Edith Wharton: 443 books

Originally published in 1928, The Children is a late novel concerns Martin Boyne's distraction from his anticipated marriage to Rose Sellars, a recently widowed woman of his own age. The distraction comes in the form of seven children he meets aboard a ship sailing from South America to Italy, principally...

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...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well-you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me.’ Lily Bart, an attractive young woman living...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘He looked at her hair and longed to touch it again, and to tell her that it smelt of the woods; but he had never learned to say such things…’ One harsh winter in 1900s New England, Ethan Frome toils at...

Tale of a tragic love triangle. This novel is lyrical in its beauty. Wharton's word choice and descriptions are vivid and real, and the reader is moved to pity the characters in their circumstances. One would be hard pressed to find a more beautifully written tragedy.

Wharton’s 1901-04 travels yielded nine ruminations about Italy, its culture, and the art of being a perceptive visitor. Includes “An Alpine Posting-Inn,” “A Midsummer Week's Dream,” “The Sanctuaries of the Pennine Alps,” “What the Hermits Saw,” “A Tuscan Shrine,” “Sub Umbra Liliorum,” “March in Italy,” and “Picturesque Milan.”

Like most Wharton novels, The House of Mirth examines the conflict between rigid social expectation and personal desire. Lily Bart is adept at playing society's games, which expect her to achieve an advantageous marriage. Yet, torn between her desire for luxurious living and a relationship based on...

In the title story, the “hermit” is a boy who witnessed the murder of his parents and sister. The trauma has shaped his life, but a new neighbor—the “wild woman”—is about to change his outlook. Wharton’s 1908 collection also includes “The Last Asset,” “In Trust,” “The Pretext,” “The Verdict,” “The Pot-Boiler,” and “The Best Man.”

Originally published in 1916, but actually written in 1890, Bunner Sisters is a novella about social exclusion and deprivation. The sisters of the title, Anna Eliza and Evelina scrape a living from selling simple haberdashery items such as buttons, trims and ribbons. Their lives are mundane and in all...

Wharton's first (1899) published collection of short stories ranges from light humor, social commentary, deception, and travel, to the darkly Gothic. Includes “The Muse's Tragedy," “A Journey," “The Pelican," “Souls Belated," “A Coward," “A Cup of Cold Water," “The Portrait," and a short play, “The Twilight of the Gods."

Francophile Wharton, an American buried in Versailles, was one of the few foreign front-line correspondents in France during World War I. A passionate advocate for the French national cause, this 1918 novella of a young American soldier in the Foreign Legion takes the United States to task for its slow aid to its ally.

Originally published in 1903, The Descent of Man and Other Stories is an early collection of short fiction that isn't held together by any particular theme. Of all the stories perhaps the most interesting for technical reasons is The Lady's Maid's Bell, a ghost story that incorporates a distinctly unreliable...

Originally published in 1901, Crucial Instances is a collection of six short stories connected, as the title suggests, by a hinging moment in the narrative through which the plot alters dramatically. In The Angel at the Grave, Paulina Anson finds herself the sole custodian of her grandfather's inheritance;...

In the title story, the “hermit" is a boy who witnessed the murder of his parents and sister. The trauma has shaped his life, but a new neighbor—the “wild woman"—is about to change his outlook. Wharton's 1908 collection also includes “The Last Asset," “In Trust," “The Pretext," “The Verdict," “The Pot-Boiler," and “The Best Man."