New Releases by edith wharton

The House of Mirth follows the career and final downfall of Lily Bart, a society beauty in turn of the century New York, whose financial security stands on very shaky ground. In a culture where money measures everything and morals are worn like fashionable garments, for appearances only, an essentially honest Lily is torn between offers of a loveless, financially secure marriage and one of love and relative poverty with the man she adores. By turns naive, worldly and reckless, her vacillating nature pulls her first in one direction, then the other, in a downward spiral towards eventual tragedy. Edith Wharton was born into the same social milieu she so successfully satirised in her novels, and The House of Mirth''s scathing and perceptive view of New York''s financial elite did not make her any friends among the American beau monde. Following the book''s publication (and its tremendous literary success), Wharton left the United States permanently and spent the rest of her days in Europe.

Enriched Classics offer readers accessible editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and commentary. Each book includes educational tools alongside the text, enabling students and readers alike to gain a deeper and more developed understanding of the writer and their work. An entrancing but sad story of a poverty-stricken Massachusetts farmer caught in a loveless marriage. The main characters are Ethan Frome, his wife Zenobia, called Zeena, and her young cousin Mattie Silver. Frome and Zeena marry after she nurses his mother in her last illness. Although Frome seems ambitious and intelligent, Zeena holds him back. When her young cousin Mattie comes to stay on their New England farm, Frome falls in love with her. But the social conventions of the day doom their love and their hopes. Ethan’s love for his young cousin leads to one day of explosive emotions with tragic consequences. The story forcefully conveys Wharton’s abhorrence of society’s unbending standards of loyalty. Enriched Classics enhance your engagement by introducing and explaining the historical and cultural significance of the work, the author’s personal history, and what impact this book had on subsequent scholarship. Each book includes discussion questions that help clarify and reinforce major themes and reading recommendations for further research. Read with confidence.

Edith Newbold Jones was born in New York on January 24, 1862. Born into wealth this background of privilege allowed her to write critic novels and stories about it culminating in her Pulitzer Prize winning novel ''The Age Of Innocence''. Marriage to Edward Robbins Wharton, who was 12 years older in 1885 allowed her to travel extensively. It was shortly apparent that her husband suffered from acuter depression and so the travelling ceased and they retired to The Mount, their estate designed by Edith Wharton . By 1908 his state was said to be incurable and prior to divorcing Edwards in 1913 she began an affair, in 1908, with Morton Fullerton, a Times journalist, who was her intellectual equal and allowed her writing talents to push forward and write the novels for which she is so well known. Acknowledged as one of the great American writers with novels such as Ethan Frome and the House Of Mirth among many. Wharton also wrote many short stories, including ghost stories and poems which we look at here in this volume. Edith Wharton died of a stroke in 1937 at the Domaine Le Pavillon Colombe, her 18th-century house on Rue de Montmorency in Saint-Brice-sous-Foret."

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade: and you must have asked who he was. It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the "natives" were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two. I had this from Harmon Gow, who had driven the stage from Bettsbridge to Starkfield in pre-trolley days and knew the chronicle of all the families on his line.

From first to last, poetry was part of Edith Wharton''s writing life. Whilerarely (after early youth) her primary focus, it always served her as a medium for recording the most vivid impressions and emotions, an intimate journal of longings and regrets. "Poetry was important to Wharton," writeseditor Louis Auchincloss, "because it enabled her to express the deeply emotional side of her nature that she kept under such tight control, not only in her life but in the ordered sweep of her fiction." In later years her poetry also engaged with the public passions of wartime, as she found herself involved with the plight of Allied soldiers in France. Her first models were Romantic, but in the course of her life she absorbed the influences of Symbolism and Modernism; and throughout her poetic career she showed a care for form even in her most private utterances, as in the erotic ode "Terminus," never published in her lifetime. This volume collects the bulk of Wharton''s significant poetry, including much work previously uncollected or unpublished.

These carefully chosen selections from Edith Wharton''s travel writing convey the writer''s control of her craft. Wharton disliked the generality of guidebooks and focused instead on the "parentheses of travel"--the undiscovered hidden corners of Europe, Morocco, and the Mediterranean. Included is an excerpt from Wharton''s unpublished memoir, The Cruise of Vanadis, as well as front line depictions of Lorraine and the Vosges during World War I. Photos.

A tale of forbidden sexual passion and thwarted dreams played out against the lush, summer backdrop of the Massachusetts Berkshires, Edith Wharton called Summer her ''hot Ethan.'' In their rural settings and their poor, uneducated protagonists, Summer and Ethan Frome represent a sharp departure from Wharton''s familiar depictions of the urban upper class. Charity Royall lives unhappily with her hard-drinking adoptive father in an isolated village, until a visiting architect awakens her sexual passion and the hope for escape. Exploring Charity''s relation to her father and her lover, Wharton delves into dark cultural territory: repressed sexuality, small-town prejudice, and, in subtle hints, incest. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.