The Custom of the Country

"For my money, no literary antiheroine can best Undine." --Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

Edith Wharton's compulsively readable 20th century classic about the conquests of Undine Spragg, the glamorous and insatiable social climber--now with a new introduction by Brandon Taylor.

Undine Spragg is beautiful--anyone in New York will admit to as much. But what is the point of beauty if no one can see you? The Spraggs left the Midwest in search of a glamorous life for their daughter. Now, cooped up in a gilded uptown hotel they can barely afford, they begin to fear their move to the big city was for naught. But Undine is determined. And Undine always gets her way.

What follows is a tactical climb to the pinnacle of affluence and early 20th-century high society that will amaze and mortify. Witty and devasting, The Custom of the Country is an astute comedy of manners and a scathing satire of upper-class life that bites to this day. More than a century after its original publication, Edith Wharton's 1913 masterpiece remains an un-put-downable showcase for one of the most memorable, controversial anti-heroines in American literature.

Author: Edith Wharton
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Published: 08/01/1997
Pages: 528
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.93lbs
Size: 7.93h x 5.27w x 1.29d
ISBN: 9780684825885

About the Author
America's most famous woman of letters, and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, Edith Wharton was born into one of the last leisured class families in New York City, as she put it, in 1862. Educated privately, she was married to Edward Wharton in 1885, and for the next few years they spent their time in the high society of Newport, Rhode Island, then Lenox, Massachusetts, and Europe. It was in Europe that Wharton first met Henry James, who was to have a profound and lasting influence on her life and work. Wharton's first published book was a work of nonfiction in collaboration with Ogden Codman, The Decoration of Houses (1897), but from early on, her marriage had been a source of distress, and she was advised by her doctor to write fiction to relieve her nervous tension. Wharton's first short stories appeared in Scribner's Magazine, and although she published several volumes of fiction around the turn of the century, including The Greater Inclination (1899), The Touchstone (1900), Crucial Instances (1901), The Valley of Decision (1902), Sanctuary (1903), and The Descent of Man and Other Stories (1904), it was not until the publication of the bestselling The House of Mirth in 1905 that she was recognized as one of the most important novelists of her time for her keen social insight and subtle sense of satire. In 1906 Wharton visited Paris, which inspired Madame de Treymes (1907), and made her home there in 1907, finally divorcing her husband in 1912. The years before the outbreak of World War I represent the core of her artistic achievement with the publication of Ethan Frome in 1911, The Reef in 1912, and The Custom of the Country in 1913. During the war she remained in France organizing relief for Belgian refugees, for which she was later awarded the Legion of Honor. She also wrote two novels about the war, The Marne (1918) and A Son at the Front (1923), and although living in France she continued to write about New England and the Newport society she knew so well and described in Summer (1917), the companion to Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. Her other works include Old New York (1924), The Mother's Recompense (1925), The Writing of Fiction (1925), The Children (1928), Hudson River Bracketed (1929), and her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934). She died in France in 193