The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton's twelfth novel, initially serialized in four parts in the Pictorial Review magazine in 1920, and later released by D. Appleton and Company as a book in New York and in London. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making it the first novel written by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and thus Wharton the first woman to win the prize.The story is set in upper-class New York City in the 1870s.

Charity Royall, born among outcasts, she is rescued by lawyer Royall and lives with him as his ward in a small New England village. Never allowed to forget her disreputable origins, Charity rebels against the stifling dullness of the tight-knit community surrounding her. But the good looks and sophistication of a visiting architect arouse Charity's passionate nature. As their relationship grows, so too does Charity's conflict with her guardian.

"I put most of myself into that opus," Edith Wharton said of The Reef, possibly her most autobiographical novel. Published in 1912, it was, Bernard Berenson told Henry Adams, "better than any previous work excepting Ethan Frome." A challenge to the moral climate of the day, The Reef follows the fancies of George Darrow, a young diplomat en route from London to France, intent on proposing to the widowed Anna Leath. Unsettled by Anna's reticence, Darrow drifts into an affair with Sophy Viner, a charmingly naive and impecunious young woman whose relations with Darrow and Anna's family threaten his prospects for success. For its dramatic construction and acute insight into social mores and the multifaceted problem of sexuality, The Reef stands as one of Edith Wharton's most daring works of fiction.

"She was conscious of throwing in the moor tentatively, and yet with a somewhat exaggerated emphasis, as if to make sure that he shouldn't accuse her of slurring it over. But he seemed to have no desire to do so. "Poor old Fred!" he merely remarked; and she breathed out carelessly: "Oh, well - " His hand still lay on hers, and for a long interval, while they stood silent in the enveloping loveliness of the night, she was aware only of the warm current running from palm to palm, as the moonlight below them drew its line of magic from shore to shore." This book has a beautiful glossy cover and a blank page for the dedication.

Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition. The Lunch Club, after three or four winters of lunching and debate, had acquired such local distinction that the entertainment of distinguished strangers became one of its accepted functions; in recognition of which it duly extended to the celebrated "Osric Dane," on the day of her arrival in Hillbridge, an invitation to be present at the next meeting. The club was to meet at Mrs. Bellinger\'s. The other members, behind her back, were of one voice in deploring her unwillingness to cede her rights in favor of Mrs. Plinth, whose house made a more impressive setting for the entertainment of celebrities; while, as Mrs. Leveret observed, there was always the picture-gallery to fall back on.

John Amherst, the reform-minded assistant manager at the Hanaford textile mills, meets trained nurse Justine Brent at the hospital bedside of Dillon, an injured mill worker. The two agree Dillon would be better off dead if he is deprived of his occupation, a conversation that unites them in their approval of euthanasia sets the action of the novel in motion.

The first and novel written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Fast and Loose contains the Whartonesque theme of women trapped by social convention and fateful forces into destructive marriages. Wharton first began writing the novel when she was fourteen.Penguin Random House Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in e-book form, with the highest quality production values. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved.

An elegantly hair-raising collection of Edith Wharton's ghost stories, selected and with a preface written by the author herself.No history of the American uncanny tale would be complete without mention of Edith Wharton, yet many of Wharton’s most dedicated admirers are unaware that she was a master of the form. In fact, one of Wharton’s final literary acts was assembling Ghosts, a personal selection of her most chilling stories, written between 1902 and 1937.In “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” the earliest tale included here, a servant’s dedication to her mistress continues from beyond the grave, and in “All Souls,” the last story Wharton wrote, an elderly woman treads the permeable line between life and the hereafter.In all her writing, Wharton’s great gift was to mercilessly illuminate the motives of men and women, and her ghost stories never stray far from the preoccupations of the living...

Pulitzer Prize–winning author This powerful classic of American literature paints a moving portrait of young man forced to enlist in World War I and the devastated father he must leave behind Inspired by a young man Edith Wharton met during her war relief work in France, A Son at the Front (1923) opens in Paris on July 30, 1914, as Europe totters on the brink of war.  Expatriate American painter John Campton, whose only son George, having been born in Paris, must report for duty in the French army, struggles to keep his son away from the front while grappling with the moral implications of his actions. A poignant meditation on art and possession, fidelity and responsibility, A Son at the Front is Wharton’s indelible take on the war novel.

fiction; poetry, Women Writers

fiction; prose, Women Writers

fiction; prose, Women Writers