Volume two of Edith Wharton's excursions into the chilling and other worldly

The American author Edith Wharton (nee Jones), was born in New York during the American Civil War in 1862. She came from a prestigious family background which, incidentally though tellingly, inspired the perennially familiar phrase, 'keeping up with the Joneses'. Perhaps predictably, she married into another prosperous family when she became the wife of Bostonian, 'Teddy' Wharton in 1883. Edith's wealth opened the world to her and she became a prodigious traveller and lived for...

Volume two of Edith Wharton's excursions into the chilling and other worldly

The American author Edith Wharton (nee Jones), was born in New York during the American Civil War in 1862. She came from a prestigious family background which, incidentally though tellingly, inspired the perennially familiar phrase, 'keeping up with the Joneses'. Perhaps predictably, she married into another prosperous family when she became the wife of Bostonian, 'Teddy' Wharton in 1883. Edith's wealth opened the world to her and she became a prodigious traveller and lived for...

The Spraggs, a family of midwesterners from the fictional city of Apex who have made money through somewhat shady financial dealings, arrive in New York City at the prompting of their beautiful, ambitious, but socially-naive daughter, Undine. She marries Ralph Marvell, a member of an old New York family that no longer enjoys significant wealth. Before her wedding, Undine encounters an acquaintance from Apex named Elmer Moffatt, a character with "a genuine disdain for religious piety and social cant," as the scholar Elaine Showalter observes. Undine begs him not to do anything that will...

Ethan Frome is a novel published in 1911 by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Edith Wharton. It is set in the fictitious town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. The novel was adapted into a film, Ethan Frome, in 1993. 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...

Edith Wharton ( born Edith Newbold Jones; January 24, 1862 - August 11, 1937) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. 1] Wharton combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight. She was well acquainted with many of her era's other literary and public figures, including Theodore Roosevelt.... Walter Appleton Clark was born June 24, 1876 and died...

Ethan Frome, a lonely and downtrodden farmer, lives alone with his sickly, judgmental wife Zeena and her cousin Mattie, who helps around the house. Ethan and Mattie have feelings for one another, but are trapped in the hopelessness of their situation. When Zeena becomes suspicious and threatens to send Mattie away, Ethan takes matters into his own hands, propelling himself and Mattie down a snowhill and towards their fate.

Summer is the story of 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 man from the city. Wharton broke the conventions of women's romantic fiction by making Charity a thoroughly independent modern woman-in touch with her emotions and sexuality, yet kept from love and the larger world she craves by the overwhelming pressures of heredity and society.

Stephen Glennard's career is falling apart and he desperately needs money so that he may marry his beautiful fiancee. He happens upon an advertisement in a London magazine promising the prospect of financial gain. Glennard was once pursued by Margaret Aubyn, a famous and recently deceased author, and he still has her passionate love letters to him. Glennard removes his name from the letters and sells them, making him a fortune and building a marriage based on the betrayal of another. However, his mounting shame and his guilty conscience ultimately force him to confess his betrayal to his...

Darrow preparing to join Anna in France when he receives a telegram ordering him to wait "til thirtieth" because of an "unexpected obstacle" - one of many such delays Anna has ordered. Deeply humiliated and disappointed, Darrow boards the boat regardless and runs into the young Sophy Viner, a woman he had previously encountered but never gotten to know thoroughly . Sophy, although down on her luck, is an ambitious aspiring actress determined to start a new life in France. Enthralled, Darrow convinces her to spend a few days with him so he can show her around Paris. During their time spent...

The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton's twelfth novel. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize. The story is set in upper-class New York City in the 1870s, during the Gilded Age. Wharton wrote the book in her 50s, after she had established herself as a strong author with publishers clamoring for her work. The Age of Innocence centers on an upper-class couple's impending marriage, and the introduction of the bride's cousin, plagued by scandal, whose presence threatens their happiness. Though the novel questions the assumptions and morals of...