The Stories of Edith Wharton

Written from the turn of the century through the 1930s these stories, razor-edged analyses of the manners of the very rich, range from the satiric to the supernatural to the tragic. From Wharton's preoccupation with the constraints of marriage and social form in the earlier stories they deepen into increasingly primordial territory, an ambivalence toward motherhood in the masterful "Her Son" and, in the chilling ghost story "All Souls", the last story she wrote, the fear of death, of dissolution. Her strong moral sense combines with a direct style, lucid and sure, minutely grounded in social observation, to produce a body of work still fresh, thematically timeless and fully at home in our own fin de siecle. (from back cover)