Newland Archer, gentleman lawyer and heir to one of New York City's best families, is happily anticipating a highly desirable marriage to the sheltered and beautiful May Welland. Yet he finds reason to doubt his choice of bride after the appearance of Countess Ellen Olenska, May's exotic and beautiful 30-year-old cousin. Ellen has returned to New York from Europe after scandalously separating herself (per rumor) from a bad marriage to a Polish count. At first, Ellen's arrival and its potential taint on the reputation of his bride-to-be's family disturb Newland, but he becomes intrigued by the...

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. Her other novels, including "The Fruit of the Tree," remain fascinating portraits of an earlier time.

The eight stories which make up The Greater Inclination (John Lane, 8vo, pp. 254, 6s), deal with various aspects of highly civilised life in the States. The preciosity of the nomenclature in "The Muse's Tragedy" prepares us for an essay in the more attenuated, if hardly the higher, humanities.

"Bunner Sisters," written in 1892 but not published until 1916 in Xingu and Other Stories, takes place in a shabby neighborhood in New York City. The two Bunner sisters, Ann Eliza the elder, and Evelina the younger, keep a small shop selling artificial flowers and small handsewn articles to Stuyvesant Square's "female population."

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.

Set in the posh milieu that Wharton knew so intimately, The Glimpses of the Moon is a sweeping portrait of a couple caught up in the trappings of privilege -- and driven by a reckless, all-consuming ambition....

Ethan Frome is set in the fictional New England town of Starkfield, where a visiting engineer tells the story of his encounter with Ethan Frome, a man with a history of thwarted dreams and desires. The accumulated longing of Frome ends in an ironic turn of events. His initial impressions are based on his observations of Frome going about his mundane tasks in Starkfield, and something about him catches the eye and curiosity of the visitor, but no one in the town seems interested in revealing many details about the man or his history - or perhaps they are not able to. The narrator ultimately...