Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Mother's Recompense
    Unavailable
    The Mother's Recompense
    Unavailable
    The Mother's Recompense
    Ebook290 pages4 hours

    The Mother's Recompense

    By Edith Wharton

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    Originally published in 1925, The Mother's Recompense details the predicament Kate Clephane finds herself in when recalled to New York from her self-imposed exile to the French Riviera after she had abandoned her husband and infant daughter. What makes her return is the impending marriage of that same daughter, but what she finds is that the soon to be husband, Chris Fenno, was a man she had loved before her departure from New York.

    Kate Clephane's moral dilemma provides the platform on which Wharton's character study is built; a battle of the consciousness between sexual love on the one side and maternal love on the other. By setting the two distinctions into play, Wharton has no concerns about the moralities of what might be implied, simply that Kate Clephane is quite capable of choosing the former and winning over the man her daughter intends to marry.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLulu.com
    Release dateNov 20, 2013
    ISBN9781291637229
    Author

    Edith Wharton

    Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was born into a distinguished New York family and was educated privately in the United States and abroad. Among her best-known work is Ethan Frome (1911), which is considered her greatest tragic story, The House of Mirth (1905), and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

    Read more from Edith Wharton

    Related to The Mother's Recompense

    Related ebooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Secret History of Creative Nonfiction

      Oct 15, 2021

      A common misconception about literary history is that women weren’t writing professionally or significantly before Jane Austen. To talk about women’s historical oppression, Virginia Woolf famously conjured up an imaginary sister for William Shakespea

      8 min read

    • Article

      Victorian Style Scandal

      Aug 13, 2022

      Tangled Souls: love and scandal among the Victorian aristocracy Jane Dismore The History Press, 2022 pp. 326 Hardback, £20.00; paperback, N/A; (Kindle £12.99) ISBN: 978-0750996624; 0750996625 Imagine: a bright young dashing politician, who thinks hi

      5 min read

    • Article

      Churchill’s Mommie Dearest

      Jun 2, 2021

      Jennie Churchill, Winston’s American mother, died shockingly prematurely 100 years ago this month, on 29th June 1921, after a fall downstairs. She was 67 and in the prime of life, newly married to a man 20 years younger and had finally found a way of

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Young HG Wells Review – The Shape Of Things To Come

      Nov 2, 2021

      It was a transformation as outlandish as anything in his fiction. In late Victorian Kent, Herbert George Wells was a shopkeeper’s sickly son threatening to kill himself if he couldn’t study science rather than fester in a hated apprenticeship. By the

      3 min read

    • Article

      Pioneering Women

      May 18, 2023

      Professional housekeeper, cook, confectioner, teacher, author; Elizabeth Raffald could be described by many job titles, but the most fitting is probably entrepreneur. Having spent some years working around Yorkshire, Raffald made her name in Manchest

      3 min read

    • Article

      Home From Home

      Jun 23, 2021

      Home From Home
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Sins Of The Father

      Apr 16, 2020

      Four years ago, the BBC aired a deeply disturbing documentary called My Nazi  Legacy. It followed the journey of Horst Wächter, the son of notorious Nazi leader Otto Wächter, as he visited the places in eastern Europe where his father had presided ov

      4 min read

    • Article

      Rewriting Her World

      Feb 18, 2021

      Rewriting Her World
      8 min read

    • Article

      Aaron Burr in Exile

      Jun 3, 2019

      IN JUNE 1808, AS HE LEFT North America for the one and only time in his life, Aaron Burr recorded the briefest of notes for his adored daughter, Theodosia. “Fair winds,” the founding father and former vice president wrote before clambering aboard a p

      16 min read

    • Article

      In The Memoirs Of Wallis Simpson We Find A Terrible Echo Of The Treatment Of Meghan

      Mar 8, 2021

      To borrow a phrase, it seems that Megxit means Megxit. The notion that Harry and Meghan could function as semi-detached royals in semi-exile was always far fetched, as is becoming increasingly apparent. It is also inevitable that their alienation fro

      4 min read

    • Article

      Power Behind The Throne

      Oct 27, 2022

      Power Behind The Throne
      3 min read

    • Article

      Hidden Histories

      Nov 25, 2021

      Edgar Mittelholzer was a Guyanese novelist who should be remembered not just for the quality of his writing, but as the earliest recorded writer from the Caribbean to make his living from the profession. I studied Caribbean literature at university,

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Voice Of A Female Golden Age

      Jan 19, 2023

      The Voice Of A Female Golden Age
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Man Who Invented Scotland?

      Aug 5, 2021

      The Man Who Invented Scotland?
      8 min read

    • Article

      Books & co

      Jul 10, 2020

      Novels, histories, biographies… By Louise Fein ‘A German girl. A Jewish boy. A love that changes everything.’ These are the words on the cover of Louise Fein’s debut novel – People Like Us – which is set in 1930s Leipzig, and is a book inspired by ev

      6 min read

    • Article

      What A Long, Strange Trip It Was

      Jun 1, 2022

      Born in 1890, Jean Rhys (christened Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams) lived through two world wars and in her long life observed firsthand the many changes wrought by the 20th century. She consorted with the literati of the Lost Generation in 1920s Pari

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Gay Duchess

      Jun 28, 2023

      Blue Eyes and a Wild Spirit: A Life of Dorothy Wellesley By Jane Wellesley Sandstone Press £30 The story of the Royal Family – George VI, the Little Princesses and Queen Elizabeth – all having the giggles when listening to T S Eliot read from The Was

      3 min read

    • Article

      Over The Hills And Far Away

      Feb 9, 2022

      Over The Hills And Far Away
      4 min read

    • Article

      De La Mare Revisited PAUL DEAN Reading Walter De La Mare

      Jun 30, 2021

      Faber £14.99 At one time, lots of children were made to read Walter de la Mare’s poem The Listeners at school. Nowadays, even if the Traveller broke the door down, he might find there was nobody there. De la Mare, once a literary lion, centrepiece of

      2 min read

    • Article

      An Enlightenment King Vindicated

      Nov 25, 2021

      THIS OUTSTANDING NEW BIOGRAPHY of George III is timely. The first of the Hanoverians to identify as British was mocked, slandered and vilified during his lifetime and is still regularly cited in the American media as the epitome of tyranny. Over the

      5 min read

    • Article

      The ‘Female Byron’

      Mar 3, 2019

      The ‘Female Byron’
      7 min read

    Reviews for The Mother's Recompense

    3.5/5

    42 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      In one of Edith Wharton's later novels, the author explores issues of morality and sexuality in the context of a mother-daughter relationship. Kate Clephane left a loveless marriage and was denied further contact with her young daughter Anne. She escaped to the French Riviera and moved among society there. Kate and Anne are reunited many years later. Anne is now a young adult, and surprisingly welcoming. She introduces Kate to post-World War I New York society, where much has changed from the world Kate once knew. Anne and Kate's relationship blossoms, but is severely tested when one of Kate's "old flames" arrives on the scene. For the first time in many years, Kate has to think about someone other than herself, and sort through several moral dilemmas. Wharton is masterful at showing the constraints women faced in those days, and resolves the conflict in what was probably the only way possible. Wharton is one of my favorite authors, and I really enjoyed this book.