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.

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 This volume collects the bulk of Wharton''s significant poetry, including much work previously uncollected or unpublished.

High quality reprint of Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse by Edith Wharton.

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 Included is an excerpt from Wharton''s unpublished memoir, The Cruise of Vanadis, as well as front line depictions of Lorraine and the Vosges during World War I. Photos.

"Problems of a midwestern writer in the East." Cf. Hanna, A. Mirror for the nation

One of the first novels to deal honestly with a woman''s sexual awakening, "Summer" created a sensation upon its 1917 publication. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Ethan Frome" shattered the standards of conventional love stories with candor and realism. Nearly a century later, this tale remains fresh and relevant.