Edith Wharton

Kollektsija elegantnoj klassiki - eto pronzitelnaja nezhnost, eto sad, kotoryj shagnul k vam na knizhnuju polku. Koreshki kollektsii sobirajut na polke tsvetochnyj ornament. V komplekt voshli knigi "Gospozha Bovari", "Gordost i predubezhdenie", "Noch nezhna", "Epokha nevinnosti", "Alaja bukva", "Chuvstvo i chuvstvitelnost" - shest klassicheskikh zhenskikh romanov, kotorye prijatno chitat i prijatno darit.

The Valley of Decision is set in eighteenth-century Italy. Here Wharton pits folks inspired by the antireligious thoughts of Rousseau and Voltaire against the orthodox leaders of the day. Soon enough Wharton's night-constant theme comes through: this, like most other violations of personal convention, will come at a terrible cost.

Edith Wharton's novels of manners seem to grow in stature as time passes. Here she draws a beautiful social climber, Undine Sprague, who is a monster of selfishness and honestly doesn't know it. Although the worlds she wants to conquer have vanished, Undine herself is amazingly recognizable. She marries well above herself twice and both times fails to recognize her husbands' strengths of character or the weakness of her own, and it is they, not she, who pay the price.

Set against the frozen waste of a harsh New England winter, Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome is a tale of despair, forbidden emotions, and sexual tensions, published with an introduction and notes by Elizabeth Ammons in Penguin Classics. Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeenie. But when Zeenie's vivacious cousin enters their household as a 'hired girl', Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent. In one of American fiction's finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio toward their tragic destinies. Different in both tone and theme from Wharton's other works, Ethan Frome has become perhaps her most enduring and most widely read novel. Edith Wharton (1862-1937), born Edith Newbold Jones, was a member of a distinguished New York family said to be the basis for the idiom 'keeping up with the Joneses'. During her life she published more than forty volumes, including novels, stories, verse, essays, travel books and memoirs; for years she published poetry and short stories in magazines, but the book that made Wharton famous was The House of Mirth (1905), which established her both as a writer of distinction and popular appeal. In 1920, Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature with her novel The Age of Innocence. If you enjoyed Ethan Frome, you might like Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, also available in Penguin Classics.

A girl came out of lawyer Royall's house at the end of the one street of North Dormer and stood on the doorstep.

She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision.'Susy Branch learned early that to thrive without money in a society driven by wealth one must dissemble, flatter and sometimes even drop one's moral guard in order to share a little of one's host's luxury and leisure. Nick Lansing has also learned and wearied of the same lesson. Despite the foolishness of their romance - for each should be seeking a partner of means - they decide to marry. By combining their skills they should be able to enjoy a year's invitations and happiness before they need face reality. But love makes its own exacting demands and its costs can also be high . . .

In these powerful and elegant tales, Edith Wharton evokes moods of disquiet and darkness within her own era. In icy newEngland a fearsome double foreshadowsthe fate of a rich young man; a married farmer is bewitched by a dead girl; a ghostly bell saves a woman's reputation. Brittany conjures ancient cruelties, Dorset witnesses a retrospective haunting and a New York club cushions an elderly aesthete as he tells of the ghastly eyes haunting his nights.

Naïve young writer Vance Weston, convalescing by the Hudson River, meets Halo Spear and is fired by her passion for literature. They meet again, much later, and, with her rich, cultivated husband, Lewis Tarrant, she introduces him to New York's literary and artistic circles. But an impulsive marriage has brought Vance poverty and unwelcome responsibilities which inhibit his writing until one summer, Halo inspires him to write the novel which makes his name. The conflict between New York sophistication and Midwestern naivety leads to painful dilemmas, involving both couples in perplexity and loss.

John Amherst, clever, idealistic and poor, is assistant manager of a cotton mill and has the makings of a working-class leader. While visiting a worker in hospital he encounters a young nurse, Justine, compassionate and principled, a woman who shares his dreams and aims. But Amherst is fatally distracted when he meets Bessy. A widow of great wealth, Bessy is charming, beautiful - and the new owner of the mill. The lives of all three become strangely interwoven as Amherst is forced to choose between sense and sentiment, between his care for the working classes and his infatuation with Bessy - a woman made for passion, but not for its aftermath.

Halo Tarrant, abandoning her failed marriage, elopes to Europe with the brilliant young writer, Vance Weston. As they travel around, her only wish is to serve him and his genius. But, ignoring the pain her amiguous status brings, Vance takes her loving attentions for granted and rejects the critical advice he had formerly welcomed. This distinguished novel, companion piece to HUDSON RIVER BRACKETED, first published in 1932, shows a writer's struggle for integrity and maturity, and the difficulties which, even in the most idealistic relationship, beset men and women in a changing but hypocritical moral climate.