In Edith Wharton’s works, references to architecture, interior decoration, painting, sculpture, and fashion abound. As these essays demonstrate, art and objects are for Wharton evidence of cultural belief and reflect the values, assumptions, and customs of the burgeoning consumer culture in which she lived and about which she wrote. Furthermore, her meditations about issues of architecture, design, and decoration serve as important commentaries on her vision of the literary arts.In...

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the majority of women were forced to seek their education outside the walls of American universities. Many turned to museums and libraries, for their own enlightenment, for formal education, and also for their careers. In Roffman’s close readings of four modernist writers—Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, Marianne Moore, and Ruth Benedict—she studied the that modernist women writers were simultaneously critical of and shaped by these institutions.

The first biography of an American masterThe Songs We Know Best, the first comprehensive biography of the early life of John Ashbery—the winner of nearly every major American literary award—reveals the unusual ways he drew on the details of his youth to populate the poems that made him one of the most original and unpredictable forces of the last century in arts and letters.Drawing on unpublished correspondence, juvenilia, and childhood diaries as we...

Taken from the poverty of her parents' home in Portsmouth, Fanny Price is brought up with her rich cousins at Mansfield Park, acutely aware of her humble rank and with her cousin Edmund as her sole ally. During her uncle's absence in Antigua, the Crawford's arrive in the neighborhood bringing with them the glamour of London life and a reckless taste for flirtation. Mansfield Park is considered Jane Austen's first mature work and, with its quiet heroine and subtle examination of social posi...

Elizabeth Gaskell's "Wives and Daughters" was originally published serially in "Cornhill Magazine" between August 1864 and January 1866. The work, which was left unfinished at the time of Gaskell's death in 1865, was completed by Frederick Greenwood. The novel is chiefly concerned with Molly Gibson, the only daughter of a widowed Doctor, who upon visiting the Hamleys of Hamley Hall finds a substitute for her mother in Mrs. Hamley. "Wives and Daughters" is a classic 19th century romantic no...

Catherine wants what Richard has: a richly decorated house, and a perfect, lavished-upon baby. Catherine also wants Richard: a disaffected diplomat whose true passion is for cinema. But Catherine is only the babysitter, and her envy—and its fallout—come to the fore when Richard is accused of a crime, and she must decide whether to help exonerate him.“Laure Baudot’s prose is exquisite, patient, and sophisticated. In the Afternoon immerses you in the fascinating and complicated mind ...

The incomparable Ali Smith melds the tale and the essay into a magical hybrid form, a song of praise to the power of stories in our livesA book that refuses to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted-literally-by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature.A hypnotic dialogue unfolds, a duet between and a meditation on art and storytelling, a book about love,...

Marion Meade's engrossing and comprehensive biography of one of the twentieth century's most captivating womenIn this lively, absorbing biography, Marion Meade illuminates both the charm and the dark side of Dorothy Parker, exploring her days of wicked wittiness at the Algonquin Round Table with the likes of Robert Benchley, George Kaufman, and Harold Ross, and in Hollywood with S. J. Perelman, William Faulkner, and Lillian Hellman. At the dazzling center of it all...

The only available source for the exact words of Joan of Arc, compiled from the transcript of her trials and rearranged as an autobiography by Willard Trask.

In her exuberant new work, BOBBED HAIR AND BATHTUB GIN, Marion Meade presents a portrait of four extraordinary writers--Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edna Ferber--whose loves, lives, and literary endeavors embodied the spirit of the 1920s.Capturing the jazz rhythms and desperate gaiety that defined the era, Meade gives us Parker, Fitzgerald, Millay, and Ferber, traces the intersections of their lives, and describes the men (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmu...

A Chautauqua Idyl by Grace Livingston HillDown in a rocky pasture, on the edge of a wood, ran a little brook, tinkle, tinkle, over the bright pebbles of its bed. Close to the waters edge grew delicate ferns, and higher up the mossy bank nestled violets, blue and white and yellow.Later in the fall the rocky pasture would glow with golden-rod and brilliant sumach, and ripe milk-weed pods would burst and fill the golden autumn sunshine with fleecy clouds. But n...

Fast, precise, hilariously timed and mercilessly honest, the stories of Empar Moliner lay bare every pretension ever to have offered comfort to the middle class psyche. From the zeal of a mothers' group staging a world record breastfeeding attempt to couples role-playing their way into parenthood at a third world ‘adoption workshop’, every well-meaning fad and right-on gesture is brilliantly observed and astutely exposed.Moliner’s sharpest weapons are saved for relationships, interr...