[]
- Published: 15 September 1994
- ISBN: 9781857151985
- Imprint: Everyman
- Format: Hardback
- Pages: 414
- RRP: $45.00
Categories:
The Custom of the Country
(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Formats & editions
THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY is probably Edith Wharton's most savage satire on the manners of late nineteenth-century America. It is the story of the exquisitely beautiful but brutally ambitious Undine Spragg who marries her way into the high aristocracy of Europe, abandoning several husbands along the way. This novel, which has scences of comedy and even farce, is a commentary on both certain aspects of feminisim and certain aspects of capitalism in Edith Wharton's time. The novel makes a fitting companion to THE AGE OF INNOCENCE and THE HOUSE OF MIRTH and shows Wharton to be one of the greatest American novelists.
- Published: 15 September 1994
- ISBN: 9781857151985
- Imprint: Everyman
- Format: Hardback
- Pages: 414
- RRP: $45.00
Categories:
Other books in the series
The New Penguin Book Of American Short Stories, From Washington Irving To Lydia Davis
Edgar Allan Poe And Edith Wharton And Ernest Hemingway And Lydia Davis And Mark Twain And Washington Irving
The Voyage of the Beagle
Charles Darwin
The Black Tulip
Alexandre Dumas
The Lady of the Camellias
Alexandre Dumas fils
Faust, Part I
Goethe
Faust, Part II
Goethe
Selected Poetry
Goethe Johann Wolfgang Von
The Nibelungenlied
Hatto A T
Volpone and Other Plays
Ben Jonson
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
Georges Perec
Venus in Furs
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Man and Superman
George Bernard Shaw
Military Dispatches
The Duke Of Wellington
Sketches from a Hunter's Album
Ivan Turgenev
The Prelude
William Wordsworth
About the author
The upper stratum of New York society into which Edith Wharton was born in 1862 provided her with an abundance of material as a novelist but did not encourage her growth as an artist. Educated by tutors and governesses, she was raised for only one career: marriage. But her marriage, in 1885, to Edward Wharton was an emotional disappointment, if not a disaster. She suffered the first of a series of nervous breakdowns in 1894. In spite of the strain of her marriage, or perhaps because of it, she began to write fiction and published her first story in 1889.
Her first published book was a guide to interior decorating, but this was followed by several novels and story collections. They were written while the Whartons lived in Newport and New York, traveled in Europe, and built their grand home, the Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts. In Europe, she met Henry James, who became her good friend, traveling companion, and the sternest but most careful critic of her fiction. The House of Mirth (1905) was both a resounding critical success and a bestseller, as was Ethan Frome (1911). In 1913 the Whartons were divorced, and Edith took up permanent residence in France.
Her subject, however, remained America, especially the moneyed New York of her youth. Her great satiric novel, The Custom of the Country was published in 1913 and The Age of Innocence won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1921.
In her later years, she enjoyed the admiration of a new generation of writers, including Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In all, she wrote some 30 books, including an autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934). She died at her villa near Paris in 1937.