Edith Wharton
9 books by Edith Wharton to read free, each with its best passages and lines, and the best quotes from all of them below.
Where to start
-
Ethan Frome
A young man living a joyless life trapped in a loveless marriage gets a taste of true passion.
36,433 words, about 3 hours
Then
-
The Age of Innocence
Upper-class New York gentleman Newland Archer is set to wed May Welland in a picture-perfect union, until the bride’s disgraced cousin returns from overseas and threatens to draw his love away.
101,862 words, about 7 hours
-
The House of Mirth
A New York socialite struggles to maintain a place among her wealthy friends in the face of her own diminished finances and fading youth.
129,693 words, about 9 hours
-
The Glimpses of the Moon
84,969 words, about 6 hours
-
Hudson River Bracketed
A young Midwestern man of modest means seeks to enter the literary world of 1920s New York.
168,879 words, about 12 hours
-
In Morocco
52,253 words, about 4 hours
-
Summer
A young woman has resigned to life in a stifling small town until a visiting stranger hints at a wider world of possibilities.
58,187 words, about 4 hours
-
The Children
97,684 words, about 7 hours
-
The Mother’s Recompense
78,693 words, about 6 hours
Edith Wharton quotes
I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
It was one of the great livery-stableman’s most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.
One sits out a cotillion—why not sit out a train?
She had a natural contempt for people who gloried in what they need only have endured.
She wanted to reform everything—it didn’t particularly matter what: cooking, marriage, religion (of course religion), dentistry, saloons, corsets—even Grandpa.
To step on board a steamer in a Spanish port, and three hours later to land in a country without a guide-book, is a sensation to rouse the hunger of the repletest sight-seer.
Old houses? Everything’s old in North Dormer, isn’t it? The folks are, anyhow.
He would have loved adventure, but adventure worthy of the name perpetually eluded him; and when it has eluded a man till he is over forty it is not likely to seek him out later.
Her female world was made up of three categories: frumps, hypocrites and the “good sort”—like herself.
That man touch a hundred? He looks as if he was dead and in hell now!
“Oh, centuries and centuries; so long,” she said, “that I’m sure I’m dead and buried, and this dear old place is heaven;”
It’s stupid of you to make love to me, and it isn’t like you to be stupid.
What is one to do—when one sees both sides of the problem? Or every possible side of it, indeed?
But this evening his soul was like a desert.
The scenery is always the same; but if one has the love of great emptinesses, and of the play of light on long stretches of parched earth and rock, the sameness is part of the enchantment.
Do you suppose anybody’d stay at North Dormer if they could help it? You wouldn’t, folks say!
It was evident that the two had the very highest opinion of each other.
She had a way of getting desperately fond of people she had been kind to, and exaggeratedly touched by the least sign of their appreciation.
Oh, as to that: I guess it’s always Ethan done the caring.
Know each other? Fiddlesticks! Everybody in New York has always known everybody.