità. Lui è la nuova promessa del mondo letterario. Le cose non sono facili e il peso delle convenzioni infrante unito alle difficoltà incontrate dallo scrittore nella realizzazione delle sue opere grava irrimediabilmente sull'armonia della coppia. Un amore travagliato e apparentemente impossibile che si dibatte nell'incapacità di entrambi di essere se stessi, al di sopra di ogni 'regola'.

In questo volume sono raccolti molti racconti dell'autrice americana, talvolta assimilabili a romanzi in miniatura. In 'Febbre romana' due ricche signore americane che si incontrano per caso durante una vacanza romana scoprono, rinvangando vecchi ricordi, un sorpren- dente equivoco che ha condizionato le loro vite. 'Falsa partenza' è la storia di un rampollo di buona famiglia che invece di acquistare le croste di pittori allora di moda investe un capitale nei capolavori ancora sconosciuti di Beato Angelico e Mantegna, facendosi diseredare dal ricco e ignorante genitore e finendo povero con i capolavori in soffitta.