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....

Fiction, Romance

...The story is one of only two novels by Wharton to be set in New England. The novel details the sexual awakening of its protagonist, Charity Royall, and shares many plot similarities with Wharton's better known novel, Ethan Frome. Only moderately well-received when...

Literature

“Bunner Sisters,” like “The Age of Innocence” is set in 1870s New York, however the lives of Ann Eliza and Evelina Bunner reflect impoverished New York. The sisters run a very small shop, in a shabby basement, in a sidestreet already doomed to decline. Shabby as it is, the sisters are happy in their small orderly community of supportive women. The story tells of the destruction of this life, and how the once content sisters are thrown into the realistic world outside of their little shop. (Summary by Margaret)...

Fiction, Literature

...This is Edith Wharton's earliest published collection of short stories (1899). Like much of her later work, they touch on themes of marriage, male/female relationships, New York society, and the nature and purpose of art. One of the ...

Short stories, Literature

...Wharton's classic story of an aging (by Victorian-era standards) spinster socialite who would rather marry for money than for true love.(Summary by BellonaTimes)...

Fiction

When published in 1907, this novel about the lives of a wealthy mill owner, her socially progressive husband and friends caused a stir due to its treatment of drug abuse, mercy killing, divorce and second marriages. (Summary by Margaret)...

Literature

...nna’s daughter’s naïve and young governess. Sophy’s relationship with Darrow and Anna’s family can threaten his success. In this novel, as in many of Wharton’s other well known novels, we see the eternal love triangle. With her sly and lovely writing style, Wharton delivers to us in this wonderful novel a cast of unforgettable characters and many unforgettable scenes which...

Romance, Literature

In an era before the advent of electric lights, telephones or motor vehicles, there exists a small cluster of aristocratic old revolutionary stock families that rule New York's social life. Under the rules of this society, being things is better than doing things and reputation and outward appearances come at the exclusion of everything else. In this Gilded Age, when America’s expansion and increased industrialism produce a group of newly wealthy robber barons and financiers, the patient, time-honored values of the old ruling class, and century, are giving way to the expediencies of the new. Caught at this cusp, a triangle of lovers, who must choose between the expectations of family and society, and the deepest yearnings of the heart. Newly engaged couple, Newland Archer, a young lawyer, and May Welland, a society debutante, are part of the old world, where the right people follow the correct rules and marry into acceptable families. The arrival from Europe of May’s cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, complicates their union, as Ellen’s mysterious past threatens to cast a shadow of scandal over the newly betrothed couple. Newland A...

Poetry

...The House of Mirth (1905), by Edith Wharton, is a novel about New York socialite Lily Bart attempting to secure a husband and a place in rich society. It is one of the first novels of manners in American literature, and one of the first to openly explore ...

Fiction

...American writer Edith Wharton is known for her novels of manners set in old New York; yet much of her adult life was spent in France. She lived in Paris throughout World War I and was heavily involved in refugee work. Her 1918 novella The Ma...

Fiction, War stories