Madame de Treymes »

One of America's most important novelists, Edith Wharton was a refined, relentless chronicler of the Gilded Age and its social mores. Along with close friend Henry James, she helped define literature at the turn of the 20th century, even as she wrote classic nonfiction on travel, decorating and her own life.

Perhaps her most Jamesian work, Madame de Treymes was Edith Wharton s first publication after the widely successful The House of Mirth. Inspired by her entree into Parisian society in the spring of 1906, it follows the fortunes of two innocents abroad: Fanny Frisbee of New York, unhappily married to the dissolute Marquis de Malrive, scion of a great house of the Faubourg St. Germain; and John Durham, her childhood friend, who arrives in Paris intent on persuading Fanny to divorce her husband and marry him instead. A scintillating picture of American and French culture at the turn of the century, and a subtle investigation of the role of women in the prevailing social hierarchy, Madame de Treymes confirmed Edith Wharton s position, as Edmund Wilson wrote, as "an historian of the American society of her time." This edition of Madame de Treymes also includes the novellas Sanctuary (1903) and Bunner Sisters (1906).