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    The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

    Author Edith Wharton
    Introduction by Roxana Robinson
    Ebook
    New York Review Books | NYRB Classics
    On sale Aug 17, 2011 | 464 Pages | 9781590174364
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    Edith Wharton’s 20 classic short stories and novellas offer an exquisite portrait of Old New York, spanning from the Civil War through the Gilded Age (New York Times).

    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 Wharton gathers 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
    Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was born in New York City. Her father, George Jones, was a relative of the Joneses that fashionable people proverbially strive to keep up with; her mother, Lucretia Rhinelander, came from one of the city’s oldest families. Raised in New York and in Europe, Edith Jones was twenty-three when she married Edward Robbins Wharton (known as Teddy). In 1902 they built themselves a forty-two-room house, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts, but Teddy’s mental instability and financial irregularities led to a divorce in 1913, after which Edith moved to France, where she lived for the rest of her life. During the First World War, Wharton threw herself into war relief, traveling to the front lines and founding a charity for refugees, in recognition of which she was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1916. Wharton published her first book, a collection of poems, in her teens and in 1897 achieved popular success as co-author of The Decoration of Houses, a treatise on aesthetics and interior design. Her first volume of short stories, The Greater Inclination, came out in 1899. Among the most famous of her many novels are The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1912), The Custom of the Country (1913), and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, the first woman to do so.

    Roxana Robinson is the author of a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe and of six books of fiction, including the novelSweetwater and the story collection A Perfect Stranger. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and lives in New York City.
    Edith Wharton View titles by Edith Wharton
    “If these stories have a defining subject (other than New York) it is divorce, which begins to replace art as Wharton's excuse for discussing the fashionable and the real. In fact, one of the pleasures of a collection like this is that you can trace her tendencies in it? and the way they develop.”
    —Time Literary Supplement

    “Edith Wharton, whose deft portraits of the upper class are taken as definitive accounts of the late 19th century, remains one of the most potent names in the literature of New York.”
    —Christopher Gray, The New York Times

    “Wharton was Old New York . . . [her family] belonged to that tiny but powerful New York clan . . . who clung together, intermarried, set the tone and made the rules for society in Manhattan . . . Her New York fiction spans the years from, roughly, 1840 through the turn of the century—from before her birth, in other words, through the Civil War and beyond into the Gilded Age, an era of tremendous transformation in American society.”
    —Charles McGrath, The New York Times

    “Mrs. Wharton had her turf, that almost sepia New York, to be turned over and over again, like setting the plow to the family farm every spring.”
    —Elizabeth Hardwick, The New York Review of Books

    “New York City [is] the setting of Wharton’s finest fictions.”
    —The New York Observer

    “In both stories [“Mrs. Manstey’s View” and “Roman Fever”], and in the intervening 18 that compromise this collection, we find women observing the world from a distance, restrained by the extraordinarily elaborate codes of behaviour that govern well-to-do, turn-of-the-century New York. But also women surprising themselves, and us, with the intensity of their feelings and desires, and the ingenuity with which they’ll circumnavigate in order to express them. Where passions smoulder at length in Wharton’s novels, her stories zero in on the moments of eruption. Always, though, in the most elegantly crystalline and coolly ironic prose.”
    —The Independent

    “Spanning 40 years (1891-1934), these 20 tales of low passions and high society show off Wharton at her forensic and acerbic best. Divorce, adultery, bankruptcy: the misdeeds that undermine gentility in the brownstones of the Manhattan rich alter, but the fear and fragility behind all the charm do not. To rebels, bolters or swindlers, these plush parlours may be prisons; but, after expulsion, they glow “with the glamor of sword-barred Edens.”
    —The Observer (UK)

    “Let’s do this the way Edith Wharton’s publicist would do it: ‘Steeped in Manhattan high society, Edith Wharton has a unique perspective on the lavish parties, debauched bachelors and vicious women of a certain age who prowl the penthouses of Manhattan . . . All true. Except since The New York Stories of Edith Wharton spans the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the indiscretions within are a lot more nuanced than in, say, Gossip Girl.”
    —L Magazine

    About

    Edith Wharton’s 20 classic short stories and novellas offer an exquisite portrait of Old New York, spanning from the Civil War through the Gilded Age (New York Times).

    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 Wharton gathers 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

    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

    Author

    Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was born in New York City. Her father, George Jones, was a relative of the Joneses that fashionable people proverbially strive to keep up with; her mother, Lucretia Rhinelander, came from one of the city’s oldest families. Raised in New York and in Europe, Edith Jones was twenty-three when she married Edward Robbins Wharton (known as Teddy). In 1902 they built themselves a forty-two-room house, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts, but Teddy’s mental instability and financial irregularities led to a divorce in 1913, after which Edith moved to France, where she lived for the rest of her life. During the First World War, Wharton threw herself into war relief, traveling to the front lines and founding a charity for refugees, in recognition of which she was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1916. Wharton published her first book, a collection of poems, in her teens and in 1897 achieved popular success as co-author of The Decoration of Houses, a treatise on aesthetics and interior design. Her first volume of short stories, The Greater Inclination, came out in 1899. Among the most famous of her many novels are The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1912), The Custom of the Country (1913), and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, the first woman to do so.

    Roxana Robinson is the author of a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe and of six books of fiction, including the novelSweetwater and the story collection A Perfect Stranger. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and lives in New York City.
    Edith Wharton View titles by Edith Wharton

    Praise

    “If these stories have a defining subject (other than New York) it is divorce, which begins to replace art as Wharton's excuse for discussing the fashionable and the real. In fact, one of the pleasures of a collection like this is that you can trace her tendencies in it? and the way they develop.”
    —Time Literary Supplement

    “Edith Wharton, whose deft portraits of the upper class are taken as definitive accounts of the late 19th century, remains one of the most potent names in the literature of New York.”
    —Christopher Gray, The New York Times

    “Wharton was Old New York . . . [her family] belonged to that tiny but powerful New York clan . . . who clung together, intermarried, set the tone and made the rules for society in Manhattan . . . Her New York fiction spans the years from, roughly, 1840 through the turn of the century—from before her birth, in other words, through the Civil War and beyond into the Gilded Age, an era of tremendous transformation in American society.”
    —Charles McGrath, The New York Times

    “Mrs. Wharton had her turf, that almost sepia New York, to be turned over and over again, like setting the plow to the family farm every spring.”
    —Elizabeth Hardwick, The New York Review of Books

    “New York City [is] the setting of Wharton’s finest fictions.”
    —The New York Observer

    “In both stories [“Mrs. Manstey’s View” and “Roman Fever”], and in the intervening 18 that compromise this collection, we find women observing the world from a distance, restrained by the extraordinarily elaborate codes of behaviour that govern well-to-do, turn-of-the-century New York. But also women surprising themselves, and us, with the intensity of their feelings and desires, and the ingenuity with which they’ll circumnavigate in order to express them. Where passions smoulder at length in Wharton’s novels, her stories zero in on the moments of eruption. Always, though, in the most elegantly crystalline and coolly ironic prose.”
    —The Independent

    “Spanning 40 years (1891-1934), these 20 tales of low passions and high society show off Wharton at her forensic and acerbic best. Divorce, adultery, bankruptcy: the misdeeds that undermine gentility in the brownstones of the Manhattan rich alter, but the fear and fragility behind all the charm do not. To rebels, bolters or swindlers, these plush parlours may be prisons; but, after expulsion, they glow “with the glamor of sword-barred Edens.”
    —The Observer (UK)

    “Let’s do this the way Edith Wharton’s publicist would do it: ‘Steeped in Manhattan high society, Edith Wharton has a unique perspective on the lavish parties, debauched bachelors and vicious women of a certain age who prowl the penthouses of Manhattan . . . All true. Except since The New York Stories of Edith Wharton spans the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the indiscretions within are a lot more nuanced than in, say, Gossip Girl.”
    —L Magazine

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