Edith Wharton Books in Order

Co edited with Arthur C. Rauscher, this book assembles Wharton’s finest supernatural fiction, sometimes alongside kindred pieces. It is aimed at readers who want the shivery side of her work gathered in one place.

Edited late in her life, *Ghosts* presents Wharton’s own selection of her most chilling tales, from "The Lady’s Maid’s Bell" to "All Souls'." The stories use haunted houses and apparitions to explore loneliness, bad marriages, and the past that refuses to stay buried.

This modern selection draws from Wharton’s several volumes of verse, choosing poems that range from light society pieces to grave reflections on war and age. It offers a concise introduction to her work as a poet.

Drawn from articles written at the front in 1915, this book records Wharton’s trips through wartime France. She visits towns near the trenches, hospitals, and ruined villages, offering a civilian’s clear eyed view of courage, devastation, and daily endurance.

An early gathering of Wharton’s poetry, *Verses* includes occasional pieces, love lyrics, and meditations on art. The volume shows another side of a writer better known for prose.

Issued here as a stand alone, "Roman Fever" follows two middle aged American women chatting above the Roman Forum while their daughters sightsee. Their polite talk gradually reveals a buried rivalry and a secret that overturns one woman’s understanding of her life.

This omnibus gathers a wide range of Wharton’s short fiction in one place. From early society pieces to late ghost stories, it showcases the consistency of her eye for motive and consequence.

In this reflective short story, an aging man looks back on the love he did not quite claim and the compromises that followed. Wharton turns a single encounter into a quiet study of regret and the stories people tell themselves about their lives.

A varied sampler of novellas, tales, and sketches, this collection is designed for readers who want manageable pieces rather than complete novels. It highlights Wharton’s ability to compress a whole life or social world into a few pages.

In this Gothic tale, a Renaissance duchess kneels before a sculpted tomb built by her jealous husband. Legend says the stone figure may one day move, and Wharton turns that rumor into a story about confinement, vengeance, and the cost of beauty.

Set largely within the dim privacy of a confessional, this short story traces how a secret told in search of absolution can instead become a tool of power. Wharton explores the line between spiritual guidance and human manipulation.

A dutiful granddaughter has spent her life guarding the memory of a once famous scholar in a decaying New England house. When a stranger arrives, her sense of purpose and sacrifice is quietly put to the test.

Published here on its own, the title story from *The Descent of Man, and Other Stories* follows a scientist whose supposed discovery makes him famous. Wharton uses his predicament to poke fun at intellectual fashion and moral spinelessness.

This slim volume presents the title sequence from *Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses*, meditating on the myth of the hunter destroyed for an illicit glimpse. The poems turn classical stories into reflections on desire, punishment, and looking.

A late volume of stories, *The World Over* ranges from New York and New England to Europe. It includes celebrated pieces such as "Pomegranate Seed" and "Roman Fever," in which apparently settled lives are overturned by a letter, a memory, or an evening’s conversation.

This themed collection gathers Wharton’s most atmospheric Gothic and ghostly fiction. Isolated houses, uneasy marriages, and inherited curses recur as she shows how the past clings to people and places.

This volume pairs two contrasted stories: a chilling winter ghost tale in "The Triumph of Night" and the comic social satire "Xingu." Together they showcase Wharton’s range from supernatural unease to drawing room farce.

The title story, "The Pelican," follows a widowed lecturer who feeds her child and her own pride by recycling the same improving talk. The other pieces in the volume continue Wharton’s amused yet pointed look at self sacrifice and self deception.

Centered on "The Mission of Jane," this book collects stories about children who unexpectedly reshape the adults around them. Whether adopted, abandoned, or simply inconvenient, they reveal hidden motives in the families that take them in.

Built around "The Last Asset," this collection explores reputation as a kind of currency. Ruined financiers, compromised wives, and shrewd go betweens all gamble with the one thing they have left to trade.

Wharton’s first collection of fiction gathers eight early stories, including "The Muse’s Tragedy" and "Souls Belated." They already show her interest in mismatched marriages, artists and their patrons, and the small choices that bind people more tightly than they expect.

In "The Dilettante" and its companion tales, cultured talkers and half committed lovers shy away from hard decisions. Wharton shows how charming hesitation can shade into selfishness.

Taking its title from a story about predatory charm, this volume gathers tales in which attractive figures use others as prey. Behind the polite settings, Wharton tracks cruelty, vanity, and the excuses people make for both.

The title story portrays an elderly widow whose joy in life is the view from her rear window, threatened by new building plans. The surrounding tales likewise find drama in small lives and overlooked corners of the city.

A new owner of a remote English house finds the servants curiously devoted to the unseen steward, Mr. Jones. As she probes the household’s routines, Wharton slowly reveals whether this invisible presence is living, dead, or something in between.

The title piece reimagines the life of a medieval penitent, while the accompanying stories move through more modern settings. Together they consider sin, repentance, and the stories societies tell about "fallen" women.

These stories revolve around inheritance, both of money and of character. Sons and daughters discover what it means to be "their father's child" when faced with choices about work, loyalty, and love.

War and peace form the backdrop of these stories about people returning to homes that are no longer quite the same. Wharton looks at soldiers, families, and exiles who must renegotiate their place after upheaval.

Written with architect Ogden Codman Jr., this classic design manual argues for rooms planned around proportion, light, and architectural detail instead of heavy Victorian clutter. Wharton urges readers to see decoration as an extension of the house’s structure, not as mere surface.

Part 2 of the early short fiction collects additional stories from Wharton’s first decade as a writer. These pieces reveal her experimenting with voice and structure while already preoccupied with marriage, money, and mismatched expectations.

An early, once unpublished society novel, *Fast and Loose* sketches flirtations, gossip, and mixed motives among rich Americans at play. It shows Wharton learning how to turn light comedy about engagements and misunderstandings into something sharper.

This Library of America style volume brings together several major novels and stories in a single authoritative edition. It is intended as a durable core collection for readers building a Wharton library.

A clergyman and those around him wrestle with how much of an inherited belief can change before it ceases to be itself. Wharton uses their conflict to ask what, if anything, is the lasting "seed" at the heart of a faith.

A widowed gentlewoman clings to what she believes is a valuable Rembrandt painting as her final protection against poverty. When experts and opportunists begin circling, Wharton exposes the mix of pride, self delusion, and genuine feeling behind her resolve.

This story follows people displaced from their familiar world, whether by war, scandal, or personal failure, who seek shelter in a new setting. Wharton is less interested in politics than in how exile reshapes identity and attachment.

After a serious illness, a man rejoins society only to find that his closest relationships have shifted in his absence. The tale explores what can and cannot be "recovered" once time and self knowledge have done their work.

A worldly American in Paris is asked to rescue a young girl’s marriage prospects by hiding her father’s disgrace. The story turns on reputation as a family’s "last asset," and what it costs to shore it up.

In this satirical sketch, professional "introducers" broker social connections between ambitious Americans and the European circles they long to enter. The business of arranging acquaintance becomes a commentary on snobbery and the price of climbing.

This collection brings together shorter pieces in which solitary figures, disappointed lovers, and social outsiders are pushed into defining moments. The title story, set in a medieval landscape, stands beside more modern tales of compromise and escape.

On the eve of a fashionable wedding, an unexpected revelation forces the supposed "best man" to decide where his loyalty really lies. Honor, friendship, and self interest collide in a few pressured hours.

This story centers on a woman who has entrusted her future to the judgment of others, only to find those guardians pursuing their own interests. Wharton dissects the quiet pressures that can make "trust" another word for control.

This edition pairs *Ethan Frome* with a group of shorter works that echo its themes of isolation, moral conflict, and harsh landscapes. It is a compact introduction to Wharton’s darker side.

A modern wife proudly negotiates a marriage that allows both partners freedom, only to discover that freedom cuts both ways. When her husband invokes the same terms, she faces an emotional reckoning she never anticipated.

Set in Venice, this short tale follows a traveler drawn into a web of charm, self deception, and perhaps the supernatural. Wharton plays with the city’s reputation for masked pleasures and half seen dangers.

Volume 1 presents early and middle period stories, including many that established Wharton’s reputation. Readers can watch her move from drawing room comedy to the colder ironies of *Ethan Frome* and the ghost tales.

Volume 2 of this set continues the chronological selection of Wharton’s stories, moving into her mature and late work. The pieces show her sharpening interest in divorce, travel, and the unease just beneath comfortable surfaces.

Choosing from dozens of tales, this volume highlights Wharton’s finest short fiction, from New York society pieces to eerie ghost stories. It is a handy starting point for readers who know only the major novels.

Here Wharton turns anthologist, selecting and commenting on English poems that treat love and desire. The book reflects her taste as a reader and offers a window onto the poetic tradition that shaped her own language.

Wharton’s final, unfinished novel follows a group of exuberant American "buccaneer" heiresses who cross the Atlantic in search of titled husbands. As they crash into English aristocratic life, the story questions what marriage, money, and freedom will finally mean for them.

This anthology gathers many of Wharton’s finest tales of the supernatural, including "Kerfol," "Afterward," and "Mr. Jones." The ghosts rarely shriek; instead they embody guilt, neglect, or buried history, bringing a slow chill to otherwise polished social settings.

This large collection brings together many of Wharton’s best stories from across her career, including classics of society, ghostly unease, and New England hardship. It is a one volume tour of her shorter work.

Covering her later decades, this volume gathers stories written during and after World War I. The settings range from Fifth Avenue apartments to European spas, with themes of aging, memory, and the long shadows of earlier choices.

In the title story, a man with an unusual sensitivity to unseen presences becomes entangled in another family’s secrets. The volume as a whole offers a compact introduction to Wharton’s way of linking ghostly impressions to buried wrongdoing.

Centered on the marital bargain of "The Reckoning," this collection presents stories in which women test the limits of the roles offered to them. Freedom, once granted, turns out to be more complicated than anyone expects.

Selected from across her career, these stories return to the brownstones, boarding houses, and offices of New York. Together they trace the city’s shift from gaslit parlors to modern skyscrapers while keeping a sharp focus on who wins and who loses in that changing world.

Centered on the famous tale "Roman Fever," in which two old friends in Rome revisit a youthful rivalry, this volume collects some of Wharton’s finest shorter fiction. The stories probe friendship, adultery, and long hidden secrets with a few deft strokes.

A substantial omnibus, this volume collects several of Wharton’s novellas along with essays and shorter pieces. It is designed for readers who want a broad sampling of her middle length fiction beyond the best known novels.

Wharton’s memoir looks back on the places and people that shaped her rather than offering a confessional diary. She recalls Old New York, The Mount, her life in France, and friendships with writers such as Henry James, giving readers a companion to the worlds of her fiction.

This collection gathers later stories in which Wharton examines jealousy, aging, and small acts of betrayal with a cool eye. Set in postwar drawing rooms, ships, and hotels, the tales show how "human nature" stubbornly resists the ideals people claim to live by.

A sequel to *Hudson River Bracketed*, this novel follows Vance Weston and Halo Tarrant as they try to build a life together in Europe and New York. Success, money troubles, and old ties test whether artistic vocation and shared ideals are enough to sustain their unconventional union.

A late collection of six stories, *Certain People* ranges from drawing room tension to the uncanny. Each tale turns on a social misstep, an old obsession, or a half acknowledged fear that reveals more about its "certain" circle than they ever intend.

This novel follows Vance Weston, a young Midwestern writer, as he discovers the Hudson Valley, an eccentric old house, and the literary world of New York. His ambitions and relationships force him to weigh artistic integrity against comfort, reputation, and the pull of the past.

Engineer Martin Boyne meets seven lively Wheater children, step and half siblings shuttled between divorced parents around Europe. Drawn into their schemes to stay together, he finds his affections shifting from an old love to the eldest girl, raising troubling questions about love and responsibility.

Set in Jazz Age New York, this novel follows an over scheduled philanthropist, her drifting husband, their restless daughter, and a circle of friends chasing painless solutions to every problem. Divorce, spiritual fads, and cosmetic fixes become symptoms of a deeper refusal to face reality.

Gathering "The Triumph of Night" with other ghostly and psychological pieces, this volume presents Wharton’s colder, more wintry tales. Snowy landscapes, lonely houses, and sudden revelations link the stories.

This collection mixes realistic and supernatural stories, some set firmly in New York and others shading into the uncanny. The "here" and the "beyond" in the title suggest both social boundaries and the thin line between life and what may follow it.

In a remote desert house, a visiting Englishman notices small oddities in the behavior of his taciturn servant. A simple bottle of mineral water becomes the key to a tense mystery about loyalty, madness, and survival.

Drawing on her long experience, Wharton lays out clear, practical thoughts on how short stories and novels work. She discusses structure, character, and technique, using examples from classic authors to show how crafted fiction can move readers without tricks or shortcuts.

After twenty years of self imposed exile on the Riviera, Kate Clephane is called back to New York by the daughter she once abandoned. When she discovers the young woman plans to marry the man Kate herself once loved, mother love and desire collide in a painful choice.

One of the *Old New York* novellas, this story traces how a seemingly ordinary young man is quietly transformed by a brief encounter with poet Walt Whitman during the Civil War. Years later, that memory gives him the courage to act when decency is at stake.

This book collects the four Old New York novellas, each set in a different nineteenth century decade. Together they chart shifting codes of art, love, and respectability in the same close knit circle that later appears in *The Age of Innocence*.

Told in retrospect, this *Old New York* novella revisits a long whispered scandal involving a married woman seen fleeing a hotel fire with another man. As an older observer learns more, the story becomes a meditation on misjudgment, loyalty, and the price of appearances.

In the 1840s, eager young Lewis Raycie is sent to Europe to buy fashionable paintings that will secure his father’s legacy. Guided instead by new ideas about art, he returns with unknown works that scandalize his family and alter his own fate.

In wartime Paris, portrait painter John Campton watches his only son be claimed by two fathers, himself and the boy’s wealthy stepfather, and then by the army. The novel follows the strain of loving someone sent to the front and the unequal sacrifices made on the home front.

Set in mid nineteenth century New York, this novella centers on Charlotte Lovell, who secretly bears a child, and her cousin Delia, who adopts the girl and passes her off as her own. Years of shared deception bind and poison their relationship as the daughter grows up.

Newlyweds Nick Lansing and Susy Branch, long on charm but short on cash, agree to live off the hospitality of rich friends and to part amicably if a better match appears for either of them. Their clever bargain is tested when real love and jealousy complicate the plan.

In 1870s New York, lawyer Newland Archer is engaged to dutiful May Welland when her unconventional cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, returns from Europe in quiet disgrace. His attraction to Ellen forces him to choose between passion and the suffocating loyalties of Old New York.

A selection of Wharton’s travel writing from several decades, this volume ranges from Italian hill towns to the French front in World War I. The pieces show how closely her feeling for place is tied to her sense of history, art, and everyday detail.

Based on a month long journey at the end of World War I, this travel narrative leads readers through Moroccan cities, ceremonies, and landscapes. Wharton records what she sees with an eye for architecture and ritual at a moment when an old world is beginning to change.

Written during and after the First World War, this short book explains everyday French habits, values, and manners to American readers. Wharton contrasts ideas about family, work, taste, and honesty, arguing that France’s strengths go far beyond battlefield heroism.

A young American who once spent happy summers in France longs to help when war breaks out. Too young at first to enlist, he later returns as a Red Cross ambulance driver at the Second Battle of the Marne, forcing him to face the cost of the loyalty he romanticized.

Charity Royall, restless and poor, longs to escape her small New England town when a visiting architect awakens her desire. As their affair leads to pregnancy and hard choices, Wharton traces a young woman’s sexual and moral awakening without easy consolation.

Here the biting comedy "Xingu" is joined by a range of other pieces about book clubs, marriages of convenience, and social pretenders. The collection highlights Wharton’s lighter touch without losing her moral edge.

In this sharp comedy, a pretentious ladies’ lunch club is thrown into confusion when a visiting author mentions something called "Xingu." Too proud to admit their ignorance, the members tie themselves in knots trying to prove they already know all about it.

Edited by Wharton during World War I, this anthology gathers essays, poems, art, and music by leading European and American figures. Proceeds originally supported civilian refugees, and the book remains a snapshot of cultural solidarity in wartime.

This volume brings together *Madame de Treymes* with three other shorter works set largely in Europe. Each novella explores clashes between American expectations and Old World codes in matters of marriage, money, and personal freedom.

Visiting an old Breton manor, a traveler hears the legend of a jealous husband, his young wife, and a pack of uncanny dogs. Blending courtroom testimony and ghostly revenge, the story suggests that cruelty can echo for centuries.

In a shabby New York shop, sisters Ann Eliza and Evelina sell small goods and dream of something better. When a quiet German clockmaker enters their lives, hope, love, and sacrifice slowly pull the sisters in different directions with heartbreaking results.

Opening with "The Muse’s Tragedy," about a woman famous as a poet’s inspiration, this collection considers what it costs to live in someone else’s shadow. The other stories continue Wharton’s fascination with art, reputation, and private feeling.

Undine Spragg, a beautiful Midwestern girl, storms New York and Europe determined to have the life she thinks she deserves. Through a string of marriages and divorces she treats people as stepping stones, exposing the emptiness beneath both new money and old titles.

Widow Anna Leath plans to marry an old lover, diplomat George Darrow, only to discover that her young governess has a hidden past with him. Set in Paris and a French country house, the novel turns on divided loyalties and the difficulty of forgiving what cannot be undone.

This edition pairs the bleak New England novella *Ethan Frome* with selected shorter works. The accompanying stories extend its concerns with duty, frustrated love, and the hard grip of place on people’s lives.

In the bleak village of Starkfield, Ethan Frome is trapped in a loveless marriage to the sickly Zeena while secretly loving her cousin Mattie. One desperate winter night on a sled turns forbidden longing into a lifelong punishment.

Over a long evening, an older man tells friends about the uncanny pair of eyes that has appeared to him at key moments in his life. The story uses this recurring vision to explore buried guilt and the stories people invent to excuse themselves.

Wharton’s earliest surviving travel journal records a luxurious cruise through the Mediterranean and Aegean. Her notes on islands, ruins, and shipboard life foreshadow the travel writing and architectural eye of her later books.

Ten stories mix worldly irony with the uncanny, following speculators, writers, and lovers who stumble into hauntings of their own making. Whether the ghosts are literal or psychological, each tale probes what guilt and desire leave behind.

Bringing together Wharton’s early short fiction, this volume ranges from her first published pieces to the ghostly and ironic tales of *Tales of Men and Ghosts*. It is an easy way to watch her style sharpen over two crowded decades.

An American couple buys an English country house precisely because its ghost is said to be subtle enough to go unnoticed. Only long afterward do they realize what they have really seen, in one of Wharton’s most quietly devastating ghost stories.

Anchored by "The Daunt Diana," about a mysterious portrait and its owner, this collection gathers several shorter pieces. Art, vanity, and the stories people build around beautiful objects link the tales.

This psychological tale follows a man haunted by the suspicion that he has committed a crime no one can prove. The "bolted door" between his conscious life and his buried fears grows thinner with each turn of the plot.

This volume gathers Wharton’s poems, many inspired by classical myth and by quiet moments of love, loss, and memory. The verses offer a more intimate, lyrical counterpoint to the hard edges of her fiction.

Wharton’s account of touring France by car at the dawn of motoring turns roads and villages into an adventure. Free from fixed train routes, she approaches cathedrals, chateaus, and small towns from unexpected angles, rediscovering a landscape already being changed by modern travel.

In a New England mill town, reform minded manager John Amherst marries wealthy Bessy Westmore, hoping to improve brutal working conditions. When an accident and a mercy killing entangle Bessy’s friend Justine, the novel confronts industrial injustice, love, and the ethics of ending suffering.

An American man in Paris hopes to free the woman he loves from an unhappy marriage with a French aristocrat. Negotiating with her subtle sister in law, Madame de Treymes, he discovers how honor, family pride, and self interest twist even well meant bargains.

Beautiful, witty Lily Bart moves through Gilded Age New York trying to secure a wealthy husband before age and scandal close in. Surrounded by gossip, debt, and bad choices, she discovers how little room society leaves a woman who will not simply obey its rules.

These travel essays record Wharton’s journeys through less familiar parts of Italy, from hill towns to quiet churches and remote estates. She looks past guidebook highlights to the "background" of local art, landscape, and daily life that shapes the country’s character.

A newly married businessman gradually meets his wife's former husbands and finds himself oddly indebted to each. The story is a wry look at divorce, habit, and how well it is really possible to know the person you marry.

A child left at an orphanage becomes the unexpected "mission" of a comfortable couple who takes her in. As Jane grows up, Wharton gently exposes the parents’ mixed motives and the limits of good intentions.

Blending travel writing and design criticism, this book tours famous and little known Italian villas and gardens. Wharton explains how terraces, fountains, and planted alleys work with the landscape, offering principles readers can adapt rather than a mere catalogue of sights.

In these early stories, Wharton uses satire and irony to explore how new scientific theories, literary fame, and social ambition unsettle comfortable lives. Professors, writers, and would-be moderns find that clever ideas are easier than honest behavior.

Kate Peyton marries a charming but weak man, hoping her own strength will shelter their child from his flaws. Years later her grown son, now an architect, brings her a professional and moral dilemma that tests what a mother should protect and what she must expose.

Set in an eighteenth century Italian principality, this historical novel follows a young nobleman who inherits power and tries to remake his small state along Enlightenment lines. As revolt, church politics, and love intrude, he learns how costly idealism can be.

In this short story, a seemingly secure life begins to give way under the weight of half truths and social pressure. Wharton shows how a single reckless step into moral "quicksand" can pull a person further down than they ever expected.

A new lady’s maid arrives at a gloomy country house and senses that her predecessor still keeps a watch from beyond the grave. This classic ghost story builds unease from whispered warnings and things that go unanswered in the night.

This collection of seven stories follows people caught at the moment when a single decision will fix the course of a life. Art, memory, and desire collide in tales that move from Italian palaces to New York parlors and quiet provincial streets.

Stephen Glennard, suddenly in need of money, secretly sells the private letters of a dead woman who once loved him, now celebrated as a great writer. His new prosperity and marriage are shadowed by guilt until the truth demands to be faced.

Collecting "The Duchess at Prayer" with other early tales, this volume moves from Italian castles to American parlors. The stories combine an interest in art and legend with sharp observation of marriage, money, and pride.

Traveling through Europe after leaving their spouses, a couple tries to live outside convention yet keeps tripping over it. This novella probes how hard it is to invent a new moral code when old habits of shame and pride remain.