Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers new to Edith Wharton who want to start with a short story
- English readers who enjoy social satire and dialogue-driven fiction
- Teachers and students needing a short text for close-reading discussion
- Readers who want to finish a complete English short story in spare moments
Not a good fit for
- Readers with weak English who rely on Chinese translations to follow the plot
- Readers who prefer serious, weighty themes and dislike light satire
- Users of textbooks seeking detailed annotations and background introductions
Reading tips
- Focus on plot and humor the first time; notice how dialogue reveals character the second.
- Mark how characters phrase their talk of culture and observe the author's irony.
- Best read in one sitting; afterwards discuss with others whether the ending achieves its satirical effect.
- For class use, have students read dialogue aloud by role to catch the subtle shifts 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
- 4
- 5
- 6
FAQ
What is this story about?
Is it suitable for English learners?
Does the electronic edition include annotations or an introduction?
Related on WeRead
量化交易：算法、分析、数据、模型和优化
Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton
The Early Short Fiction Part Two
我在南美钓鱼
忧郁的热带
The Naturalist on the River Amazons
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.
