Edith Wharton (1862-1937) is a central figure in American literature, a masterful chronicler of her age and prolific writer in many modes. Her major works include The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), The Custom of the Country (1913) and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize, the first awarded to a woman.

Hermione Lee, editor of this volume, is President of Wolfson College, Oxford, a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, and the author of acclaimed biographies of Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Edith Wharton. - (Penguin Putnam)