Edith Wharton's The Marne traces a boy's education in privilege, war, and disillusionment against the glittering backdrop of prewar Europe and the devastation that follows. Troy Belknap, an American child of travel and comfort, grows up enchanted by France's villages, cathedrals, and hidden roads, but World War I transforms his love of place into a fierce moral and emotional awakening. When his beloved tutor is called to the front, Troy is thrown into the chaos of St. Moritz and Paris, whe...

Returning to New York after twelve years abroad, the narrator unexpectedly encounters his old Harvard friend Halston Merrick at a Cumnor dinner party and is struck by the change in him: once brilliant, ambitious, and destined for public life, Merrick has instead been absorbed by the family iron business and never married. His attention is fixed on a quiet woman in gray, Mrs. Reardon, whom the narrator recognizes as Paulina Trant, a once-radiant figure now faded into conventional respectabi...

Enter the sophisticated world of Edith Wharton, where love, wealth, social expectations, and personal freedom collide. The Complete Works of Edith Wharton brings together the writings of Edith Wharton, one of America's most celebrated novelists and a keen observer of the social world of the wealthy and privileged. Wharton's fiction examines the complicated relationships between individual desire and social convention. Her characters navigate restrictive social expectations, difficult marri...

The second volume in this essential library gathers James Joyce's modernist vision, Mark Twain's American wit, Jules Verne's boundless imagination, Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure and suspense, Oscar Wilde's epigrammatic brilliance, and Bram Stoker's gothic terror alongside voices from Tolstoy to Tagore, Stendhal to Sienkiewicz. Ranging from French Enlightenment fiction to Victorian sensation novels, Russian realism to early global literature, this collection widens the canon begun in V...

The early stories, where the machinery is already assembled: a wife who will not divorce, a man who inherits a manuscript, the muse of a dead poet, a couple who meet in the afterlife and find the arrangement is not what either was promised. Wharton was born into the old New York money whose rules she spent her career dissecting, and became the first woman to take the Pulitzer. These are the pieces where she learned to be merciless.

At a lavish summer dinner at Highfield, Austin Wrayford watches Cobham Stilling turn wealth into spectacle, boasting endlessly about his carefully chosen motor-boat while the guests orbit his vanity. Yet Wrayford's attention keeps returning to Isabel Stilling, whose quiet reserve and inward strength suggest a deeper life beneath the polished social surface. Behind the glittering conversation, there are signs of financial strain, marital unease, and a bond between Isabel and Wrayford that n...

In old New York, where reputation can outweigh feeling, a single glimpse at a hotel fire sets a life of secrecy and consequence in motion. Through the reflective eyes of a boy, Edith Wharton opens a world of glittering manners, rigid codes, and the hidden scandals that pulse beneath polite society. At the center is Mrs. Lizzie Hazeldean, a woman forced to move through grief, marriage, and widowhood under constant scrutiny. As rumors, guilt, and social pressure tighten around her, she must ...

This ebook contains the complete works of Edith Wharton: 22 novels and novellas, 11 story collections with 85 stories, 2 collections of poetry, and 9 non-fiction books.The collection is sorted chronologically by literary genres. There are the usual inline tables of contents and links after each text/chapter to get back to the respective tables. An alphabetical index of stories is also provided. Dates of first publication can be found at the end of the stories.Contents:...

In Morocco is Edith Wharton's vivid travel account of a country poised between ancient splendor and modern intrusion. Written after a hurried wartime journey, it captures the thrill of entering a land still difficult to reach, where Fez, Rabat, Salé, Marrakech, Moulay Idriss, and other historic places remain charged with mystery, beauty, and danger. Wharton presents Morocco as both a personal adventure and a rare record of a world she feared mass tourism would soon alter beyond recognition...

Edith Wharton's elegant study of Italy's great villas and gardens is both a visual tour and a passionate argument for the art of landscape design. With vivid illustrations by Maxfield Parrish and photographs, she moves region by region from Florence and Siena to Rome, Genoa, Lombardy, and Venetia, revealing how the finest Italian gardens unite architecture, nature, water, stone, and evergreen growth into one living composition. Wharton insists that the true lesson of Italy is not in flower...

Italian Backgrounds is Edith Wharton's elegant, sharply observed travel and art writing on northern and central Italy, where landscapes, shrines, mountain sanctuaries, and old cities become occasions for historical feeling and aesthetic judgment. From the austere Swiss village of Splügen, with its laboring meadows, posting-inn, and comic impatience for Italy, she traces the journey south through Chiavenna, the Valtelline, Tirano, and the Aprica pass, watching snow, pine forest, vines, and ...

In wartime Paris, Edith Wharton turns observation into a sharp cultural portrait of France, asking what gives the nation its enduring force and why its spirit mattered so deeply in an age of upheaval. French Ways and Their Meaning is less a narrative than a series of essays, each one probing a different facet of French life: first impressions, reverence, taste, intellectual honesty, continuity, and the changing role of women in modern France. With wit and precision, Wharton compares French...