Edith Wharton's insightful 1912 classic was a daring challenge to the social and sexual conventions of the time, and 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...

The Fruit of the Tree is one of Edith Wharton's few novels to deal directly with issues such as euthanasia, the problems of labor and industrial conditions, and professions for women, as well as Wharton's more customary themes such as divorce. Published in 1907, it received positive but mixed reviews, and more recently critics have attempted to explain its uneven structure, which combines an industrial plot (Amherst's attempts to reform the mills), an ethical plot (the question of euthanasia) and the more conventional romance plot (Justine, Bessy, and Amherst). As The Fruit of the Tree opens,...

Edith Wharton's "Madame de Treymes" is a remarkable example of the form. It is the story of the tactical defeat but moral victory of an honest and upstanding American in his struggle to win a wife from a tightly united but feudally minded French aristocratic family. He loses, but they cheat. . . . In a masterpiece of brevity, Wharton dramatizes the contrast between the two opposing forces: the simple and proper old brownstone New York, low in style but high in principle, and the achingly beautiful but decadent Saint-Germain district of Paris. The issue is seamlessly joined. Louis Auchincloss...

The House of Mirth (1905), by Edith Wharton, is the story of Lily Bart, a well-born, but penniless woman of the high society of New York City, who was raised and educated to become wife to a rich man, a hothouse flower for conspicuous consumption. As an unmarried woman with gambling debts and an uncertain future, Lily is destroyed by the society that created her. Written in the style of a novel of manners, The House of Mirth was the fourth novel by Edith Wharton (1862-1937), which tells the story of Lily Bart against the background of the high-society of upper class New York City of the...

Considered by some to be her finest work, Edith Wharton's "Summer" created a sensation when first published in 1917, as it was one of the first novels to deal honestly with a young woman's sexual awakening. "Summer" is the story of proud and independent Charity Royall, a child of mountain moonshiners adopted by a family in a poor New England town, who has a passionate love affair with Lucius Harney, an educated young man from the city. Wharton broke the conventions of woman's romantic fiction by making Charity a thoroughly contemporary woman--in touch with her feelings and sexuality, yet kept...

The Marne is named after the critical French battles along the Marne River during the First World War. Troy Belknap, is a wealthy American whose family is enjoying their annual summer visit to France when the Germans invade. Troy's tutor and close friend M. Grantier leaves for his hometown when news spreads of the German invasion

The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton's 12th novel, initially serialized in four parts in the Pictorial Review magazine in 1920.The Age of Innocence centers on an upper-class couple's impending marriage, and the introduction of a woman plagued by scandal whose presence threatens their happiness. Though the novel questions the assumptions and morals of 1870s' New York society, it never devolves into an outright condemnation of the institution.