The New York Stories of Edith Wharton [Paperback]

A New York Review Books Original

Edith Wharton wrote about New York as only a native can. Her Manhattan is a city of well-appointed drawing rooms, hansoms and broughams, all-night cotillions, and resplendent Fifth Avenue flats. Bishops’ nieces mingle with bachelor industrialists; respectable wives turn into excellent mistresses. All are governed by a code of behavior as rigid as it is precarious. What fascinates Wharton are the points of weakness in the structure of Old New York: the artists and writers at its fringes, the free-love advocates testing its limits, widows and divorcées struggling to hold their own.

The New York Stories of Edith Whartongathers twenty stories of the city, written over the course of Wharton’s career. From her first published story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” to one of her last and most celebrated, “Roman Fever,” this new collection charts the growth of an American master and enriches our understanding of the central themes of her work, among them the meaning of marriage, the struggle for artistic integrity, the bonds between parent and child, and the plight of the aged.

Illuminated by Roxana Robinson’s Introduction, these stories showcase Wharton’s astonishing insight into the turbulent inner lives of the men and women caught up in a rapidly changing society.TABLE OF CONTENTS
 
Mrs. Manstey's View
 
The Good May Come
 
The Portrait
 
A Cup of Cold Water
 
A Journey
 
The Rembrandt
 
The Other Two
 
The Quicksand
 
The Dilettante
 
The Reckoning
 
Expiation
 
The Pot-Boiler
 
His Father's Son
 
Full Circle
 
Autres Temps . . . 
 
The Long Run
 
After Holbein
 
Diagnosis
 
Pomegranate Seed
 
Roman Fever

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