Edith Wharton's Lenox

Edith Wharton's Lenox PDF Author: Cornelia Brooke Gilder
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1467135178
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
In 1900, Edith Wharton burst into the settled summer colony of Lenox. An aspiring novelist in her thirties, she was already a ferocious aesthete and intellect. She and her husband, Teddy, planned a defiantly classical villa, and she became a bestselling author with The House of Mirth in 1905. As a hostess, designer, gardener and writer, Wharton set high standards that delighted many, including Ambassador Joseph Choate and sculptor Daniel Chester French. But her perceptive and sometimes indiscreet pen also alienated potent figures like Emily Vanderbilt Sloane and Georgiana Welles Sargent. Author Cornelia Brooke Gilder gives an insider's glimpse of the community's reaction to this disruptive star during her tumultuous Lenox decade.

Edith Wharton's Lenox

Edith Wharton's Lenox PDF Author: Cornelia Brooke Gilder
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1467135178
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
In 1900, Edith Wharton burst into the settled summer colony of Lenox. An aspiring novelist in her thirties, she was already a ferocious aesthete and intellect. She and her husband, Teddy, planned a defiantly classical villa, and she became a bestselling author with The House of Mirth in 1905. As a hostess, designer, gardener and writer, Wharton set high standards that delighted many, including Ambassador Joseph Choate and sculptor Daniel Chester French. But her perceptive and sometimes indiscreet pen also alienated potent figures like Emily Vanderbilt Sloane and Georgiana Welles Sargent. Author Cornelia Brooke Gilder gives an insider's glimpse of the community's reaction to this disruptive star during her tumultuous Lenox decade.

Edith Wharton at Home

Edith Wharton at Home PDF Author: Richard Guy Wilson
Publisher: The Monacelli Press, LLC
ISBN: 1580933289
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
The Mount, Edith Wharton’s country place in the Berkshires, is truly an autobiographical house. There Wharton wrote some of her best-known and successful novels, including Ethan Frome and House of Mirth. The house itself, completed in 1902, embodies principles set forth in Wharton's famous book The Decoration of Houses, and the surrounding landscape displays her deep knowledge of Italian gardens. Wandering the grounds of this historic home, one can see the influence of Wharton’s inimitable spirit in its architecture and design, just as one can sense the Mount’s impact on the extraordinary life of Edith Wharton herself. The Mount sits in the rolling landscape of the Berkshire Hills, with views overlooking Laurel Lake and all the way out to the mountains. At the turn of the century, Lenox and Stockbridge were thriving summer resort communities, home to Vanderbilts, Sloanes, and other prominent families of the Gilded Age. At once a leader and a recorder of this glamorous society, Edith Wharton stands at the pinnacle of turn of the twentieth-century American literature and social history. The Mount was crucial to her success, and the story of her life there is filled with gatherings of literary figures and artists. Edith Wharton at Home presents Wharton’s life at The Mount in vivid detail with authoritative text by Richard Guy Wilson and archival images, as well as new color photography of the restoration of The Mount and its spectacular gardens. "The Mount was to give me country cares and joys, long happy rides and drives through the wooded lanes of that loveliest region, the companionship of dear friends, and the freedom from trivial obligations, which was necessary if I was to go on with my writing. The Mount was my first real home . . . its blessed influence still lives in me." —Edith Wharton, 1934

The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton

The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton PDF Author: Edith Wharton
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 144748052X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
This haunting anthology is an enthralling collection of chilling tales infused with Edith Wharton's masterful exploration of human psychology and the hidden recesses of the human heart. As a keen observer of human nature, Wharton weaves her ghostly tales with remarkable subtlety and psychological depth. Her ghosts are not mere apparitions but poignant manifestations of guilt, regret, and unrequited desires. Through her elegant prose and sharp wit, Wharton delves into the darkest corners of the human psyche, exploring themes of forbidden passions, societal constraints, and the persistent power of the past. Each setting serves as the backdrop for chilling encounters with the spectral realm. The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton is a testament to Wharton's versatility as a writer. The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, she imbues her tales with atmospheric tension, challenging the reader to question what lies beyond our mortal existence.

Edith Wharton in France

Edith Wharton in France PDF Author: Claudine Lesage
Publisher: Easton Studio Press LLC
ISBN: 1632260948
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Using previously unexamined and untranslated French sources, Claudine Lesage has illuminated the intertwined characters and important relationships of Wharton’s French life. The bulk of the new material comes from the daybooks of Paul and Minnie Bourget; Wharton’s letters (in French) to Léon Bélugou; and the author’s personal research in Hyères. Highlights include letters used in Wharton’s divorce proceedings and a mysterious autobiographical essay written by Wharton’s lover Morton Fullerton. Most significantly, Wharton’s friendship with Bélugou, absent from most Wharton biographies, is, for the first time, fully recounted through their extensive intimate correspondence. The year 1907 was a milestone in Edith Wharton’s life and work. Unlike Joseph Conrad, who had, virtually overnight, forsaken his native land for an adopted one, Mrs. Wharton’s transition required several years of shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic. At first, all of Europe beckoned to her, but, from 1907 on, Wharton would claim Paris and, after the war, the French countryside as her home. All the while, her work, long regarded as being exclusively American, followed a similar trajectory.

A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses

A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses PDF Author: Anne Trubek
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812205812
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
There are many ways to show our devotion to an author besides reading his or her works. Graves make for popular pilgrimage sites, but far more popular are writers' house museums. What is it we hope to accomplish by trekking to the home of a dead author? We may go in search of the point of inspiration, eager to stand on the very spot where our favorite literary characters first came to life—and find ourselves instead in the house where the author himself was conceived, or where she drew her last breath. Perhaps it is a place through which our writer passed only briefly, or maybe it really was a longtime home—now thoroughly remade as a decorator's show-house. In A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses Anne Trubek takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of a goodly number of house museums across the nation. In Key West she visits the shamelessly ersatz shrine to a hard-living Ernest Hemingway, while meditating on his lost Cuban farm and the sterile Idaho house in which he committed suicide. In Hannibal, Missouri, she walks the fuzzy line between fact and fiction, as she visits the home of the young Samuel Clemens—and the purported haunts of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Injun' Joe. She hits literary pay-dirt in Concord, Massachusetts, the nineteenth-century mecca that gave home to Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau—and yet could not accommodate a surprisingly complex Louisa May Alcott. She takes us along the trail of residences that Edgar Allan Poe left behind in the wake of his many failures and to the burned-out shell of a California house with which Jack London staked his claim on posterity. In Dayton, Ohio, a charismatic guide brings Paul Laurence Dunbar to compelling life for those few visitors willing to listen; in Cleveland, Trubek finds a moving remembrance of Charles Chesnutt in a house that no longer stands. Why is it that we visit writers' houses? Although admittedly skeptical about the stories these buildings tell us about their former inhabitants, Anne Trubek carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary and finds in each some truth about literature, history, and contemporary America.

Things That Grow

Things That Grow PDF Author: Meredith Goldstein
Publisher: HMH Books For Young Readers
ISBN: 1328770109
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
After her grandmother dies, a girl travels to different gardens to scatter her ashes, learning about life and love along the way. From Love Letters advice columnist and podcast host Meredith Goldstein, this emotionally resonant novel with a touch of humor is perfect for fans of Robin Benway and Jenna Evans Welch. When Lori's Dorothy Parker-loving grandmother dies, Lori's world is turned upside down. Grandma Sheryl was everything to Lori--and not just because Sheryl raised Lori when Lori's mom got a job out of town. Now Lori's mom is insisting on moving her away from her beloved Boston right before senior year. Desperate to stay for as long as possible, Lori insists on honoring her grandmother's last request before she moves: to scatter Sheryl's ashes near things that grow. Along with her uncle Seth and Chris, best friend and love-of-her-life crush, Lori sets off on a road trip to visit her grandmother's favorite gardens. Dodging forest bathers, scandalized volunteers, and angry homeowners, they come to terms with the shape of life after Grandma Sheryl. Saying goodbye isn't easy, but Lori might just find a way to move forward surrounded by the people she loves.

Italian Backgrounds

Italian Backgrounds PDF Author: Edith Wharton
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
ISBN: 1465616292
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
For ten days we had not known what ailed us. We had fled from the August heat and crowd of the Vorderrheinthal to the posting-inn below the Splügen pass; and here fortune had given us all the midsummer tourist can hope for—solitude, cool air and fine scenery. A dozen times a day we counted our mercies, but still privately felt them to be insufficient. As we walked through the larch-groves beside the Rhine, or climbed the grassy heights above the valley, we were oppressed by the didactic quality of our surroundings—by the aggressive salubrity and repose of this bergerie de Florian. We seemed to be living in the landscape of a sanatorium prospectus. It was all pleasant enough, according to Schopenhauer’s definition of pleasure. We had none of the things we did not want; but then we did not particularly want any of the things we had. We had fancied we did till we got them; and as we had to own that they did their part in fulfilling our anticipations, we were driven to conclude that the fault was in ourselves. Then suddenly we found out what was wrong. Splügen was charming, but it was too near Italy. One can forgive a place three thousand miles from Italy for not being Italian; but that a village on the very border should remain stolidly, immovably Swiss was a constant source of exasperation. Even the landscape had neglected its opportunities. A few miles off it became the accomplice of man’s most exquisite imaginings; but here we could see in it only endless material for Swiss clocks and fodder. The trouble began with our watching the diligences. Every evening we saw one toiling up the pass from Chiavenna, with dusty horses and perspiring passengers. How we pitied those passengers! We walked among them puffed up with all the good air in our lungs. We felt fresh and cool and enviable, and moralized on the plaintive lot of those whose scant holidays compelled them to visit Italy in August. But already the poison was at work. We pictured what our less fortunate brothers had seen till we began to wonder if, after all, they were less fortunate. At least they had been there; and what drawbacks could qualify that fact? Was it better to be cool and look at a water-fall, or to be hot and look at Saint Mark’s? Was it better to walk on gentians or on mosaic, to smell fir-needles or incense? Was it, in short, ever well to be elsewhere when one might be in Italy?

Ghosts

Ghosts PDF Author: Edith Wharton
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681375729
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
An elegantly hair-raising collection of Edith Wharton's ghost stories, selected and with a preface written by the author herself. No history of the American uncanny tale would be complete without mention of Edith Wharton, yet many of Wharton’s most dedicated admirers are unaware that she was a master of the form. In fact, one of Wharton’s final literary acts was assembling Ghosts, a personal selection of her most chilling stories, written between 1902 and 1937. In “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” the earliest tale included here, a servant’s dedication to her mistress continues from beyond the grave, and in “All Souls,” the last story Wharton wrote, an elderly woman treads the permeable line between life and the hereafter. In all her writing, Wharton’s great gift was to mercilessly illuminate the motives of men and women, and her ghost stories never stray far from the preoccupations of the living, using the supernatural to investigate such worldly matters as violence within marriage, the horrors of aging, the rot at the root of new fortunes, the darkness that stares back from the abyss of one’s own soul. These are stories to “send a cold shiver down one’s spine,” not to terrify, and as Wharton explains in her preface, her goal in writing them was to counter “the hard grind of modern speeding-up” by preserving that ineffable space of “silence and continuity,” which is not merely the prerogative of humanity but—“in the fun of the shudder”—its delight. Contents All Souls’ The Eyes Afterward The Lady’s Maid’s Bell Kerfol The Triumph of Night Miss Mary Pask Bewitched Mr. Jones Pomegranate Seed A Bottle of Perrier

The Buccaneers

The Buccaneers PDF Author: Edith Wharton
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 144062139X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Edith Wharton's spellbinding final novel tells a story of love in the gilded age that crosses the boundaries of society—soon to be an original series on AppleTV+! “Brave, lively, engaging...a fairy-tale novel, miraculouly returned to life.”—The New York Times Book Review Set in the 1870s, the same period as Wharton's The Age of Innocence, The Buccaneers is about five wealthy American girls denied entry into New York Society because their parents' money is too new. At the suggestion of their clever governess, the girls sail to London, where they marry lords, earls, and dukes who find their beauty charming—and their wealth extremely useful. After Wharton's death in 1937, The Christian Science Monitor said, "If it could have been completed, The Buccaneers would doubtless stand among the richest and most sophisticated of Wharton's novels." Now, with wit and imagination, Marion Mainwaring has finished the story, taking her cue from Wharton's own synopsis. It is a novel any Wharton fan will celebrate and any romantic reader will love. This is the richly engaging story of Nan St. George and Guy Thwarte, an American heiress and an English aristocrat, whose love breaks the rules of both their societies.

The Decoration of Houses

The Decoration of Houses PDF Author: Edith Wharton
Publisher: Charles Scribner
ISBN:
Category : Interior decoration
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description