Product details
- ISBN 9781841593128
- Weight: 522g
- Dimensions: 131 x 210mm
- Publication Date: 22 Feb 2008
- Publisher: Everyman
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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These brilliantly wrought, tragic novellas explore the repressed emotions and destructive passions of working-cass people far removed from the social milieu usually inhabited by Edith Wharton's characters.
Ethan Frome is one of Wharton's most famous works; it is a tightly constructed and almost unbearably heartbreaking story of forbidden love in a snowbound New England village. Summer, also set in rural New England, is often considered a companion to Ethan Frome - Wharton herself called it 'the hot Ethan' - in its portrayal of a young woman's sexual and social awakening. Bunner Sisters takes place in the narrow, dusty streets of late-nineteenth-century New York, where the constrained but peaceful lives of two spinster shopkeepers are shattered when they meet a man who becomes the unworthy focus of all their pent-up hopes.
All three of these novellas feature realistic and haunting characters as vivid as any Wharton ever conjured, and together they provide a superb introduction to the shorter fiction of one of America's greatest writers.
Edith Wharton was born in New York City on January 24, 1862. Edith married Teddy Wharton, who was 12 years older. They lived a life of relative ease with homes in New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Edith became a prolific writer and produced over 40 books in 40 years.
Edith divorced Teddy in 1912, having no immediate heirs, and never married again. She was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University, and a full membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her novels became so popular that Ms. Wharton was able to live comfortably on her earnings the rest of her life. Edith continued to write until a stroke took her life in August 1937.
