The Choice
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who admire Edith Wharton's novels and want to catch up on her short stories
- Readers interested in American social ethics from the late 19th to early 20th century
- English learners who want close-reading practice with a shorter English text
- Readers who want to finish a complete short story on a commute or in spare moments
Not a good fit for
- Readers expecting lengthy plotting and complex multi-strand narratives
- Readers who need a Chinese translation and are not used to reading English originals
- Readers who prefer strong plot twists or suspenseful thrills
Reading tips
- Read through once to grasp the story's direction, then go back and read the dialogue closely, noting subtle shifts in the characters' wording.
- As you read, jot down Wharton's descriptions of scenes and objects and consider how they correspond to the characters' situations.
- If using the text for English study, pick two or three passages to translate sentence by sentence, then compare with the original to appreciate differences in tone.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
FAQ
Is this book a novel or a short story?
Do I need to have read other works by Wharton first?
What language is the Project Gutenberg edition in?
Comments
Find this book
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
About the author
Edith Wharton (Wharton, Edith, 1862–1937) was an American novelist, with 44 works held in this collection. She depicts with fine brushwork the manners and moral dilemmas of New York high society from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Her representative novels The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth both focus on women's struggles among marriage, class, and selfhood; Ethan Frome, set in rural New England, presents tragic fates in a repressive environment. Her style is calm and restrained, revealing through everyday details the conflict between individual psychology and social convention, and her works combine irony with sympathy. Beyond novels, she also wrote nonfiction such as The Decoration of Houses and ghost-story collections such as Tales of Men and Ghosts, showing diverse subjects. Public information is limited, and biographical details fall outside this introduction; yet judging from the works held here alone, her sustained attention to social class and gender roles makes her a voice not to be overlooked in American literature.
