"With this volume (a companion to Collected Stories 1911-1937), The Library of America presents the finest of Wharton's achievement in short fiction, drawn from the more than eighty stories she published over the course of her career. Here, in settings familiar and exotic, are all of Wharton's characteristic qualities and themes: her candid exploration of relations between the sexes; her satire, sometimes gentle, sometimes despairing, of social class...

Set in the bleak mansions of England, America, and Normandy, eleven classic tales depict the terrors of persons confronted by unearthly entities.

Four young American girls journey from America to England in search of romance and adventure in this exquisite production of Edith Wharton's final book.

Headstrong, beautiful Tina has nothing but disdain for her Aunt Charlotte. Tina does not think that her aunt has any understanding of a young girls heart, but Charlotte knows more than Tina thinks. For unloved, unlovable Aunt Charlotte is really Tina's mother, whose romance with a Civil War soldier who didn't return resulted in Tina's birth.

In New York City in the 1870s, a rigid social code governs how people talk, walk, meet, part, dine, earn their livings, fall in love, and marry. Not a word of the code is written down anywhere, but these people have been studying it since they were born. In this elegant milieu, marriages, like treaties between nations, exist to provide for the orderly transmission of wealth; scions of old and rich families understand that their personal desires have...

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
Newland Archer saw little to envy in the marriages of his friends, yet he prided himself that in May Welland he had found the companion of his needs—tender and impressionable, with equal purity of mind and manners. The engagement was announced discreetly, but all of New York society was soon privy to this most perfect match, a union of families and circumstances cemented...