439 pages

English language

Published 1998 by Doubleday.

ISBN:
978-0-385-48723-8
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OCLC Number:
38557258

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4 stars (1 review)

With the publication of her controversial novel The Custom of the Country - Edith Wharton leveled her most biting critique of the limitations that late nineteenth-century society placed upon the ambitious woman. Undine Spragg, the book's central character, is a magnificent antiheroine, viciously and precisely rendered. She is boundlessly ambitious and ready to ruthlessly sell herself to whatever man she believes can provide her with the success she desperately desires.

The Custom of the Country plays brilliantly upon the contradictions between Undine's determined strivings and the completely passive feminine ideal of her place and time.

This Collector's Edition evokes - with photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn and drawings by Charles Dana Gibson - the changing New York of which Wharton became the premier observer and critic. It also brings readers closer to the author herself, with letters in her hand and other archival traces of her life from the special …

47 editions

Lifestyles of the wannabe rich and famous

4 stars

This was an interesting book from the standpoint of social conventions in upper crust society at the turn of the 20th century. Undine Spragg is very much the antihero leaving a trail of destruction in her wake as she crawls up the social ladder marriage by marriage. One wonders whether Meghan Markle should have read it before becoming entangled in the British royal family given the subject matter.

It's a bit hard to relate to so much of the novel partly because it's over a hundred years old, but also because I am not of the New York elite and therefore unfamiliar, even baffled by some of the social aspects of the story. Having to have your mother respond first before you can seems bizarre and so when Undine breaks some of these rules, it is difficult to appreciate the effect it should have on the reader.

One of the …

Subjects

  • Americans -- France -- Fiction
  • Remarried people -- Fiction
  • Divorced women -- Fiction
  • Upper class -- Fiction
  • New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction
  • Paris (France) -- Fiction