Penned in 1899 by Edith Wharton, this short story features the proper Mrs. Carstyle, her husband Mr. Carstyle, and their daughter Irene who are all are taken with their guest and an eligible bachelor named Vibart. Narrator John Chancer is a film and television actor with professional readings of many audiobooks to his credit.

Wharton’s antiwar masterpiece probes the devastation of World War I on the home front.

Inspired by a young man Edith Wharton met during her war relief work in France, A Son at the Front opens in Paris on July 30, 1914, as Europe totters on the brink of war. Expatriate American painter John Campton–whose only son, George, having been born in Paris, must report for duty in the French army–struggles to keep his son away from the front while grappling with the moral implications of his actions.

Interweaving her own experiences of the Great War with themes of parental and filial love, art and self-sacrifice, national loyalties and class privilege, A Son at the Front is a poignant meditation on art and possession, fidelity and responsibility in which Wharton tells an intimate and captivating story of war behind the lines.

Prudence Rutledge is terrified. She sits in her isolated New England farmhouse, fearing that her husband is stepping out on her. Seems like Saul has been seen down at the pond, meeting up with a young woman named Ora Brand. Trouble is, Ora Brand has been dead for over a year.

In her short story Bewitched, Edith Wharton lures you into the ghostly heart of New England, circa 1926. It’s a time when ghosts roam the barren hills, and horror stalks the lonely inhabitants with devastating results.

This new adaptation of Bewitched is underscored with music and sound effects that plunge you deeper into those bewitched New England souls.

Written in 1892 but not published until 1916, this beautifully crafted story features two sisters who keep a shop in a shabby part of New York City. When Ann Eliza, the eldest sister, gifts Evelina with a clock on her birthday, events are set in motion which will forever change not only their relationship but the very fabric of their world.

Ethan Frome, a poor, downtrodden New England farmer, is trapped in a loveless marriage to his invalid wife, Zeena. His ambition and intelligence are oppressed by Zeena’s cold, conniving character. When Zeena’s young cousin Mattie arrives to help care for her, Ethan is immediately taken by Mattie’s warm, vivacious personality. They fall desperately in love as he realizes how much is missing from his life and marriage. Tragically, their love is doomed by Zeena’s ever-lurking presence and by the social conventions of the day. Ethan remains torn between his sense of obligation and his urge to satisfy his heart’s desire up to the suspenseful and unanticipated conclusion.
Perhaps reflective of Wharton’s own loveless marriage, this sophisticated, star-crossed love story vividly depicts her abhorrence of society’s relentless standards of loyalty. Ethan Frome is one of Wharton’s most popular and best-known works.

Often regarded as Edith Wharton’s finest achievement,Ethan Fromecontrasts sharply with her usual ironic contemplation of fashionable New York society. Set in the bleak winter landscape of New England farmlands, this keenly-etched portrait of the simple inhabitants of a nineteenth-century village is a masterpiece of literary realism.

Ethan is a patient, rough-hewn man tormented by a passionate love for his sickly wife’s young cousin, Mattie, who has come to offer her domestic services. Restricted by the bonds of marriage–however loveless it may be–and the fear of public condemnation, Ethan’s desperate quest for happiness leads ultimately to pain and despair.

Ethan’s story, with its tragic implications of what might have been, has held irresistible fascination for readers for over a century. The tale of a decent man’s fall brought on by his finest feelings is a haunting study of the human conflict between desire and duty.

Burdened by poverty and spiritually dulled by a loveless marriage to Zeena, his older and ailing wife, Ethan Frome is emotionally stirred by the arrival of their youthful cousin, Mattie Silver, who becomes employed as household help. Mattie’s presence not only brightens a gloomy house but also stirs long-dormant feelings in Ethan. However, their growing love for each other is discovered by the embittered Zeena, and it presages an ending to the tale that is both shocking and savagely ironic.

The first of four novellas, together called Old New York, set in the mid-1800s.

Lewis Raycie is sent on a grand tour of Europe with instructions from his father to acquire a collection of accepted Art Works. His father’s dream is to own a Raphael; instead, Lewis returns with a priceless collection of Renaissance masterpieces by Piero della Francesca and others of equal stature. They are, however, unknown in America.

His father is appalled and disinherits him. His family ridicules him. But it is only after Lewis dies that the magnificent collection gets the recognition it really deserves.

A Voices in the Wind Audio Theatre production

This collection features four spine-tingling horror stories to entice your imagination, including “Bewitched” by Edith Wharton, “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Body Snatcher” by Robert Louis Stevenson, and “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe. Each story is chillingly enhanced by music and sound effects.

Four Classic Horror Stories is best listened to by candlelight at the midnight hour, when the wind howls ’round the house and ghosts whisper from the dark shadows!

“To step on board a steamer in a Spanish port, and three hours later to land in a country without a guidebook, is a sensation to rouse the hunger of the most replete sightseer. The sensation is attainable by any one who will take the trouble to row out into the harbor of Algeciras and scramble onto a little black boat headed across the straits.”

A classic of travel writing, In Morocco is Edith Wharton’s remarkable account of her journey to that country during World War I. With her characteristic sense of adventure, Wharton set out to explore Morocco and its people, traveling by military jeep to Rabat, Moulay Idriss, Fez, and Marrakech, from the Atlantic coast to the high Atlas. Along the way, she witnessed religious ceremonies and ritual dances, visited the opulent palaces of the sultan, and was admitted to the mysterious world of his harem.

Madame de Treymes follows the fortunes of two innocents abroad: Fanny Frisbee of New York, unhappily married to the dissolute Marquis de Malrive, scion of a great house of the Faubourg St. Germain; and John Durham, her childhood friend, who arrives in Paris intent on persuading Fanny to divorce her husband and marry him instead. A scintillating picture of American and French society at the turn of the century, it is also a subtle investigation of the clash of cultures and the role of women in the social hierarchy.

This edition also includes the novellas Sanctuary and Bunner Sisters, two short works rich in the social satire and cunning insight that characterized Wharton’s acclaimed novels The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.

Spanning four decades in the mid-nineteenth century, the interconnected novellas of Old New York lay out in vivid detail the complex and inscrutable codes, customs, and taboos of New York society in classic Wharton style.

In False Dawn (1840s), Mr. Halston Raycie sends his son Lewis to Europe to buy art, as Mr. Raycie aims to ascend to the upper crust of society by means of a well-respected art collection. But when Lewis returns from Europe with daring pieces by artists unknown to the New York socialites and tastemakers, his appalled father disinherits him, only to discover, too late, the wisdom of his son’s intuition.

The Old Maid (1850s), the best known of the four novellas, follows the life of Tina, a young woman caught between the mother who adopted her–the beautiful, upstanding Delia–and her true mother, her plain, unmarried “aunt” Charlotte, who gave Tina up to provide her with a socially acceptable life. The three women live quietly together until Tina’s wedding day, when Delia’s and Charlotte’s hidden jealousies rush to the surface.

Then in The Spark (1860s), Mr. Hayley Delane recounts how his life has turned out since he was wounded in the Civil War, where, during his rehabilitation, he chances to meet a certain American poet whose memory stays with him all his life.

And finally in New Year’s Day (1870s), Mrs. Lizzie Hazeldean’s suspected affair with the unmarried Henry Prest is the center of scandal and gossip in the city, but the true nature of the relationship is not what it may seem.

One of America’s first novels to deal frankly with a young woman’s sexual awakening, Summer shocked readers with its forthright exploration of desire and sexuality when it was first published in 1917. Set in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, it tells the story of Charity Royall, a young New England woman of humble origins who meets and falls in love with the worldly Lucius Harney, an architect from the city. In evocative and descriptive prose, Edith Wharton conveys the ecstasy of Charity’s first experience in sexual and romantic love, and pulls her heroine through the throes of loving a man who ultimately cannot choose her. Wharton’s tale elicits the passion and despair of all great but ill-fated love affairs and enthralls the contemporary audience with its pathos just as it did nearly one hundred years ago.

Wharton’s most erotic and lyrical novel, Summer explores a daring theme for 1917: a woman’s awakening to her sexuality.

Eighteen-year-old Charity Royall lives in the small town of North Dormer, ignorant of desire until the arrival of architect Lucius Harney. Independent yet kept from love until now by society’s expectations, Charity finds herself wrapped up in a love affair with Harney.

Like the succulent summer landscape in the Berkshires around them, Charity’s romance is lush and picturesque, but its consequences are harsh and real.

Praised for its realism and candor by such writers as Joseph Conrad and Henry James and compared to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Summer was one of Wharton’s personal favorites of all her novels and remains as fresh and relevant today as when it was first written.

Winner of the first Pulitzer Prize for literature ever awarded to a woman, The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s elegant portrait of desire and betrayal in old New York.

In the highest circle of New York social life during the 1870s, Newland Archer, a young lawyer, prepares to marry the docile May Welland. But before their engagement is announced, he meets the mysterious, nonconformist Countess Ellen Olenska, May’s cousin, who has returned to New York after a long absence. Ellen mirrors his own sense of disillusionment with society and the “good marriage” he is about to embark upon and provokes a moral struggle within him as he continues to go through the motions.

A social commentary of surprising compassion and insight, The Age of Innocence toes the line between the comedy of manners and the tragedy of thwarted love.

‘The Age of Innocence’ is a 1920 novel by Edith Wharton, and the winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize. The title is an ironic comment on the smooth outward manners of New York society in comparison to its inner workings. The narrative revolves around the impending marriage of an upper-class couple, Newland Archer and the beautiful May Welland, which is disrupted by the appearance of the mysterious Countess Ellen Olenska who shocks the New York aristocracy with her unconventional manners and revealing clothes. The novel’s underlying theme is the loss of the pre-war world which was destroyed by World War I. The writing is rich in detail, and impressive in its descriptions of the golden age of New York in the 19th century.

Set in the 1870s, Edith Wharton examines the American elite culture on the East Coast. Newland Archer is a lawyer and heir to one of New York City’s most prominent families. He is arraigned to be married to May Welland. Newland is pleased with the prospect, under he meets Countess Ellen Olenska, May’s older cousin. Suddenly, Newland begins to doubt his arranged marriage and society’s shallow rules as his attraction to Ellen increases.

The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton’s most famous novel, is a love story, written immediately after the end of the First World War. Its brilliant anatomization of the snobbery and hypocrisy of the wealthy elite of New York society in the 1870s made it an instant classic, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921.
Newland Archer, Wharton’s protagonist, is charming, tactful, enlightened-a thorough product of this society. He accepts its standards and abides by its rules, but he also recognizes its limitations. His engagement to the impeccable May Welland assures him of a safe and conventional future, until the arrival of May’s cousin Ellen Olenska. Independent, free-thinking, and scandalously separated from her husband, Ellen forces Archer to question the values and assumptions of his narrow world. As their love for each other grows, Archer has to decide where his ultimate loyalty lies.

Newland Archer is a young lawyer, a member of New York’s high society, and engaged to be married to May Welland. Countess Ellen Olenska is May’s cousin, and wants a divorce from the Polish nobleman she married. Intelligent and beautiful, she comes back to New York where she tries to fit into the high society life she had before her marriage. Her family and former friends, however, are shocked by the idea of divorce within their social circle, and she finds herself snubbed by her own class. Ellen and Newland fall in love and must choose between passion and conventions.

“Brave, lively, engaging . . . a fairy-tale novel, miraculouly returned to life.” —The New York Times Book Review

Edith Wharton’s spellbinding final novel, telling a story of love in the gilded age that crossed the boundaries of society, soon to be an Apple Original Series on Apple TV+

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 first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature, Edith Wharton stands among the finest writers of early 20th-century America. In The Custom of the Country, Wharton’ s scathing social commentary is on full display through the beautiful and manipulative Undine Spragg. When Undine convinces her nouveau riche parents to move to New York, she quickly injects herself into high society. But even a well-to-do husband isn’ t enough for Undine, whose overwhelming lust for wealth proves to be her undoing.

From New York to Europe, the apartments of the nouveau riche to ancient French estates, Edith Wharton tells the story of Undine Spragg, a girl from a Midwestern town with unquenchable social aspirations. Though Undine is narcissistic, pampered, and incredibly selfish, she is a beguiling heroine whose marital initiation into New York high society from its trade-wealthy fringes is only the beginning of her relentless ambitions. Wharton weaves an elaborate plot that renders a detailed depiction of upper-class social behavior in the early twentieth century. By utilizing a character with inexorable greed in a novel of manners, she demonstrates some of the customs of a modern age and posits a surprising explanation for divorce and the social role of women, which still resonates for the modern audience today.

The Spraggs, a wealthy family of Midwesterners, are visiting New York City to marry off their beautiful daughter Undine. While Undine’s beauty catches the attention of several high-society men, she finds it difficult to fit in with the old-money social circles that rule New York. When she finally marries Ralph Marvell, she embraces a life full of frivolities, which eventually leads to her tumultuous demise. Best known for inspiring the hit series Downton Abbey, this classic novel is a scathing critique of ambition featuring one of the most ruthless heroines in literature.

One of Edith Wharton’s most acclaimed works, The Custom of the Country is a blistering indictment of materialism, power, and misplaced values. Its heroine, Undine Spragg, is one of the most ruthless characters in all of literature, as selfishly unscrupulous as she is fiercely beautiful. When her family acquires a small fortune, they leave America’s heartland and head east. As Undine climbs the social ladder through a series of marriages and affairs, she shows little concern for who she has to step on to get anything and everything she desires. Her rise to the top of New York’s elite society–before moving on to conquer Paris as well–provides a poignant and scathing commentary on the unquenchable ambitions of America’s nouveau riche.

Set in New York in the 1920s, The Glimpses of the Moon details the romantic misadventures of Nick Lansing and Susy Branch, two high-society hangers-on with the right connections but a lack of funds. To maintain their status, they decide to marry and spend a year or so sponging off their wealthy friends, honeymooning in their mansions and villas. Both agree that they’re free to dissolve the marriage if either one of them meets someone who can advance them socially. How their scheme unfolds is a comedy of Eros that will charm all fans of Wharton’s work.

Set among the elegant brownstones and opulent country houses of turn-of-the-century upper-class New York, Edith Wharton’s first great novel is a precise, satiric portrayal of what the author herself called “a society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers.”

Her brilliantly complex characterization of the doomed Lily Bart, whose stunning beauty and dependence on marriage for economic survival reduce her to a decorative object, is an incisive commentary on the status of women in that society. Lily is all too much a product of the world indicated by the title, a phrase taken from Ecclesiastes: “The heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” From her tragic attraction to bachelor lawyer Lawrence Seldon to her desperate relationship with the social-climbing Rosedale, it is Lily’s very specialness that threatens the fulfillment she seeks in life.

Time after time, Lily fails to make the ultimate move, to abandon the possibility of a greater love and enter into a mercenary union. This masterful novel from one of literature’s greatest voices is a tragedy of money, morality, and missed opportunity.

What Galsworthy did for Edwardian England, Wharton did for turn-of-the-century New York, and she did it to perfection in The House of Mirth. Hackles bristle discreetly, lips curl ever-so politely, and every breach of good taste is carefully recorded, as social aspirant Lily Bart launches a desperate bid for a place on the city’s elite social register.

Lily Bart enjoys an equitable standing within the New York City elite. Although she desires a comfortable life and has received generous proposals from wealthy suitors, Lily remains single with hope for an honest and loving marriage. However, her life takes an unexpected twist when a nasty bit of gossip instigates her long descent down the social ladder. With her reputation plummeting, Lily escapes the city by joining an acquaintance on a European cruise. But this, too, causes irreparable damage to her reputation, and soon Lily finds herself disowned and friendless.

The beautiful, much-desired Lily Bart has been raised to be one of the perfect wives of the wealthy upper class, but her spark of character and independent drive prevents her from becoming one of the many women who will succeed in those circles. Though her desire for a comfortable life means that she cannot marry for love without money, her resistance to the rules of the social elite endangers her many marriage proposals. As Lily spirals down into debt and dishonor, her story takes on the resonance of classic tragedy.
The House of Mirth is a lucid, disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of author Edith Wharton’s generation. Herself born into Old New York Society, Wharton watched as an entirely new set of people living by new codes of conduct entered the metropolitan scene. In telling the story of Lily Bart, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arrestingly modern tale of one woman’s struggle to succeed.

The Reef follows the fancies of George Darrow, a young diplomat en route from London to France, intent on proposing to the widowed Anna Leath. Unsettled by Anna’s reticence, Darrow drifts into an affair with Sophy Viner, a charmingly na+>>ve and impecunious young woman whose relations with Darrow and Anna’s family threaten his prospects for success. The affair becomes the reef on which four lives are in danger of foundering: two of them innocent, and two of them burdened with experience and tinged with desperation.

A challenge to the moral climate of the day, this story of the drastic effects of a casual sexual betrayal offers a clear-eyed assessment of the possibilities and limitations of human love.

This spare, mesmerizing novel is Edith Wharton’s money-can’t-buy-happiness tale. Young Stephen Glennard is poor, but he has an unanticipated gambling chip: a collection of love letters from a scorned but now famous lover, the distinguished novelist Margaret Aubyn. To raise money for his forthcoming wedding to another woman, Stephen stoops to selling the letters. His decision brings him wealth and admission to society, but a mystery contained in the missives comes back to haunt him, and it may take a madness of guilt to remind Stephen that he does, after all, have a conscience.

Betrayal, greed, and consequences faced make this sly, masterful story a deft social and psychological portrait to stand with Wharton’s best.

An original compilation of eight of Edith Wharton’s gothic stories

A ghostly presence in “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” desires revenge against a tyrannical husband. In “Mr. Jones,” Lady Jane Lynke inherits an estate unexpectedly and can’t make sense of how to manage the servants–especially since the caretaker has been dead for decades but keeps giving orders.

Meanwhile, in “Afterward,” a newly wealthy American couple moves into a large, isolated house in southern England complete with a ghost–and the mysteries surrounding the husband’s business are slowly uncovered. In “The Hermit and the Wild Woman,” the “hermit,” while a young boy, witnessed the killing of his family during an attack on his town. As a result of this trauma, he has retreated into isolation–until he meets a “wild woman” who comes to live nearby.

These are just a few of the wonderful and unnerving tales gathered together in this new compilation of Wharton’s gothic stories.

Twilight Sleep, a gothic satire of Jazz Age New York, was an instant best-seller when it was released in 1927. Quintessential Edith Wharton, it is stylish and sharp, at turns scathing, hilarious and melodramatic, but also deeply and surprisingly human. In a modernist twist, the story is told by three distinct narrators—19-year-old Nona Manford, her unflappable socialite mother Pauline, and Nona’s father and Pauline’s second husband, divorce lawyer Dexter Manford. All are trying to save the marriage of Nona’s half-brother, Jim Wyant, and his wife Lita. And in doing so, all are confronting their own fears and frustrations and devising ever more outlandish means of escape.

Edith Wharton’s superb satirical novel of the Jazz Age, a critically praised bestseller when it was first published in 1927

Whether it is sex, drugs, or infatuation with the occult, Mrs. Manford and her extended family of socialites are determined to escape the pain, boredom, and emptiness of life through whatever form of “twilight sleep” they can devise or procure.

Far ahead of its time, this Wharton classic employed modernist techniques such as an ever-changing narration among the novel’s characters and a close examination of the characters’ self-identities and relationships with one another to tell a tale rich with irony and wit about the upper crust’s own undoing.