The Custom of the Country

Praise for Edith Wharton and Custom of the Country

“For my money, no literary antiheroine can best Undine… Wharton’s portrait of [her] is so acute that it frequently flickers across time into the contemporary.”—Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

“Prescient… In this new Gilded Age, when the disparities between rich and poor are again, and disastrously, as great as they were in Wharton’s time, we could do with such a novelist, a cultural anthropologist who might hold up a mirror to our failings and our future, with eagle-eyed clarity and a small measure of compassion.”—Claire Messud, The New York Times Style Magazine

“There are only three or four American novelists who can be thought of as ‘major,’ and Edith Wharton is one.”—Gore Vidal

“Wharton is an amusingly ruthless observer of the manners and mores of the wealthy.”—Jay McInerney, The Week

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was an American novelist—the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence in 1921—as well as a short story writer, playwright, designer, reporter, and poet. Her other works include Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, and Roman Fever and Other Stories. Born into one of New York’s elite families, she drew upon her knowledge of upper-class aristocracy to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age.

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