Three Novels of New York: The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

By Edith Wharton, Jonathan Franzen and Richard Gray

For the 150th anniversary of Edith Wharton's birth: her three greatest novels, in a couture-inspired deluxe edition featuring a new introduction by Jonathan Franzen

Born into a distinguished New York family, Edith Wharton chronicled the lives of the wealthy, the well born, and the nouveau riches in fiction that often hinges on the collision of personal passion and social convention. This volume brings together her best-loved novels, all set in New York.

The House of Mirth is the story of Lily Bart, who needs a rich husband but refuses to marry without both love and money. The Custom of the Country follows the marriages and affairs of Undine Spragg, who is as vain, spoiled, and selfish as she is irresistibly fascinating. The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence concerns the passionate bond that develops between the newly engaged Newland Archer and his finacée's cousin, the Countess Olenska, new to New York and newly divorced.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9781101577325

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) published more than forty books during her lifetime, including the classic Gilded Age society novels Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, and The Age of Innocence, for which she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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PENGUIN CLASSICS DELUXE EDITION

THREE NOVELS OF NEW YORK

The House of Mirth • The Custom of the Country • The Age of Innocence

EDITH WHARTON (1862–1937) was born Edith Newbold Jones. A member of a distinguished New York family, she was educated privately in America and abroad. She spent long periods in Europe, and from 1910 until her death made her home in France. She published poetry and short stories in magazines and in volume form before her novel The House of Mirth (1905) became a bestseller and established her as a writer of both distinction and popular appeal. During her life, she published more than forty volumes: novels, stories, verse, essays, travel books, and memoirs. The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome (1911), The Custom of the Country (1913), Summer (1917), and The Age of Innocence (1920; winner of the Pulitzer Prize) are all available in Penguin Classics editions.

JONATHAN FRANZEN is the author of Freedom and The Corrections, among other novels, as well as several works of nonfiction. He lives in New York City and Santa Cruz, California.

EDITH WHARTON

Three Novels of New York

The House of Mirth

The Custom of the Country

The Age of Innocence

Introduction by

JONATHAN FRANZEN

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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The House of Mirth

First published in the United States of America by Charles Scribner’s Sons 1905

The Custom of the Country

First published in the United States of America by Charles Scribner’s Sons 1913

The Age of Innocence

First published in the United States of America by D. Appleton and Company 1920

This edition with an introduction by Jonathan Franzen published in Penguin Books 2012

Introduction copyright © Jonathan Franzen, 2012

All rights reserved

Ebook ISBN: 9781101577325

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Contents

Introduction by JONATHAN FRANZEN

THE HOUSE OF MIRTH

BOOK ONE

BOOK TWO

THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY

BOOK ONE

BOOK TWO

BOOK THREE

BOOK FOUR

BOOK FIVE

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

BOOK ONE

BOOK TWO

Introduction

Edith Wharton and the Problem of Sympathy

The older I get, the more I’m convinced that a fiction writer’s oeuvre is a mirror of the writer’s character. It may well be a defect of my own character that my literary tastes are so deeply intertwined with my responses, as a person, to the person of the author—that I persist in disliking the posturing young Steinbeck who wrote Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row while loving the later Steinbeck who fought back personal and career entropy and produced East of Eden, and that I draw what amounts to a moral distinction between the two—but I suspect that sympathy or its absence are involved in almost every reader’s literary judgments. Without sympathy, whether for the writer or for the fictional characters, a work of fiction has a very hard time mattering.

So what to make of Edith Wharton, on the eve of her hundred-fiftieth birthday? There are many good reasons to wish Wharton’s work read, or read afresh, at this late literary date. You may be dismayed by the ongoing underrepresentation of women in the American canon, or by the Academy’s valorization of overt formal experimentation at the expense of more naturalistic fiction. You may lament that Wharton’s work is still commonly assumed to be as dated as the hats she wore, or that several generations of high school graduates know her chiefly through her frosty minor novel Ethan Frome. You may feel that, alongside the more familiar genealogies of American fiction (Henry James and the modernists, Mark Twain and the vernacularists, Herman Melville and the postmoderns), there is a less-noticed line connecting William Dean Howells to Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis and thence to Jay McInerny and Jane Smiley, and that Wharton is the vital link in it. You may want, as I do, to re-celebrate The House of Mirth, call much-merited attention to The Custom of the Country, and re-evaluate The Age of Innocence—her three great like-titled novels. But to consider Wharton and her work is to confront the problem of sympathy.

No major American novelist has led a more privileged life than Wharton did. Although she was seldom entirely free of money worries, she always lived as if she were: pouring her inherited income into houses in rich-person precincts, indulging her passion for gardens and interior decoration, touring Europe endlessly in hired yachts or chauffeured cars, hobnobbing with the powerful and the famous, despising inferior hotels. To be rich like Wharton may be what all of us secretly or not so secretly want, but privilege like hers isn’t easy to like; it puts her at a moral disadvantage. And she wasn’t privileged like Tolstoy, with his liberal reform schemes and his kindness to peasants. She was deeply conservative, opposed to socialism, unions, and women’s suffrage, intellectually attracted to the relentless worldview of Darwinism, hostile to the rawness and noise and vulgarity of America (by 1913 she had settled permanently in France, and she visited the United States only once after that, for eleven days), and unwilling to support her friend Teddy Roosevelt when his politics became more populist. She was the kind of lady who fired off a high-toned letter of complaint to the owner of a shop where a clerk had refused to lend her an umbrella. Her biographers supply this signal image of the artist at work: writing in bed after breakfast and tossing the completed pages on the floor to be sorted and typed up by her secretary.

Wharton did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty. The man she would have most liked to marry, her friend Walter Berry, a noted connoisseur of female beauty, wasn’t the marrying type. After two failed youthful courtships, she settled for an affable dud of modest means, Teddy Wharton. That their ensuing twenty-eight years of marriage were almost entirely sexless was perhaps less a function of her looks than of her sexual ignorance, the blame for which she laid squarely on her mother. As far as anyone knows, Wharton died having had only one other sexual relationship, an affair with an evasive bisexual journalist and serial two-timer, Morton Fullerton. She by then was in her late forties, and the beginner-like idealism and blatancy of her ardor—detailed in a secret diary and in letters preserved by Fullerton—are at once poignant and somewhat embarrassing, as they seem later to have been to Wharton herself.

Her father, a benign but recessive figure, died fairly young, after suffering from the financial stresses of providing a luxurious lifestyle for his wife. Wharton, all her life, had only bad things to say about her mother; she also became estranged from both of her brothers. She had relatively few friendships with women and none with female writers of her caliber—more strikes against her, in terms of sympathy—but she forged close and lasting friendships with an extraordinary number of successful men, including Henry James, Bernard Berenson, and André Gide. Many were gay or otherwise confirmed in bachelorhood. In the instances where her male friends were married, Wharton seems mostly to have treated the wives with indifference or outright jealousy.

The fine quip of one of Wharton’s contemporary reviewers—She writes like a masculine Henry James—could also be applied to her social pursuits: she wanted to be with the men and to talk about the things men talked about. The half-affectionate, half-terrified nicknames that James and his circle gave her—the Eagle, the Cyclone—are of a piece with their reports on her. She wasn’t charming or easy to be with, but she was immensely energetic, always curious, always interesting, always formidable. She was a doer, an explorer, a bestower, a thinker. When, in her forties, she finally battled free of the deadness of her marriage and became a best-selling author, Teddy responded by spiraling into mental illness and embezzling a good part of her inheritance. She was distraught about this, as anyone would have been, but not so distraught that she didn’t force Teddy to repay her and, two years later, with firm resolve, divorce him. Lacking good looks and the feminine charms that might have accompanied them, she eventually became, in every sense but one, the man of her house.

A curious thing about beauty, however, is that its absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do. To the contrary, Edith Wharton might well be more congenial to us now if, alongside her other advantages, she’d looked like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy; and nobody was more conscious of this capacity of beauty to override our resentment of privilege than Wharton herself was. At the center of each of her three finest novels is a female character of great beauty, chosen deliberately to complicate the problem of sympathy.

The reader of The House of Mirth (1905) is introduced to its heroine, Lily Bart, through the gaze of an admiring man, Lawrence Selden, who runs into her by chance at Grand Central Terminal. Selden immediately wonders what Lily is doing there, and he reflects that it was characteristic of her that she always roused speculation, that her simplest acts seemed the result of far-reaching intentions. To Selden, it’s inconceivable that a woman in possession of as much beauty as Lily would not be forever calculating how to use it. And Selden is right about this—Lily, strapped financially, is constantly forced to draw upon her one sure resource—but he is no less wrong. Lily’s predicament is that she is never quite able to square those far-reaching intentions with her momentary desires and her tentative moral sensibilities.

On the surface, there would seem to be no reason for a reader to sympathize with Lily. The social height that she’s bent on securing is one that she herself acknowledges is dull and sterile, she’s profoundly self-involved and incapable of true charity, she pridefully contrasts other women’s looks with her own, she has no intellectual life to speak of, she’s put off from pursuing her one kindred spirit (Selden) by the modesty of his income, and she’s in no danger of ever starving. She is, basically, the worst sort of party girl, and Wharton, in much the same way that she didn’t even try to be soft or charming in her personal life, eschews the standard novelistic tricks for warming or softening Lily’s image—the book is devoid of pet-the-dog moments. So why is it so hard to stop reading Lily’s story?

One big reason is that she doesn’t have enough money. The particulars of her shortfall may not be sympathetic—she needs to dress well and gamble at bridge tables in order to catch a man who can enable her to dress well and gamble for the rest of her life—but one of the mysterious strengths of the novel as an art form, from Balzac forward, is how readily readers connect with the financial anxieties of fictional characters. When Lily, by taking a long romantic walk with Selden, is blowing her chance to marry the extremely wealthy but comically boring and prudish Percy Gryce, with whom she would have had the bleakest of relationships, you may find yourself wanting to shout at her, You idiot! Don’t do it! Get back to the house and seal the deal with Gryce! Money, in novels, is such a potent reality principle that the need for it can override even our wish for a character to live happily ever after, and Wharton, throughout the book, applies the principle with characteristic relentlessness, tightening the financial screws on Lily as if the author were in league with nature at its most unforgiving.

What finally undoes Lily, though, isn’t the unforgiving world but her own bad decisions, her failures to foresee the seemingly obvious social consequences of her actions. Her propensity to error is a second engine of sympathy. We all know how it feels to be making a mistake, and the deliciousness of watching other people make them—particularly the mistake of marrying the wrong person—is a core appeal of narratives from Oedipus to Middlemarch. Wharton compounds the deliciousness in The House of Mirth by creating an eminently marriageable heroine whose mistake is to be too afraid of making the mistake of marrying wrong. Again and again, at the crucial moment, Lily blows up her opportunities to trade her beauty for financial security or at least for a chance at happiness.

I don’t know of another novel more preoccupied with female beauty than The House of Mirth. That Wharton, who was fluent in German, chose to saddle her lily-like heroine with a beard—in German, Bart—points toward the gender inversions that Wharton engaged in to make her difficult life livable and her private life-story writable, as well as toward other forms of inversion, such as giving Lily the looks she herself didn’t have and denying Lily the money that she did have. The novel can be read as a sustained effort by Wharton to imagine beauty from the inside and achieve sympathy for it, or, conversely, as a sadistically slow and thorough punishment of the pretty girl she couldn’t be. Beauty in novels usually cuts two ways. On the one hand, we’re aware of how often it deforms the moral character of people who possess it; on the other hand, it represents a kind of natural capital, like a tree’s perfect fruit, that we’re instinctively averse to seeing wasted. Ticking along through the novel, as inexorable as the decline in Lily’s funds, is the clock on her youthful good looks. The clock starts running on page one—under her hat and veil she regained the girlish smoothness, the purity of tint, that she was beginning to lose after eleven years of late hours and indefatigable dancing—and it continues to heighten the urgency of Lily’s plight, inviting us to share in it emotionally. But only at the book’s very end, when Lily finds herself holding another woman’s baby and experiencing a host of unfamiliar emotions, does a more powerful sort of urgency crash into view. The financial potential of her looks is revealed to have been an artificial value, in contrast to their authentic value in the natural scheme of human reproduction. What has been simply a series of private misfortunes for Lily suddenly becomes something larger: the tragedy of a New York City social world whose priorities are so divorced from nature that they kill the emblematically attractive female who ought, by natural right, to thrive. The reader is driven to search for an explanation of the tragedy in Lily’s appallingly deforming social upbringing—the kind of upbringing that Wharton herself felt deformed by—and to pity her for it, as, per Aristotle, a tragic protagonist must be pitied.

But sympathy in novels need not be simply a matter of the reader’s direct identification with a fictional character. It can also be driven by my admiration of a character who is long on virtues I am short on (the moral courage of Atticus Finch, the limpid goodness of Alyosha Karamazov) or, most interestingly, by my wish to be a character who is unlike me in ways I don’t admire or even like. One of the great perplexities of fiction—and the quality that makes the novel the quintessentially liberal art form—is that we experience sympathy so readily for characters we wouldn’t like in real life. Becky Sharp may be a soulless social climber, Tom Ripley may be a sociopath, the Jackal may want to assassinate the French president, Mickey Sabbath may be a disgustingly self-involved old goat, and Raskolnikov may want to get away with murder, but I find myself rooting for each of them. This is sometimes, no doubt, a function of the lure of the forbidden, the guilty pleasure of imagining what would it be like to be unburdened by scruples. In every case, though, the alchemical agent by which fiction transmutes my secret envy or my ordinary dislike of bad people into sympathy is desire. Apparently, all a novelist has to do is give a character a powerful desire (to rise socially, to get away with murder), and I, as a reader, become helpless not to make that desire my own.

In Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913), as in The House of Mirth, an unfit member of old New York society fails to survive. But here the harshly Darwinian nature is the new, industrialized, nakedly capitalist America, and the victim is certainly not the protagonist, Undine Spragg. The novel reads like a perfect, deliberate inversion of The House of Mirth. It takes the same ingredients of sympathy and applies them to a heroine beside whom Lily Bart is an angel of grace and sensitivity and lovability. Undine Spragg is the spoiled, ignorant, shallow, amoral, and staggeringly selfish product of the economically booming American hinterland; she’s named after a hair curler mass-produced by an uncle of hers. Wharton was working on the novel in precisely the years when she was preparing to forsake the United States permanently, and its grotesquely negative cartoon of the country—the lecherously red face of the millionaire Van Degen, the fatuous pretensions of the celebrity portrait-painter Van Poppel, the culpably feeble traditions of old New York, the vacuous pleasure-seeking of the arrivistes, the corrupt connivance of business and politics—reads like a selective marshalling of evidence to support her case. The country that can produce and celebrate a creature like Undine Spragg is not, Wharton seems to be arguing to herself, a country she can live in.

But Undine’s story is one you absolutely have to read. The Custom of the Country is the earliest novel to portray an America I recognize as fully modern, the first fictional rendering of a culture to which the Kardashians, Twitter, and Fox News would come as no surprise. Lewis’s Babbit and Fitzgerald’s Gatsby not only follow directly from it but seem, if anything, somewhat less modern. The nexus of money and media and celebrity, which dominates our world today, appears in the novel’s opening chapter in the form of the press clippings that Mrs. Heeny (Undine’s masseuse and early social adviser) carries with her everywhere, and the clippings become a leitmotif, a recurring measure of Undine’s progress. Ignorant though Undine is, she’s smart enough to know that she has exactly what reporters need, and she proves remarkably adept at manipulating the press. Along the way, she anticipates two other hallmarks of modern American society: the obliteration of all social distinctions by money and the hedonic treadmill of materialism. In Undine’s world, everything can be bought, and none of it will ever be enough.

But the novel’s most strikingly modern element is divorce. The Custom of the Country is by no means the earliest novel in which marriages are dissolved, but it’s the first to put serial divorce at its center, and in so doing it sounds the death knell of the marriage plot that had invigorated countless narratives in centuries past. The once-high stakes of choosing a spouse are dramatically lowered when every mistake can be—and is, by Undine—undone by divorce. The costs now are mostly financial. And Wharton, who could see the inevitability of her own divorce when she was working on the book, again does nothing by halves. The story is saturated with divorce; it’s what the book is relentlessly about. Where The House of Mirth, a story of irrevocable mistakes, ends with the guttering of the feeble flame of Lily’s life, The Custom of the Country, which is a story of mistakes without lasting consequences for their maker, ends with the cartoonishly pure spectacle of Undine’s marrying the richest man in America and still not being satisfied. You don’t have to admire Undine Spragg to admire an author with the courage and the love of form to go for broke like this. Wharton embraces her new-fashioned divorce plot as zestfully as Nabokov embraces pedophilia in Lolita.

Undine is an extreme case of the unlikable person rendered perplexingly sympathetic by her desires. She’s almost comically indestructible, like Wile E. Coyote. The interest I take in her ascent, her Coyote-like survival of the seeming wipeout blows that her divorces deliver to her social standing, may be akin to the fascination of watching one spider in a jar prevail over other spiders, but I still can’t read the book without aligning myself with her struggle. This in turn has the odd effect of rendering secondary characters who might be sympathetic (her second and third husbands; her father) less so. I feel annoyed and frustrated with these men for thwarting a progress I’ve become engrossed in; their scruples, though admirable in theory, contrast unfavorably with Undine’s desires. In this regard, Undine may remind you of Wharton herself, whose success and vitality finally crushed her husband, and whose two great romantic love objects (Berry and Fullerton) it’s hard not to think less of, when you read her biography, for not being equal to her love. Undine’s sole motivating appetite, which is to have a certain kind of flashy good time, may bear little resemblance to Wharton’s sophisticated hunger for art and foreign travel and serious talk, but Undine is nevertheless very much like her creator in being a personally isolated woman doing her best to use what she was given to make her way in the world.

Here, indeed, is a portal to a deeper kind of sympathy for Wharton. Despite all her privileges, despite her strenuous socializing, she remained an isolate and a misfit, which is to say a born writer. The middle-aged woman tossing her morning pages onto the floor was the same person who, beginning at the age of four, was prone to falling into trance-like states in which she made up stories. She was raised to care about clothes and about looks and about maintaining proprieties in an elite social world, and she spent her twenties and thirties dutifully playing the role for which she’d been bred, but she never stopped being the girl who made up stories. And that girl, perverse, yearning, trapped, is inside all of her best novels, straining against the conventions of her privileged world. As if aware of what an unlikable figure she herself cut, she placed unlikable women in the foreground of these novels and then deployed the storyteller’s most potent weapon, the contagiousness of fictional desire, to create sympathy for them.

In her most generously realized novel, The Age of Innocence (1920), written well after her affair with Fullerton, and after the Great War had made the decades preceding it seem suddenly historical, Wharton told her own story more directly than she had ever done before, by splitting herself into a male and a female character, dividing beard from lily. The novel’s protagonist, Newland Archer, embodies Wharton’s origins: he’s an isolated misfit who is nevertheless inextricably enmeshed in the social conventions of old New York and inescapably adapted, despite his yearning not to be, to the comforts and norms of a steady, conservative world. The object of Newland’s great passion, Ellen Olenska, is the person Wharton became: the self-sufficient exile, the survivor of a disastrous and disillusioning marriage, the New York–born European free spirit. They attract each other intensely because they belong together the way two sides of a unitary personality belong together. And so, for once, the problem of sympathy for Wharton’s characters isn’t a problem at all. There’s no making of mistakes here, and money is a minor issue. Ellen is simply pretty and in trouble, and Newland simply wants her but, being married, can’t have her.

The greatness of The Age of Innocence is that it takes the long view. By setting the main action in the 1870s, Wharton is able, at the end, to bring Newland and Ellen into a radically altered world in which their earlier plight can be seen as the product of a particular time and place. The novel becomes the story not only of what they couldn’t have—of what they were denied by the velvet-gloved conspiring of their Old New York families—but of what they have been able to have instead. Its great heartbreaking late line, which takes the measure of Newland’s unfulfilled desire, is delivered neither by Newland nor Ellen but by the woman whom Newland has stayed married to. Wharton, in the novel, certainly shines what she once called the full light of my critical attention on the social conventions that deformed her own youth, but she also in a very real way celebrates them. She renders them so clearly and completely that they emerge, in historical hindsight, as what they really are: a social arrangement with advantages as well as disadvantages. In so doing, she denies the modern reader the easy comfort of condemning an antiquated arrangement. What you feel instead, at the novel’s end, is sympathy.

JONATHAN FRANZEN

NOVEMBER 2011

THE HOUSE OF MIRTH

BOOK ONE

Chapter 1

Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart.

It was a Monday in early September, and he was returning to his work from a hurried dip into the country; but what was Miss Bart doing in town at that season? If she had appeared to be catching a train, he might have inferred that he had come on her in the act of transition between one and another of the country-houses which disputed her presence after the close of the Newport season; but her desultory air perplexed him. She stood apart from the crowd, letting it drift by her to the platform or the street, and wearing an air of irresolution which might, as he surmised, be the mask of a very definite purpose. It struck him at once that she was waiting for some one, but he hardly knew why the idea arrested him. There was nothing new about Lily Bart, yet he could never see her without a faint movement of interest: it was characteristic of her that she always roused speculation, that her simplest acts seemed the result of far-reaching intentions.

An impulse of curiosity made him turn out of his direct line to the door, and stroll past her. He knew that if she did not wish to be seen she would contrive to elude him; and it amused him to think of putting her skill to the test.

Mr. Selden—what good luck!

She came forward smiling, eager almost, in her resolve to intercept him. One or two persons, in brushing past them, lingered to look; for Miss Bart was a figure to arrest even the suburban traveller rushing to his last train.

Selden had never seen her more radiant. Her vivid head, relieved against the dull tints of the crowd, made her more conspicuous than in a ball-room, and under her dark hat and veil she regained the girlish smoothness, the purity of tint, that she was beginning to lose after eleven years of late hours and indefatigable dancing. Was it really eleven years, Selden found himself wondering, and had she indeed reached the nine-and-twentieth birthday with which her rivals credited her?

What luck! she repeated. How nice of you to come to my rescue!

He responded joyfully that to do so was his mission in life, and asked what form the rescue was to take.

Oh, almost any—even to sitting on a bench and talking to me. One sits out a cotillion—why not sit out a train? It isn’t a bit hotter here than in Mrs. Van Osburgh’s conservatory—and some of the women are not a bit uglier.

She broke off, laughing, to explain that she had come up to town from Tuxedo, on her way to the Gus Trenors’ at Bellomont, and had missed the three-fifteen train to Rhinebeck.

And there isn’t another till half-past five. She consulted the little jewelled watch among her laces. Just two hours to wait. And I don’t know what to do with myself. My maid came up this morning to do some shopping for me, and was to go on to Bellomont at one o’clock, and my aunt’s house is closed, and I don’t know a soul in town. She glanced plaintively about the station. "It is hotter than Mrs. Van Osburgh’s, after all. If you can spare the time, do take me somewhere for a breath of air."

He declared himself entirely at her disposal: the adventure struck him as diverting. As a spectator, he had always enjoyed Lily Bart; and his course lay so far out of her orbit that it amused him to be drawn for a moment into the sudden intimacy which her proposal implied.

Shall we go over to Sherry’s for a cup of tea?

She smiled assentingly, and then made a slight grimace.

"So many people come up to town on a Monday—one is sure to meet a lot of bores. I’m as old as the hills, of course, and it ought not to make any difference; but if I’m old enough, you’re not, she objected gaily. I’m dying for tea—but isn’t there a quieter place?"

He answered her smile, which rested on him vividly. Her discretions interested him almost as much as her imprudences: he was so sure that both were part of the same carefully-elaborated plan. In judging Miss Bart, he had always made use of the argument from design.

The resources of New York are rather meagre, he said; but I’ll find a hansom first, and then we’ll invent something.

He led her through the throng of returning holiday-makers, past shallow-faced girls in preposterous hats, and flat-chested women struggling with paper bundles and palm-leaf fans. Was it possible that she belonged to the same race? The dinginess, the crudity of this average section of womanhood made him feel how highly specialized she was.

A rapid shower had cooled the air, and clouds still hung refreshingly over the moist street.

How delicious! Let us walk a little, she said as they emerged from the station.

They turned into Madison Avenue and began to stroll northward. As she moved beside him, with her long light step, Selden was conscious of taking a luxurious pleasure in her nearness: in the modelling of her little ear, the crisp upward wave of her hair—was it ever so slightly brightened by art?—and the thick planting of her straight black lashes. Everything about her was at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine. He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her. He was aware that the qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her sex were chiefly external: as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay. Yet the analogy left him unsatisfied, for a coarse texture will not take a high finish; and was it not possible that the material was fine, but that circumstance had fashioned it into a futile shape?

As he reached this point in his speculations the sun came out, and her lifted parasol cut off his enjoyment. A moment or two later she paused with a sigh.

Oh, dear, I’m so hot and thirsty—and what a hideous place New York is! She looked despairingly up and down the dreary thoroughfare. Other cities put on their best clothes in summer, but New York seems to sit in its shirt-sleeves. Her eyes wandered down one of the side-streets. Some one has had the humanity to plant a few trees over there. Let us go into the shade.

I am glad my street meets with your approval, said Selden as they turned the corner.

Your street? Do you live here?

She glanced with interest along the new brick and limestone house-fronts, fantastically varied in obedience to the American craving for novelty, but fresh and inviting with their awnings and flower-boxes.

"Ah, yes—to be sure: The Benedick. What a nice-looking building! I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. She looked across at the flat-house with its marble porch and pseudo-Georgian façade. Which are your windows? Those with the awnings down?"

On the top floor—yes.

And that nice little balcony is yours? How cool it looks up there!

He paused a moment. Come up and see, he suggested. I can give you a cup of tea in no time—and you won’t meet any bores.

Her colour deepened—she still had the art of blushing at the right time—but she took the suggestion as lightly as it was made.

Why not? It’s too tempting—I’ll take the risk, she declared.

Oh, I’m not dangerous, he said in the same key. In truth, he had never liked her as well as at that moment. He knew she had accepted without afterthought: he could never be a factor in her calculations, and there was a surprise, a refreshment almost, in the spontaneity of her consent.

On the threshold he paused a moment, feeling for his latch-key.

There’s no one here; but I have a servant who is supposed to come in the mornings, and it’s just possible he may have put out the tea-things and provided some cake.

He ushered her into a slip of a hall hung with old prints. She noticed the letters and notes heaped on the table among his gloves and sticks; then she found herself in a small library, dark but cheerful, with its walls of books, a pleasantly faded Turkey rug, a littered desk, and, as he had foretold, a tea-tray on a low table near the window. A breeze had sprung up, swaying inward the muslin curtains, and bringing a fresh scent of mignonette and petunias from the flower-box on the balcony.

Lily sank with a sigh into one of the shabby leather chairs.

How delicious to have a place like this all to one’s self! What a miserable thing it is to be a woman. She leaned back in a luxury of discontent.

Selden was rummaging in a cupboard for the cake.

Even women, he said, have been known to enjoy the privileges of a flat.

Oh, governesses—or widows. But not girls—not poor, miserable, marriageable girls!

I even know a girl who lives in a flat.

She sat up in surprise. You do?

I do, he assured her emerging from the cupboard with the sought-for cake.

Oh, I know—you mean Gerty Farish. She smiled a little unkindly. "But I said marriageable—and besides, she has a horrid little place, and no maid, and such queer things to eat. Her cook does the washing and the food tastes of soap. I should hate that, you know."

You shouldn’t dine with her on wash-days, said Selden, cutting the cake.

They both laughed, and he knelt by the table to light the lamp under the kettle, while she measured out the tea into a little tea-pot of green glaze. As he watched her hand, polished as a bit of old ivory, with its slender pink nails, and the sapphire bracelet slipping over her wrist, he was struck with the irony of suggesting to her such a life as his cousin Gertrude Farish had chosen. She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.

She seemed to read his thought. It was horrid of me to say that of Gerty, she said with charming compunction. I forgot she was your cousin. But we’re so different, you know: she likes being good, and I like being happy. And besides, she is free and I am not. If I were, I daresay I could manage to be happy even in her flat. It must be pure bliss to arrange the furniture just as one likes, and give all the horrors to the ash-man. If I could only do over my aunt’s drawing-room I know I should be a better woman.

Is it so very bad? he asked sympathetically.

She smiled at him across the tea-pot which she was holding up to be filled.

That shows how seldom you come there. Why don’t you come oftener?

When I do come, it’s not to look at Mrs. Peniston’s furniture.

Nonsense, she said. You don’t come at all—and yet we get on so well when we meet.

Perhaps that’s the reason, he answered promptly. I’m afraid I haven’t any cream, you know—shall you mind a slice of lemon instead?

I shall like it better. She waited while he cut the lemon and dropped a thin disk into her cup. But that is not the reason, she insisted.

The reason for what?

For your never coming. She leaned forward with a shade of perplexity in her charming eyes. I wish I knew—I wish I could make you out. Of course I know there are men who don’t like me—one can tell that at a glance. And there are others who are afraid of me: they think I want to marry them. She smiled up at him frankly. But I don’t think you dislike me—and you can’t possibly think I want to marry you.

No—I absolve you of that, he agreed.

Well, then——?

He had carried his cup to the fireplace, and stood leaning against the chimney-piece and looking down on her with an air of indolent amusement. The provocation in her eyes increased his amusement—he had not supposed she would waste her powder on such small game; but perhaps she was only keeping her hand in; or perhaps a girl of her type had no conversation but of the personal kind. At any rate, she was amazingly pretty, and he had asked her to tea and must live up to his obligations.

Well, then, he said with a plunge, "perhaps that’s the reason."

What?

The fact that you don’t want to marry me. Perhaps I don’t regard it as such a strong inducement to go and see you. He felt a slight shiver down his spine as he ventured this, but her laugh reassured him.

Dear Mr. Selden, that wasn’t worthy of you. It’s stupid of you to make love to me, and it isn’t like you to be stupid. She leaned back, sipping her tea with an air so enchantingly judicial that, if they had been in her aunt’s drawing-room, he might almost have tried to disprove her deduction.

Don’t you see, she continued, that there are men enough to say pleasant things to me, and that what I want is a friend who won’t be afraid to say disagreeable ones when I need them? Sometimes I have fancied you might be that friend—I don’t know why, except that you are neither a prig nor a bounder, and that I shouldn’t have to pretend with you or be on my guard against you. Her voice had dropped to a note of seriousness, and she sat gazing up at him with the troubled gravity of a child.

You don’t know how much I need such a friend, she said. My aunt is full of copy-book axioms, but they were all meant to apply to conduct in the early fifties. I always feel that to live up to them would include wearing book-muslin with gigot sleeves. And the other women—my best friends—well, they use me or abuse me; but they don’t care a straw what happens to me. I’ve been about too long—people are getting tired of me; they are beginning to say I ought to marry.

There was a moment’s pause, during which Selden meditated one or two replies calculated to add a momentary zest to the situation; but he rejected them in favour of the simple question: Well, why don’t you?

She coloured and laughed. "Ah, I see you are a friend after all, and that is one of the disagreeable things I was asking for."

It wasn’t meant to be disagreeable, he returned amicably. Isn’t marriage your vocation? Isn’t it what you’re all brought up for?

She sighed. I suppose so. What else is there?

Exactly. And so why not take the plunge and have it over?

She shrugged her shoulders. You speak as if I ought to marry the first man who came along.

I didn’t mean to imply that you are as hard put to it as that. But there must be some one with the requisite qualifications.

She shook her head wearily. I threw away one or two good chances when I first came out—I suppose every girl does; and you know I am horribly poor—and very expensive. I must have a great deal of money.

Selden had turned to reach for a cigarette-box on the mantel-piece.

What’s become of Dillworth? he asked.

Oh, his mother was frightened—she was afraid I should have all the family jewels reset. And she wanted me to promise that I wouldn’t do over the drawing-room.

The very thing you are marrying for!

Exactly. So she packed him off to India.

Hard luck—but you can do better than Dillworth.

He offered the box, and she took out three or four cigarettes, putting one between her lips and slipping the others into a little gold case attached to her long pearl chain.

Have I time? Just a whiff, then. She leaned forward, holding the tip of her cigarette to his. As she did so, he noted, with a purely impersonal enjoyment, how evenly the black lashes were set in her smooth white lids, and how the purplish shade beneath them melted into the pure pallor of the cheek.

She began to saunter about the room, examining the bookshelves between the puffs of her cigarette-smoke. Some of the volumes had the ripe tints of good tooling and old morocco, and her eyes lingered on them caressingly, not with the appreciation of the expert, but with the pleasure in agreeable tones and textures that was one of her inmost susceptibilities. Suddenly her expression changed from desultory enjoyment to active conjecture, and she turned to Selden with a question.

You collect, don’t you—you know about first editions and things?

As much as a man may who has no money to spend. Now and then I pick up something in the rubbish heap; and I go and look on at the big sales.

She had again addressed herself to the shelves, but her eyes now swept them inattentively, and he saw that she was preoccupied with a new idea.

And Americana—do you collect Americana?

Selden stared and laughed.

No, that’s rather out of my line. I’m not really a collector, you see; I simply like to have good editions of the books I am fond of.

She made a slight grimace. And Americana are horribly dull, I suppose?

I should fancy so—except to the historian. But your real collector values a thing for its rarity. I don’t suppose the buyers of Americana sit up reading them all night—old Jefferson Gryce certainly didn’t.

She was listening with keen attention. And yet they fetch fabulous prices, don’t they? It seems so odd to want to pay a lot for an ugly badly-printed book that one is never going to read! And I suppose most of the owners of Americana are not historians either?

No; very few of the historians can afford to buy them. They have to use those in the public libraries or in private collections. It seems to be the mere rarity that attracts the average collector.

He had seated himself on an arm of the chair near which she was standing, and she continued to question him, asking which were the rarest volumes, whether the Jefferson Gryce collection was really considered the finest in the world, and what was the largest price ever fetched by a single volume.

It was so pleasant to sit there looking up at her, as she lifted now one book and then another from the shelves, fluttering the pages between her fingers, while her drooping profile was outlined against the warm background of old bindings, that he talked on without pausing to wonder at her sudden interest in so unsuggestive a subject. But he could never be long with her without trying to find a reason for what she was doing, and as she replaced his first edition of La Bruyère and turned away from the bookcases, he began to ask himself what she had been driving at. Her next question was not of a nature to enlighten him. She paused before him with a smile which seemed at once designed to admit him to her familiarity, and to remind him of the restrictions it imposed.

Don’t you ever mind, she asked suddenly, not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?

He followed her glance about the room, with its worn furniture and shabby walls.

Don’t I just? Do you take me for a saint on a pillar?

And having to work—do you mind that?

Oh, the work itself is not so bad—I’m rather fond of the law.

No; but the being tied down: the routine—don’t you ever want to get away, to see new places and people?

Horribly—especially when I see all my friends rushing to the steamer.

She drew a sympathetic breath. But do you mind enough—to marry to get out of it?

Selden broke into a laugh. God forbid! he declared.

She rose with a sigh, tossing her cigarette into the grate.

Ah, there’s the difference—a girl must, a man may if he chooses. She surveyed him critically. Your coat’s a little shabby—but who cares? It doesn’t keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they don’t make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop—and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership.

Selden glanced at her with amusement: it was impossible, even with her lovely eyes imploring him, to take a sentimental view of her case.

Ah, well, there must be plenty of capital on the lookout for such an investment. Perhaps you’ll meet your fate to-night at the Trenors’.

She returned his look interrogatively.

I thought you might be going there—oh, not in that capacity! But there are to be a lot of your set—Gwen Van Osburgh, the Wetheralls, Lady Cressida Raith—and the George Dorsets.

She paused a moment before the last name, and shot a query through her lashes; but he remained imperturbable.

Mrs. Trenor asked me; but I can’t get away till the end of the week; and those big parties bore me.

Ah, so they do me, she exclaimed.

Then why go?

It’s part of the business—you forget! And besides, if I didn’t, I should be playing bézique with my aunt at Richfield Springs.

That’s almost as bad as marrying Dillworth, he agreed, and they both laughed for pure pleasure in their sudden intimacy.

She glanced at the clock.

Dear me! I must be off. It’s after five.

She paused before the mantelpiece, studying herself in the mirror while she adjusted her veil. The attitude revealed the long slope of her slender sides, which gave a kind of wild-wood grace to her outline—as though she were a captured dryad subdued to the conventions of the drawing-room; and Selden reflected that it was the same streak of sylvan freedom in her nature that lent such savour to her artificiality.

He followed her across the room to the entrance-hall; but on the threshold she held out her hand with a gesture of leave-taking.

It’s been delightful; and now you will have to return my visit.

But don’t you want me to see you to the station?

No, good-bye here, please.

She let her hand lie in his a moment, smiling up at him adorably.

Good-bye, then—and good luck at Bellomont! he said, opening the door for her.

On the landing she paused to look about her. There were a thousand chances to one against her meeting anybody, but one could never tell, and she always paid for her rare indiscretions by a violent reaction of prudence. There was no one in sight, however, but a char-woman who was scrubbing the stairs. Her own stout person and its surrounding implements took up so much room that Lily, to pass her, had to gather up her skirts and brush against the wall. As she did so, the woman paused in her work and looked up curiously, resting her clenched red fists on the wet cloth she had just drawn from her pail. She had a broad sallow face, slightly pitted with small-pox, and thin straw-coloured hair through which her scalp shone unpleasantly.

I beg your pardon, said Lily, intending by her politeness to convey a criticism of the other’s manner.

The woman, without answering, pushed her pail aside, and continued to stare as Miss Bart swept by with a murmur of silken linings. Lily felt herself flushing under the look. What did the creature suppose? Could one never do the simplest, the most harmless thing, without subjecting one’s self to some odious conjecture? Half way down the next flight, she smiled to think that a char-woman’s stare should so perturb her. The poor thing was probably dazzled by such an unwonted apparition. But were such apparitions unwonted on Selden’s stairs? Miss Bart was not familiar with the moral code of bachelors’ flat-houses, and her colour rose again as it occurred to her that the woman’s persistent gaze implied a groping among past associations. But she put aside the thought with a smile at her own fears, and hastened downward, wondering if she should find a cab short of Fifth Avenue.

Under the Georgian porch she paused again, scanning the street for a hansom. None was in sight, but as she reached the sidewalk she ran against a small glossy-looking man with a gardenia in his coat, who raised his hat with a surprised exclamation.

"Miss Bart? Well—of all people! This is luck," he declared; and she caught a twinkle of amused curiosity between his screwedup lids.

Oh, Mr. Rosedale—how are you? she said, perceiving that the irrepressible annoyance on her face was reflected in the sudden intimacy of his smile.

Mr. Rosedale stood scanning her with interest and approval. He was a plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type, with smart London clothes fitting him like upholstery, and small sidelong eyes which gave him the air of appraising people as if they were bric-a-brac. He glanced up interrogatively at the porch of the Benedick.

Been up to town for a little shopping, I suppose? he said, in a tone which had the familiarity of a touch.

Miss Bart shrank from it slightly, and then flung herself into precipitate explanations.

Yes—I came up to see my dress-maker. I am just on my way to catch the train to the Trenors’.

Ah—your dress-maker; just so, he said blandly. I didn’t know there were any dress-makers in the Benedick.

The Benedick? She looked gently puzzled. Is that the name of this building?

Yes, that’s the name: I believe it’s an old word for bachelor, isn’t it? I happen to own the building—that’s the way I know. His smile deepened as he added with increasing assurance: But you must let me take you to the station. The Trenors are at Bellomont, of course? You’ve barely time to catch the five-forty. The dress-maker kept you waiting, I suppose.

Lily stiffened under the pleasantry.

Oh, thanks, she stammered; and at that moment her eye caught a hansom drifting down Madison Avenue, and she hailed it with a desperate gesture.

You’re very kind; but I couldn’t think of troubling you, she said, extending her hand to Mr. Rosedale; and heedless of his protestations, she sprang into the rescuing vehicle, and called out a breathless order to the driver.

Chapter 2

In the hansom she leaned back with a sigh.

Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice? She had yielded to a passing impulse in going to Lawrence Selden’s rooms, and it was so seldom that she could allow herself the luxury of an impulse! This one, at any rate, was going to cost her rather more than she could afford. She was vexed to see that, in spite of so many years of vigilance, she had blundered twice within five minutes. That stupid story about her dress-maker was bad enough—it would have been so simple to tell Rosedale that she had been taking tea with Selden! The mere statement of the fact would have rendered it innocuous. But, after having let herself be surprised in a falsehood, it was doubly stupid to snub the witness of her discomfiture. If she had had the presence of mind to let Rosedale drive her to the station, the concession might have purchased his silence. He had his race’s accuracy in the appraisal of values, and to be seen walking down the platform at the crowded afternoon hour in the company of Miss Lily Bart would have been money in his pocket, as he might himself have phrased it. He knew, of course, that there would be a large house-party at Bellomont, and the possibility of being taken for one of Mrs. Trenor’s guests was doubtless included in his calculations. Mr. Rosedale was still at a stage in his social ascent when it was of importance to produce such impressions.

The provoking part was that Lily knew all this—knew how easy it would have been to silence him on the spot, and how difficult it might be to do so afterward. Mr. Simon Rosedale was a man who made it his business to know everything about every one, whose idea of showing himself to be at home in society was to display an inconvenient familiarity with the habits of those with whom he wished to be thought intimate. Lily was sure that within twenty-four hours the story of her visiting her dressmaker at the Benedick would be in active circulation among Mr. Rosedale’s acquaintances. The worst of it was that she had always snubbed and ignored him. On his first appearance—when her improvident cousin, Jack Stepney, had obtained for him (in return for favours too easily guessed) a card to one of the vast impersonal Van Osburgh crushes—Rosedale, with that mixture of artistic sensibility and business astuteness which characterizes his race, had instantly gravitated toward Miss Bart. She understood his motives, for her own course was guided by as nice calculations. Training and experience had taught her to be hospitable to newcomers, since the most unpromising might be useful later on, and there were plenty of available oubliettes to swallow them if they were not. But some intuitive repugnance, getting the better of years of social discipline, had made her push Mr. Rosedale into his oubliette without a trial. He had left behind only the ripple of amusement which his speedy despatch had caused among her friends; and though later (to shift the metaphor) he reappeared lower down the stream, it was only in fleeting glimpses, with long submergences between.

Hitherto Lily had been undisturbed by scruples. In her little set Mr. Rosedale had been pronounced impossible, and Jack Stepney roundly snubbed for his attempt to pay his debts in dinner invitations. Even Mrs. Trenor, whose taste for variety had led her into some hazardous experiments, resisted Jack’s attempts to disguise Mr. Rosedale as a novelty, and declared that he was the same little Jew who had been served up and rejected at the social board a dozen times within her memory; and while Judy Trenor was obdurate there was small chance of Mr. Rosedale’s penetrating beyond the outer limbo of the Van Osburgh crushes. Jack gave up the contest with a laughing You’ll see, and, sticking manfully to his guns, showed himself with Rosedale at the fashionable restaurants, in company with the personally vivid if socially obscure ladies who are available for such purposes. But the attempt had hitherto been vain, and as Rosedale undoubtedly paid for the dinners, the laugh remained with his debtor.

Mr. Rosedale, it will be seen, was thus far not a factor to be feared—unless one put one’s self in his power. And this was precisely what Miss Bart had done. Her clumsy fib had let him see that she had something to conceal; and she was sure he had a score to settle with her. Something in his smile told her he had not forgotten. She turned from the thought with a little shiver, but it hung on her all the way to the station, and dogged her down the platform with the persistency of Mr. Rosedale himself.

She had just time to take her seat before the train started; but having arranged herself in her corner with the instinctive feeling for effect which never forsook her, she glanced about in the hope of seeing some other member of the Trenors’ party. She wanted to get away from herself, and conversation was the only means of escape that she knew.

Her search was rewarded by the discovery of a very blond young man with a soft reddish beard, who, at the other end of the carriage, appeared to be dissembling himself behind an unfolded newspaper. Lily’s eye brightened, and a faint smile relaxed the drawn lines of her mouth. She had known that Mr. Percy Gryce was to be at Bellomont, but she had not counted on the luck of having him to herself in the train; and the fact banished all perturbing thoughts of Mr. Rosedale. Perhaps, after all, the day was to end more favourably than it had begun.

She began to cut the pages of a novel, tranquilly studying her prey through downcast lashes while she organized a method of attack. Something in his attitude of conscious absorption told her that he was aware of her presence: no one had ever been quite so engrossed in an evening paper! She guessed that he was too shy to come up to her, and that she would have to devise some means of approach which should not appear to be an advance on her part. It amused her to think that any one as rich as Mr. Percy Gryce should be shy; but she was gifted with treasures of indulgence for such idiosyncrasies, and besides, his timidity might serve her purpose better than too much assurance. She had the art of giving self-confidence to the embarrassed, but she was not equally sure of being able to embarrass the self-confident.

She waited till the train had emerged from the tunnel and was racing between the ragged edges of the northern suburbs. Then, as it lowered its speed near Yonkers, she rose from her seat and drifted slowly down the carriage. As she passed Mr. Gryce, the train gave a lurch, and he was aware of a slender hand gripping

Reviews for Three Novels of New York

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Even now, however, she was not always happy. She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.

As soon as I saw that the heroine's name was Undine Spragg I could tell that this book would be fun, and I was right. It is a satire about a social climbing golddigger from the mid-West and her attempts to marry into high society via several different husbands.

Undine is a nightmare and I started off pitying her poor parents, but then decided that they had brought it on themselves by spoiling her so badly. However, the story makes the serious point that if men keep their wives in the dark about their careers and everything else that is important to them, it is not surprising that their wives are empty-headed and vain as they have nothing but socialising to occupy themselves with. Undine is manipulative but stupid and would be no match for Becky Sharp, although she ends the book in a far better position in life than Becky did in Vanity Fair.

If you have the Oxford World Classics edition, leave the introduction until last as it is full of spoilers.

[bibleblaster · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Loved this depiction of a self-absorbed woman and the damage she leaves in her wake. The last chapter is a beautiful, subtle, realistic, heartbreaking answer to the question I carried throughout: "How will this end?"

[suesbooks · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

well written, but also tedious description of moneyed people in the early 20's. very few likable characters. even though i was very familiar with ethan frome for many years, this book held surprises for me. i certainly learned more history than i needed to learn.

[jonbrammer-788089 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was a tough one. Wharton is such a skilled writer with a keen observant eye for her social milieu, but I really think she missed her mark with Custom. I've had an ongoing argument with my partner about whether this could be considered a feminist work; I think it is one of her few novels that is pointedly anti-feminist, and more socially conservative. By creating the monstrous character of Undine Spragg, who is horrible in such an over-the-top way, Wharton seems to be satirizing the social climbers who are willing to trample on relations and customs in order to achieve material success. The older more established New York families seem to be the only ones who see Undine for what she is, and Ralph Marvell is the only truly good person, a tragic hero whose old ideas of marriage are not able to cope with Undine's need for riches and glory.

Some critics have called the novel a satire on marriage and divorce. Undine is a satirical character in that she is a pure consumption machine who has no character arc - she represents the voracious capitalism of the era that corrupts everyone who touches it. Elmer Moffat is the male counterpart, the crude business genius who confidently knows what he wants, which is more stuff. Everyone else resists Undine's corruption, although it is hinted that her neglected son Paul will eventually succumb to the amoral pursuits of his putative parents.

[naggedman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ghastly though our anti-heroine is, I found it difficult to put down. The end is a one-page triumph for the authot.
In this edition the editor's asterisks are somewhat irritating, leading to endnotes listed by page number, explaining such things as Pegasus was "the winged horse of the muses", which isn't quite the case!

[annbury_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Edith Wharton was did not like the "new rich" who were taking over New York around the turn of the century, and in "The Custom of the Country" she makes it very clear why. The heroine, Undine Spagg, a midwestern beauty who comes to New York in search of the social advancement she has always craved, is not likeable, but she is VERY compelling. The story traces the ups and downs of her quest for the level of social advancement that will finally make her happy. Along the way, the novel pillories the new rich, and holds the old rich up to a regretful examination. The book is a great read -- you may not like Undine, but you do want to find out what she does next -- and extremely witty. Wharton's ability to turn a phrase was unparalleled. I wish someone would -- could -- write a book like this about today's 1%.

[froxgirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Firstly: how can you fail to love a novel whose main character is UNDINE SPAGG? This story of manners and morals in Gilded Age Manhattan and Paris centers on a shallow woman whose beauty entraps the men who strive to install her in their trophy cases. Out of all her suitors, only the point of view of her first husband, Ralph, is heard. In his mundane upper class life, he seeks in Undine a purpose and a direction for himself, realizing too late, and tragically, that she sees nothing beyond improving her social standing and acquiring clothing and jewels. As she continues on her upward trajectory, Undine leaves behind the parents who funded her voyage and her young son. Obstacles in the form of her own transparency and the unforgiving social strictures trip her up, but never for long. The author sees her and the hypocrisy that surrounds her, especially in regards to the place of women of that time, all-powerful at evening soirees but with nothing to do but depend upon the business success of their husbands. A cruel world for sure, but most others are starving in unheated tenements, so it's hard to muster up much sympathy for Undine and her cohort.

[burritapal · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Meet the character Undine Spraggs, nickname Undie (lol). She's a spoiled rotten young woman who thinks that to succeed in this life, you only have to be beautiful. On the outside. Due to her parents inability to put down a firm foot on her constant "wants," she goes through her shallow, materialistic life using people. Parents are for giving you money, also husbands. If you don't give her enough, she will get rid of you and find a richer one. Her parents move to succeedingly downgraded hotels because of the money drain that is Undine Spraggs.

This is a deliciously-written novel, seriously hard to put down until the bitter end. Edith Wharton is a superb storyteller and observer of humans and their ridiculous foibles.

[sparemethecensor · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An enjoyable read though notably saying less than both Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth. A solid choice for a Wharton fan. Otherwise, read her more famous works -- they are, rightly, more lauded.

[beauxarts79 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of the best endings I've ever read.

[sjgirl-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed Undine’s self-absorption and social climbing, she’s consistently awful to anyone who loves her, manipulative and unapologetic which doesn’t make her likable but I didn’t mind that, there were moments I was eager for her plans to come to fruition and other times where I very much wanted them to blow up in her face so she made for an entertaining read.

However, as much as it entertained me to anticipate ups and downs in Undine’s life, in actuality, I wanted a bit more of an arc to the story. I don’t mean a growth arc for Undine, plenty of people in real life don’t change over time, I didn’t need her to change, but I did need the plot to change more than it did. With the exception of a life-changing decision made by one male character, for the most part the story followed the same pattern over and over. As mentioned, it wasn’t without entertainment value, I just felt like the plot could have used a few more sharp turns, a few more unexpected challenges for a character as formidable as Undine to bump up against. I wish the tides hadn’t always turned quite so easily for her, even a character made to seem from the start like they’re going to throw a wrench in the works for Undine, ultimately doesn’t prove to be much of a foe.

While the plot didn’t twist quite as regularly as I might have hoped, I’d still recommend reading this, at this point in time pop culture is overflowing with anti-heroes but there still aren’t that many anti-heroines out there and even the ones that do come to mind like Scarlet O’Hara, have the occasional redeeming moment, the same cannot be said of Undine, so in that respect her character is a fairly unique reading experience.

[tshrope · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Edith Wharton is truly a woman of letters. I cannot think of a contemporary writer who even comes close to matching her style and use of language. It is a pleasure to read her prose, and not difficult or archaic as some may think “Classic Novels” to be. Along with her beautiful prose is her keen insights into human nature, and her ability to skewer and satirize every social class with knowing intimacy.

Wharton daringly takes a wholly unlikeable and unsympathetic character, Undine Sprague, and makes her the main character of this novel. Undine is one of the most spoiled characters I have ever read about in a novel; she and Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair seem to be tied for this title. While Undine has brief flashes of insight and understanding of her world, her ambitions and those around her, they are very brief and she dismisses them quickly so as not to lose sight of the next rung up on the Social ladder in which she is ascending.

While this is not my favorite Wharton book, (Undine is just too unsympathetic for that) I would absolutely recommend it, if for no other reason than to read beautiful prose, something that seems to be a lost art today in “literary fiction.”

[brenzi_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

”Even now, she was not always happy. She had everything she wanted but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.”

Meet Undine Spragg, possibly the most unlikable woman in literature and that quote just about sums her up. She’s not completely happy because there may be something out there that she wants if only she actually knew about it. That quote comes up towards the end of the book but pretty much lays out the journey Wharton takes you on from the beginning. Undine cares about only one person. Undine. The rest of society is only there to supply her with an audience to note how beautiful and wonderful she is. She needs money; lots of it and beginning with her father, every man in her life needs to supply her with plenty of funds to buy the things she just has to have. I kept hoping someone was going to say, “Undine stop. There’s no money left for that.” But the bills just keep coming.

The fact that Edith Wharton is able to portray this self-centered social climber without making the reader throw the book against a wall is all to her credit. But isn’t that what Wharton always does? Whether it was Lily Bart in The House of Mirth or Ethan Frome and Zeena and Mattie she always manages a psychological portrait of her characters that will surprise, maybe shock, but will be in keeping with the ugly reality that is life, in this case life among the wealthy of New York and Paris in 1913. You know it’s satire but it’s all so believable I had to wonder if Wharton knew people like Undine.

The writing, as is always the case with Edith Wharton, is sublime and the pages practically turn themselves. Very highly recommended.

[beyondedenrock · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Oh Undine!

I have to address you, but I must confess that I am very nearly lost for words. I have never met anyone quite like you – in fact or in fiction – and you have made such an impression. You really are a force of nature. You had to be, to have lived the life that you have lived.

Looking back it’s hard to believe that you were the daughter of a self-made man, that you came from Apex in North Carolina. But, of course, you were the apple of your parents’ eyes, and they were prepared to invest everything they had, and to do without themselves, to help you reach the very highest echelons of New York society.

You always got what you wanted. Always.

Did you appreciate what they did for you? Did you understand how much they sacrifice? I think not; there was nothing in your words, your actions, your demeanour to suggest that you did.

At first I was inclined to blame your parents for spoiling you, but I came to realise that it wasn’t them, it was you. I began to feel sorry for them.

You made some mistakes as you climbed the ladder, because you didn’t quite understand quite how that rarefied society worked, but you were a wonderfully quick learner. You changed your behaviour, your appearance, your expectations, to become the person you wanted to be, the person you needed to be, to achieve your ambitions.

And you succeeded. You drew the attention of Ralph Marvell, the son of one of the oldest, grandest families in New York. He loved your beauty, your difference; and you loved everything that he stood for. And so you married …..

Sadly, it wasn’t a happy ending.

You didn’t understand that the families at the pinnacle of society were not the wealthiest. You couldn’t understand that Ralph didn’t share your ambitions – I don’t think that you even realised that was possible – and certainly it was quite beyond your comprehension that he dreamed of a writing a novel. He never did, he had not one iota of your drive and ambition, and I suspect that he lacked the talent. Ralph drifted through life, disappointed that he could not expand your narrow horizons, that he could not open your eyes to the beauty of the art and literature that he loved.

He was part of an old order that was dying, and you were part of a new order that would adapt and survive. You learned how to bend and even change society’s rules to allow you to do exactly what you wanted to do. You really didn’t understand him, you broke him, and my heart broke for him.

I even began to feel at little sorry for you, despite your selfishness, because there was so much that you didn’t understand. There are more important things than money, luxury, fashion, and social position. Things can’t really make you happy, because there will always be other things to want, there will always be things beyond your reach. You learned so much, but you never learned that.

There would be more marriages, more travels, more possessions ….

There would be more damage. My heart broke again, for the son you so often seemed to forget you had. And though you would never admit it, you were damaged by your own actions. But you were a survivor Undine, weren’t you?

You did learn a little; I learned a little about your past, and I came to feel that I understood you a little better; most of all, I do think that when you finally married the right man it made all the difference. It wasn’t quite enough for me to say that I liked you, but I was always fascinated by you.

Now I find myself wanting to do what Alice did at the end of ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I want to throw you in the air and say, “You’re just a fictional character!” But I can’t. Because you are so utterly real; not a heroine, not a villainess, but a vivid, three-dimensional human being, with strengths and weaknesses.

You are perfectly realised; your world and everything, everything around you is perfectly realised. The telling of your story is compelling, beautiful and so very profound. It speaks of its times and it has things to say that are timeless. Because, though times may change, human nature stays the same.

Edith Wharton was a genius – it’s as simple as that.

[gbill_7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If you’re the kind of person who gets angry while reading about annoying characters to the point of wanting to punch them in their fictitious faces, don’t read this book. Wharton does paint an enduring portrait of a gold digger in Undine Spragg, but at 500+ pages, it gets to be a little much. She also satirizes ‘new money’ in America, both how it was made, through unscrupulous backroom deals and connections, as well as its lack of grace and culture. Undine has an extraordinary amount of ambition, but as a woman can only channel this by using her charms to marry a rich man, and someone with connections in society. As with all greedy, selfish people, no amount of material possessions are ever enough for Undine, and she can only improve her situation by divorcing and remarrying, something that carries a stigma in America and is not possible in France, where she lives for a portion of the novel. Wharton’s writing is great, but none of the characters are likeable, so it’s a bit of a masochistic read. It’s the 8th novel I’ve read by her and was far from a disappointment, but I would recommend ‘The Age of Innocence’, ‘The House of Mirth’, ‘The Reef’, or good old ‘Ethan Frome’ instead.

Quotes:
On beauty, a sign of the times then (and again now), and I liked the last phrase:
“She was tall enough to carry off a little extra weight, but excessive slimness was the fashion, and she shuddered at the thought that she might some day deviate from the perpendicular.”

And this one, on being admired:
“What could be more delightful than to feel that, while all the women envied her dress, the men did not so much as look at it?”

On men:
“He put it to her at last, standing squarely before her, his batrachian sallowness unpleasantly flushed, and primitive man looking out of the eyes from which a frock-coated gentleman usually pined at her.”

On moments of rapture, and writing; the best passage of the book:
“It was one of those moments when the accumulated impressions of life converge on heart and brain, elucidating, enlacing each other, in a mysterious confusion of beauty. He had had glimpses of such a state before, of such mergings of the personal with the general life that one felt one’s self a mere wave on the wild stream of being, yet thrilled with a sharper sense of individuality than can be known within the mere bounds of the actual. But now he knew the sensation in its fullness, and with it came the releasing power of language. Words were flashing like brilliant birds through the boughs overhead; he had but to wave his magic wand to have them flutter down to him. Only they were so beautiful up there, weaving their fantastic flights against the blue, that it was pleasanter, for the moment, to watch them and let the wand lie.”

[idiotgirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is such a depressing book. You know why someone like Undine exists. And so you "cut her some slack." But she is so horrible. It makes you angry that she exists. And then you feel so bad for her husbands (a string of them) and her little boy. I'm glad I have lived in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Reading Wharton and James over the past few weeks. She is so good.

[etxgardener · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is, perhaps, Edith Wharton's most scathing satire of haute bourgeoisie society of all the novels she wrote. I have seen it compared to The House of Mirth but while Lily Barth was bad (but probably not bad enough), Undine Spragg is just plain awful: shallow, uneducated, vulgar and totally narcissistic. She lives in her own selfish world that must unceasingly revolve around herself.

Unfortunately, like many beautiful women she has a string of enablers - starting with her parents who bend to her every whim. The novel chronicles her rise from a midwestern city (Chicago? Cleveland?) to New York where she marries into an old New York family (Think the Welland family from The Age of Innocence only with a whole lot less money). She quickly becomes disillusioned with him, and moves onto greener pastures with a French aristocrat, only to see that his expectations of domestic life do not meet her expectations of how she wants to live.

Finally we find her with husband number three - a vulgar Donald rump-like character - who is very rich and understands that he will only hold onto her as long as his money holds out. Along the way, Undine leaves a trail of destruction in her wake: suicide, bankruptcy,a neglected child and ruined parents. Up to the very end, she is neither satisfied, nor is she sorry for anything that she does.

In today's age of income inequality and narcissistic culture, this book, written 100 years ago is just as relevant to day as when it was written in 1912.

[lara335 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Edith Wharton paints a fascinating anti-heroine in Udine. Ambitious, totally selfish and self-deceiving Udine sets out to conquer Society in both America and turn-of-the-century France. Divorcing her husbands and neglecting her child to achieve superficial supremacy if not personal satisfaction.

[pgchuis · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

** spoiler alert ** The story of Undine Spragg, possibly the most self-centred heroine I have ever encountered, who forces her long-suffering parents to move to New York so that she can meet "the best people". She marries Ralph, from an "old family" and has a son with him, but divorces him because he is too poor. She plans to marry her lover, Peter, but he drops her and so, after much strategizing on her part she marries a French nobleman, Raymond. Raymond too fails to keep her in the style she had expected, so she ditches him for the dubious Elmer Moffatt, to whom, it is revealed towards the end, she was briefly married as a teenager. Even with his riches, she is dissatisfied and the final page sees her furious that as a divorcee she can never be the wife of an ambassador.

Things I liked about this novel:

Undine's realisation that Raymond and his friends are bored by her because she is ignorant and has no interests or conversation.

The fact that Peter ditches her (or at least says he does) because of her heartless disregard for her husband when he is so ill.

The comments that: Undine regards money as something the men in her life must provide for her and she is wholly uninterested in how it is earned/obtained; American men keep their women ignorant about money and thus value them and their intelligence less than Europeans do their wives.

On the other hand:

Ralph's suicide came out of nowhere and seemed precipitate - surely he knew Undine didn't really want Paul?

Presumably Undine's divorce from Elmer meant that her marriage to Raymond in the RC church was unlawful. This doesn't affect the plot because the divorce was kept secret, but were we supposed to note this?

[jaysbooks · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

about a horrible, selfish social climber--main character is so annoying that I could barely force myself to finish the book--proves that women today are lucky to be educated with careers so they can divert their energy toward better things than parties clothes and status

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton tells the story of Undine Spragg, a Midwestern girl who attempts to scale the heights of New York City society. Undine is one of the most unique characters I have come across. Beautiful, selfish, and ignorant. She is terribly spoiled and seems incapable of understanding the consequences of her actions. She has no empathy and leaves a wake of damaged lives behind her. She repulsed me with her nastiness, yet I had to read on and find out what she was going to do next.

As we follow Undine through first one husband and then another, I kept waiting for her to learn a life lesson or two, but instead she always seems to think that her wishes must come first, that money should always be available to her and that her beauty entitled her to anything she wanted. Undine always seems to get what she wanted, but she also was quickly dissatisfied. Motherhood did nothing either mature her and I felt very sorry for her son, Paul. Wharton never wavered in keeping Undine true to her vision, even at the end of the book, the reader is given a glimpse of Undine that allows us to know that she will never be satisfied with the status quo.

Wharton delivers her story beautifully and uses her wit and insight to give us a sharp look at upper crust society as the nouveau riche come up against the old guard. I enjoyed this book immensely and will keep Undine Spragg on the memory shelf alongside of Scarlett O’Hara and Becky Sharp.

[robindawson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How does Wharton do it? In Undine Spregg she has created a very unsympathetic character - selfish, spoiled, cruel, materialistic, heartless – who turns over husbands much as she does dresses and discards her child – and yet Wharton’s Undine is fascinating and unforgettable.

Though Undine is a ruthless social climber the quality of the prose, the exquisite characterisations, the vivid scenes and exchanges, the variety of viewpoints are all so good one can only continue. And Undine is never indecisive – the story never wavers or palls because she never takes her eye from the next prize.

But Wharton loves to throw the cat among the pigeons. She is also using Undine to comment on the social mores of the time. She shows how the nature of business is shifting, and the nouveau riche are pushing aside the stuffy old guard. She also draws some interesting comparisons between American and Europe society. Wharton combines superb prose with an acute understanding of human character.

[timjones_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I like Edith Wharton's writing very much, and this novel has many of her strengths, but I struggled with it because of Edith Wharton's relentless snobbery towards her main character, Undine Spragg, a loathsome and predatory specimen of the "nouveau riche" who preys on and ingratiates herself into classy but faded old-money New York society.

Edith Wharton directs (or at least strongly nudges) the reader to hate Unidine and take the side of her victims, but the old rich of New York are no better than the nouveau riche in my view: their old money ultimately derives from expropriating Native American land, so why should I sympathise with them?

Thus, although Undine is most certainly far from likable, I found myself with a sneaking admiration for her, and felt that, portrayed by another author with a broader range of human sympathies, she could have emerged as a heroic, or at least anti-heroic, character. I'll fight you for her, Edith!

[rubyscarlett-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Oh, Edith. Why does it always seem like you're speaking to me directly, that your books are your end of our correspondence, that your heroines are mere reflections of the person I truly am? Why, oh, why can you find just the tender spot, the flaw I wish I didn't have and then show me what would happen if I didn't keep it in check? How can you crash into my life at the very moment I need it most? The Custom of the Country reads like a cautionary tale and yet it's impossible for me to blame the heroine as I see too much of myself in her. Undine's childish belief that a fat bank account buys happiness, her blind refusal to really deeply consider that money does not grow on trees, her selfish yet brave belief that she must be happy no matter what even if she hurts everyone that stands in her way, all down to her eternal quest for an unreachable satisfaction with her lot. This is a brilliant book because it reads like a tragedy that's full of stuff and I revel in material things, however much I wish I didn't. Details of dresses lined in a wardrobe 'like so many unfulfilled promises', exquisite art, theatre, food, houses. It's an orgy of aristocratic detail the inherent dizziness of which plays into the ultimate catastrophe and the spiralling fall. It's about climbing a neverending ladder to the stars and not being able to appreciate the world in between. The writing is marvellous, the emotions raw. Oh, what a treat that was.

[donnab317 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is fabulous book - masterfully crafted, eloquently written, and I am just sorry I haven't read more of her book, but I will remeday that. I sumply must read more (all) of Edith Warton's works. Her writing is beautiful and succinct; her characters are well built and interesting.

[erickibler · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is another dip into the Lifetime Reading Plan well.

Undine Spragg is a beautiful but spoiled little Midwestern bourgeois princess. She goads her parents into relocating to New York City, where she hopes to realize her dream of marrying well, entering "society" as she sees it, and living a life of ease and entertainment, surrounded by all the things lots and lots of money can buy.

A succession of marital adventures (each with an aristocrat of a different type) teach her nothing about living a truly fulfilling life. Undine is sort of a proto-Scarlett O'Hara. But unlike Scarlett, she never undergoes any refining hardship, and thus, never develops her character into someone the reader can truly like.

This is a didactic book, in which Wharton shows us how the prevailing definitions and behaviors of success in business create such "perfect monsters" as Undine. A perceptive mouthpiece of a character states this theme outright in the first third of the book. "The custom of the country" has created her. The remainder of the book merely hammers the lesson home over and over again. Although there are some surprises and reversals, Undine is allowed to remain the same spoiled Undine she was from the beginning.

[eenee_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I liked that this book was set in New York and Edith Wharton was obviously very clever. But overall, I just didn’t dig this book much. There is something about the story of “vapid but beautiful jerk that always gets her way” that just doesn't do it for me. Snooze.

[kasthu_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read The Customs of the Country before I learned that Edith Wharton was the subject of the September issue of Vogue magazine, entitled “The Customs of the Country.” I just about died. How did I not know about this before???? Supermodel Natalia Vodianova plays Edith Wharton, and several famous actors and authors play various people in her life, including Jeffrey Eugenides as Henry James (gasp! A win-win combination in my book, pun intended). It looks as though Edith Wharton is having a bit of a revival at the moment; a cache of her letters has been published recently, in conjunction with the fact that this year is the 150th anniversary of her birth. In addition, Vintage Classics have reprinted several of her novels, including this one, Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, and The Age of Innocence, all with simple and simply beautiful covers.

Edith Wharton was notoriously both fascinated by and contemptuous of New York society, and The Customs of the Country is another such novel in which she skewers her characters and the world in which they live. The Customs of the Country is the story of Undine Spragg, a rapaciously acquisitive young woman who constantly strives for more. She and her parents come to New York City, having recently hit the apex of society in the aptly-named midwestern town of Apex, and Undine is on a quest to marry well and acquire money and power. Yet Undine is constantly an outsider looking in, someone that true high-class New York society doesn’t take completely seriously.

She marries Ralph Marvel, a man with whom she couldn’t be more incompatible. Ralph’s family have come down in the world, and Ralph is an artistic type who would rather be composing poetry than working a 9-5 job on Wall Street. The novel chronicles Undine’s adventures in marriage, her scandalous affairs, from New York to France and back again. Meanwhile, a shocking secret from Undine's path threatens to reveal itself and spoil all her plans.

I was intrigued by the author's choice of the name Undine for her protagonist. An undine is a water spirit, said to gain a soul by marrying and having a child. So you might easily see the connection between the mythological creature and Undine Spragg and the hope that Wharton might have had for her main character as she created her. There's also the German folktale of Ondine, in which a woman curses her unfaithful husband to cease breathing. Shoe-on-the-other-foot syndrome, maybe? You get the sense that Edith Wharton was not only fascinated with the monster she created, but repelled by her actions at the same time. As such, the reader doesn’t quite know whether to dislike Undine or laugh at her, because half the time her antics are really quite ridiculous. At the end of the day, though, the reader has to wonder: what’s all of this social striving for? To what end? That’s why this novel is sometimes tinged with a hint of sadness.

[dablackwood · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this book despite the main character being totally unappealing. Funny how Wharton can make her female characters so superficial and unlikable and yet, as a woman, I continue to read and enjoy the book. Her writing is so elegant. So many times I wanted to thank her for saying something so beautifully and spot on.

[hemlokgang · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Edith Wharton's damning portrait of the never satisfied, social climbing, money grubbing American is an excellent read. Follow the marital career of Undine Spragg and cringe throughout the entire story. Undine represents all that is base and ugly about the upstart American women contrasted with the elegant, complex European social system. I particularly love the closing, as Undine ponders her awareness that there is one thing she cannot have. She cannot be the wife of an asmbassador because she has been divorced. How crushing! To me, this is a harsher, blunter Edith Wharton than I am used to, yet still wonderful!