The Age of Innocence / Edith Wharton

Title: The Age of Innocence 

Author: Edith Wharton

Subjects: Fiction

The Age of Innocence makes Wharton the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in the year 1921. The story is set in the 1870s, in upper-class, "Gilded-Age" New York City. It is fundamentally a story which struggles to reconcile the old with the new. 

Ethan Frome / Edith Wharton

Title: Ethan Frome 

Author: Edith Wharton

Subjects: Fiction

The novel is written by Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Edith Wharton. Ethan Frome runs a small farm and cares for his ailing mother. A relatively unhappy woman is sent by family to help. She works very hard cleaning and caring for the home. In his gratitude, Ethan married her soon after his mother's death. But soon after their marriage, she takes to get bed. A remarkably demanding and miserable existence for Ethan. Who now works the farm and cares for his wife.

You and You / Edith Wharton

TO THE AMERICAN PRIVATE IN THE GREAT WAR

Every one of you won the war—

You and you and you—

Each one knowing what it was for,

And what was his job to do.

Every one of you won the war,

Obedient, unwearied, unknown,

Dung in the trenches, drift on the shore,

Dust to the world's end blown;

Every one of you, steady and true,

With the Tide / Edith Wharton

Somewhere I read, in an old book whose name

Is gone from me, I read that when the days

Of a man are counted, and his business done,

There comes up the shore at evening, with the tide,

To the place where he sits, a boat—

And in the boat, from the place where he sits, he sees,

Dim in the dusk, dim and yet so familiar,

The faces of his friends long dead; and knows

They come for him, brought in upon the tide,

To take him where men go at set of day.

The Sonnet / Edith Wharton

PURE form, that like some chalice of old time

Contain'st the liquid of the poet's thought

Within thy curving hollow, gem-enwrought

With interwoven traceries of rhyme,

While o'er thy brim the bubbling fancies climb,

What thing am I, that undismayed have sought

To pour my verse with trembling hand untaught

Into a shape so small yet so sublime?

Botticelli's Madonna in the Louvre / Edith Wharton

WHAT strange presentiment, O Mother, lies

On thy waste brow and sadly-folded lips,

Forefeeling the Light's terrible eclipse

On Calvary, as if love made thee wise,

And thou couldst read in those dear infant eyes

The sorrow that beneath their smiling sleeps,

And guess what bitter tears a mother weeps

When the cross darkens her unclouded skies?

The Long Run / Edith Wharton

The shade of those our days that had no tongue.

I

It was last winter, after a twelve years' absence from New York, that I saw again, at one of the Jim Cumnors' dinners, my old friend Halston Merrick.

The Cumnors' house is one of the few where, even after such a lapse of time, one can be sure of finding familiar faces and picking up old threads; where for a moment one can abandon one's self to the illusion that New York humanity is a shade less unstable than its bricks and mortar. And that evening in particular I remember feeling that there could be no pleasanter way of re-entering the confused and careless world to which I was returning than through the quiet softly-lit diningroom in which Mrs. Cumnor, with a characteristic sense of my needing to be broken in gradually, had contrived to assemble so many friendly faces.

Coming Home / Edith Wharton

I

The young men of our American Relief Corps are beginning to come back from the front with stories.

There was no time to pick them up during the first months--the whole business was too wild and grim. The horror has not decreased, but nerves and sight are beginning to be disciplined to it. In the earlier days, moreover, such fragments of experience as one got were torn from their setting like bits of flesh scattered by shrapnel. Now things that seemed disjointed are beginning to link themselves together, and the broken bones of history are rising from the battle-fields.

The Choice / Edith Wharton

I

Stilling, that night after dinner, had surpassed himself. He always did, Wrayford reflected, when the small fry from Highfield came to dine. He, Cobham Stilling, who had to find his bearings and keep to his level in the big heedless ironic world of New York, dilated and grew vast in the congenial medium of Highfield. The Red House was the biggest house of the Highfield summer colony, and Cobham Stilling was its biggest man. No one else within a radius of a hundred miles (on a conservative estimate) had as many horses, as many greenhouses, as many servants, and assuredly no one else had three motors and a motor-boat for the lake.

Autres Temps / Edith Wharton

I

Mrs. Lidcote, as the huge menacing mass of New York defined itself far off across the waters, shrank back into her corner of the deck and sat listening with a kind of unreasoning terror to the steady onward drive of the screws.

She had set out on the voyage quietly enough,--in what she called her "reasonable" mood,--but the week at sea had given her too much time to think of things and had left her too long alone with the past.

The Letters / Edith Wharton

I

UP the long hill from the station at St.-Cloud, Lizzie West climbed

in the cold spring sunshine. As she breasted the incline, she

noticed the first waves of wistaria over courtyard railings and the

high lights of new foliage against the walls of ivy-matted gardens;

and she thought again, as she had thought a hundred times

before, that she had never seen so beautiful a spring.

The Blond Beast / Edith Wharton

I

IT had been almost too easy--that was young Millner's first feeling,

as he stood again on the Spence door-step, the great moment of his

interview behind him, and Fifth Avenue rolling its grimy Pactolus at

his feet.

Halting there in the winter light, with the clang of the ponderous

vestibule doors in his ears, and his eyes carried down the

perspective of the packed interminable thoroughfare, he even dared

to remember Rastignac's apostrophe to Paris, and to hazard

recklessly under his small fair moustache: "Who knows?"

The Eyes / Edith Wharton

I

WE had been put in the mood for ghosts, that evening, after an

excellent dinner at our old friend Culwin's, by a tale of Fred

Murchard's--the narrative of a strange personal visitation.

Seen through the haze of our cigars, and by the drowsy gleam of a

coal fire, Culwin's library, with its oak walls and dark old

bindings, made a good setting for such evocations; and ghostly

experiences at first hand being, after Murchard's brilliant opening,

the only kind acceptable to us, we proceeded to take stock of our

group and tax each member for a contribution. There were eight of

us, and seven contrived, in a manner more or less adequate, to

fulfil the condition imposed.

The Triumph Of Night / Edith Wharton

I

It was clear that the sleigh from Weymore had not come; and the shivering young traveller from Boston, who had counted on jumping into it when he left the train at Northridge Junction, found himself standing alone on the open platform, exposed to the full assault of night-fall and winter.

The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape. Dark, searching and sword-like, it alternately muffled and harried its victim, like a bull-fighter now whirling his cloak and now planting his darts. This analogy brought home to the young man the fact that he himself had no cloak, and that the overcoat in which he had faced the relatively temperate air of Boston seemed no thicker than a sheet of paper on the bleak heights of Northridge.

The Legend / Edith Wharton

I

ARTHUR BERNALD could never afterward recall just when the first

conjecture flashed on him: oddly enough, there was no record of it

in the agitated jottings of his diary. But, as it seemed to him in

retrospect, he had always felt that the queer man at the Wades' must

be John Pellerin, if only for the negative reason that he couldn't

imaginably be any one else. It was impossible, in the confused

pattern of the century's intellectual life, to fit the stranger in

anywhere, save in the big gap which, some five and twenty years

earlier, had been left by Pellerin's unaccountable disappearance;

and conversely, such a man as the Wades' visitor couldn't have lived

for sixty years without filling, somewhere in space, a nearly

equivalent void.

Full Circle / Edith Wharton

I

GEOFFREY BETTON woke rather late--so late that the winter sunlight

sliding across his warm red carpet struck his eyes as he turned on

the pillow.

Strett, the valet, had been in, drawn the bath in the adjoining

dressing-room, placed the crystal and silver cigarette-box at his

side, put a match to the fire, and thrown open the windows to the

bright morning air. It brought in, on the glitter of sun, all the

shrill crisp morning noises--those piercing notes of the American

thoroughfare that seem to take a sharper vibration from the

clearness of the medium through which they pass.

The Debt / Edith Wharton

I

YOU remember--it's not so long ago--the talk there was about

Dredge's "Arrival of the Fittest"? The talk has subsided, but the

book of course remains: stands up, in fact, as the tallest thing of

its kind since--well, I'd almost said since "The Origin of Species."

The Daunt Diana / Edith Wharton

I

"WHAT'S become of the Daunt Diana? You mean to say you never heard

the sequel?"

Ringham Finney threw himself back into his chair with the smile of

the collector who has a good thing to show. He knew he had a good

listener, at any rate. I don't think much of Ringham's snuff-boxes,

but his anecdotes are usually worth while. He's a psychologist

astray among _bibelots_, and the best bits he brings back from his

raids on Christie's and the Hotel Drouot are the fragments of human

nature he picks up on those historic battle-fields. If his _flair_

in enamel had been half as good we should have heard of the Finney

collection by this time.

His Father's Son / Edith Wharton

I

AFTER his wife's death Mason Grew took the momentous step of selling

out his business and moving from Wingfield, Connecticut, to

Brooklyn.

For years he had secretly nursed the hope of such a change, but had

never dared to suggest it to Mrs. Grew, a woman of immutable habits.

Mr. Grew himself was attached to Wingfield, where he had grown up,

prospered, and become what the local press described as "prominent."

He was attached to his ugly brick house with sandstone trimmings and

a cast-iron area-railing neatly sanded to match; to the similar row

of houses across the street, the "trolley" wires forming a kind of

aerial pathway between, and the sprawling vista closed by the

steeple of the church which he and his wife had always attended, and

where their only child had been baptized.

The Best Man / Edith Wharton

I

DUSK had fallen, and the circle of light shed by the lamp of

Governor Mornway's writing-table just rescued from the surrounding

dimness his own imposing bulk, thrown back in a deep chair in the

lounging attitude habitual to him at that hour.