Edith Wharton

The first of CSA Word's popular women's short story collections

An outstandingly good and very unusual collection – The Sunday Times

This selection of stories relates the many experiences and complexities of womanhood; sometimes joyful, sometimes sad but always enriching. With stories by Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Gaskell – it includes Ladies in Lavender by William J. Locke,...

The beautiful, much-desired Lily Bart has been raised to be one of the perfect wives of the wealthy upper class, but her spark of character and independent drive prevents her from becoming one of the many women who will succeed in those circles. Though her desire for a comfortable life means that she cannot marry for love without money, her resistance to the rules of the social elite endangers her many marriage proposals. As Lily spirals down into...

Enduring literature illuminated by practical scholarship each enriched classic edition includes: A concise introduction that gives readers important background information. A chronology of the author's life and work. A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context. An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations. Detailed explanatory notes. Critical analysis, including contemporary...

Edith Wharton 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. Wharton combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels of social and psychological insight. She was also well acquainted with many of her era's other literary and public figures, including Theodore Roosevelt....

In this classic by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Age of Innocence, a mother's past complicates her daughter's future in 1920s New York. Trapped in an unhappy marriage with a controlling husband, Kate Clephane began an affair with a wealthy man, only to lose her daughter, Anne, and be exiled from New York society. Years later, after their entanglement has ended, Kate meets Chris Fenno in France. Although he is a much younger man, Chris...

Considered wildly controversial at the time of its release, 'The Fruit of the Tree' is a departure from the norm for Edith Wharton. While her trademark eye for social detail and psychological insights are present and correct, this novel deals with more melancholic themes, such as divorce, addiction, euthanasia, poor working conditions, and extravagance. It follows the story of George Amhurst, the assistant manager of a textile mill in New England....

In this comic novel by a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, a bachelor on a transatlantic cruise meets a group of runaway children who change his life forever. Martin Boyne is a cautious man of forty-six. The bachelor has been nursing a relationship with a widow for five years, and now he is crossing the Atlantic to be with her. He laments that he never meets interesting people in his travels, but that is about to change . . . The seven precocious...

Nick Lansing and Susy Branch, a newly married couple with the right connections but little money, devise a shrewd plan to sponge off their wealthy friends, honeymooning in their mansions and villas. How their plan unfolds is a charming comedy of Eros.

An aspiring writer from the Midwest finds inspiration and heartache in New York's Hudson Valley in this classic novel by the author of The House of Mirth.  It's the early 1920s, a time when all of America seems to be hurtling toward transformation. Vance Weston, a young man from Euphoria, Illinois, decamps for New York with grand ambitions of becoming an author. There he meets Halo Spear, a remarkable young woman who introduces Vance to great writers...

The Pulitzer Prize—winning author of The Age of Innocence explores the supernatural and other unknowns in six short stories. The acclaimed Gilded Age author travels around the world and into the unknown with these six tales. After recovering from a bad fever in a Swiss sanitorium, an American pays a social call to a friend's lonely sister on the coast of Brittany, but his journey takes a terrifying turn in "Miss Mary Pask." A wealthy resident of...