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The New York Stories of Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton
#UB8572
Paperback, 452 pages; 2007
$9.90
To the girls in Miss Talcott's set, the attentions of a clever man who had to work for his living had the zest of a forbidden pleasure; but to marry such a man would be as unpardonable as to have one's carriage seen at the door of a cheap dress-maker.
Born and raised in Manhattan, Edith Wharton wrote of turn-of-the-last- century New York society with a native's insight. These twenty stories—ordered chronologically from "Mrs. Manstey's View," published in 1891, to the renowned "Roman Fever," published in 1934—explore artists' circles and cotillion balls, failing marriages and passionate affairs, the follies of the young and the yearnings of the elderly. Wharton's New York—of restrained manners with often-scandalous undercurrents—looms large in each of these stories; it's as skillfully rendered as her memorable characters.
(AG)
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