The Edith Wharton Project

After reading Summer and Ethan Frome a few years ago, I fell under the spell of Edith Wharton. As I continued with The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth in which she describes in realistic detail the superficiality and capriciousness of the east coast upper class in intriguing, chaotic and calculated story twists and turns I was drawn into a universe that often amazed me and sometimes aggravated me.

I don’t think any characters in literature have affected me as much as Lily Bart, Undine Spragg, Charity Royall and Ethan Frome. Are there others like them in the vast trove of Wharton’s other novels, novellas and short stories I have yet to read? As an homage to this great American writer and to the characters already discovered and those to come is a pledge to read everything she has written!

The House of Mirth remains my favorite, but with so much more to read, who knows the final verdict?

Novels/Novellas

The Touchstone, 1900

The Valley of Decision, 1902

Sanctuary, 1903

The House of Mirth, 1905

Madame de Treymes, 1906

The Fruit of the Tree, 1907

Ethan Frome, 1911

The Reef, 1912

The Custom of the Country, 1913

The Bunner Sisters 1916

Summer, 1917

The Marne, 1918

The Age of Innocence, 1920 (Pulitzer Prize winner)

The Glimpses of the Moon, 1922

A Son at the Front, 1923

Old New York, 1924

The Mother’s Recompense, 1925

Twilight Sleep, 1927

The Children, 1928

Hudson River Bracketed, 1929

The Gods Arrive, 1932

The Buccaneers, 1938

Fast and Loose, (first novel, written in 1876-1877)

Short Story Collections

The Greater Inclination, 1899

Crucial Instances, 1901

The Descent of Man and Other Stories, 1904

The Hermit and the Wild Woman, 1908

Tales of Men and Ghosts, 1910

Xingu and Other Stories, 1916
Xingu, 1916

Here and Beyond, 1926

Certain People, 1930

Human Nature, 1933

The World Over, 1936

Ghosts, 1937

A Granted Prayer (prev. unpublished)

Nonfiction

The Decoration of Houses, 1897

Italian Villas and Their Gardens, 1904

Italian Backgrounds, 1905

A Motor-Flight Through France, 1908

Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort, 1915

French Ways and Their Meaning, 1919

In Morocco, 1920

The Writing of Fiction, 1925

A Backward Glance, 1934 (autobiography)

Poetry

Verses, 1878

Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse, 1909

Twelve Poems, 1926

As Editor

The Book of the Homeless, 1915

Eternal Passions in English Poetry, 1939