The Custom of the Country

Edith Wharton's lacerating satire on marriage and materialism in turn-of-the-century New York features her most selfish, ruthless, and irresistibly outrageous female character.

Undine Spragg is an exquisitely beautiful but ferociously acquisitive young woman from the Midwest who comes to New York to seek her fortune. She achieves her social ambitions--but only at the highest cost to her family, her admirers, and her several husbands. Wharton lavished on Undine an imaginative energy that suggests she was as fascinated as she was appalled by the alluring monster she had created. It is the complexity of her attitude that makes The Custom of the Country--with its rich social and emotional detail and its headlong narrative power--one of the most fully realized and resonant of her works.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: 06/05/2012
ISBN: 9780307949547
Pages: 432
Weight: 0.71lbs
Size: 8.13h x 5.13w x 0.97d