Author Guide · Novels of Manners & Short Fiction
Books Written by
In 1921 the three judges of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction voted for Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. Columbia University’s advisory board overruled them and gave the prize to The Age of Innocence, and Edith Wharton became the first woman to win it. She was 58, and had grown up inside the closed world that novel describes: born Edith Newbold Jones in 1862 in a brownstone on West 23rd Street in Manhattan, she married into the same society, wrote a book on interior design before she wrote a novel, and spent the second half of her life in France. Her first big success, The House of Mirth, sold 140,000 copies in under three months in 1905. She published more than 40 books, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times. This guide covers her 11 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 11 key books · 1905–1938 · Updated October 2026
ClickTap a spine to jump to that book below.
Quick answer
Edith Wharton’s best-known book is The Age of Innocence (1920), which won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize. Her other key books include The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), The Custom of the Country (1913), Summer (1917), the four novellas of Old New York (1924), her memoir A Backward Glance (1934) and the unfinished The Buccaneers (1938). Start with The Age of Innocence. Below are all 11 in order, plus her ghost stories, travel writing and design books.
Where to Start with Edith Wharton
If you want the novel everyone means
→ The Age of Innocence (1920) — Newland Archer, May Welland and Ellen Olenska in 1870s New York.
If you want something short
→ Ethan Frome (1911) — a winter tragedy in rural Massachusetts, under 200 pages.
If you want her darkest society novel
→ The House of Mirth (1905) — Lily Bart’s slide out of New York high society.
If you want a heroine you will love to hate
→ The Custom of the Country (1913) — Undine Spragg marries her way up.
11 Edith Wharton Books, in Order
The House of Mirth
Serialised in Scribner’s Magazine from January 1905 and published as a book that October. Lily Bart, 29, beautiful and short of money, needs a rich husband in 1890s New York, but gambling debts, gossip spread by Bertha Dorset and her own hesitation push her out of society, into work in a milliner’s shop and dependence on chloral. Scribner called it the fastest-selling book the firm had ever published; it reached 140,000 copies by the end of 1905. The title comes from Ecclesiastes.
Ethan Frome
A short novel set in the fictional town of Starkfield, Massachusetts, told by a visitor who pieces together why the local farmer Ethan Frome walks with a limp. Ethan, married to his sickly wife Zeena, falls in love with her poor cousin Mattie Silver; when Zeena sends Mattie away, the two try to end their lives on a sled run. Wharton first wrote the story as a French-language exercise, and probably drew on a fatal 1904 sledding accident in Lenox, near her house The Mount.
The Reef
George Darrow, an American diplomat in London, is on his way to the widowed Anna Leath at her château at Givré in France when he has a brief affair with Sophy Viner, a young would-be actress. Months later Sophy turns up at Givré as the governess, engaged to Anna’s stepson Owen. Reviewers were harsh, and Wharton herself later called it a “poor miserable lifeless lump”; it was filmed in 1999.
The Custom of the Country
Undine Spragg, from the fictional town of Apex in the Midwest, arrives in New York with her parents’ money and climbs society through marriage and divorce: to Ralph Marvell of an old New York family, to the French Count Raymond de Chelles, and back to the financier Elmer Moffatt. Julian Fellowes has named it an inspiration for Downton Abbey. A film starring Sydney Sweeney began shooting in 2026.
Summer
Wharton’s other rural New England novel, set in the small town of North Dormer in western Massachusetts. Charity Royall, taken down from “the Mountain” as a child and raised by the lawyer Royall, works in the town library and begins a secret affair with Lucius Harney, a visiting architect from New York. Its frank treatment of a young woman’s sexual awakening was controversial when it appeared.
The Age of Innocence
Serialised in Pictorial Review and published by D. Appleton in October 1920. In 1870s New York the lawyer Newland Archer is engaged to the conventional May Welland when her cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, returns from Europe after leaving her husband, and he falls in love with her. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, and has been filmed three times, most famously by Martin Scorsese in 1993 with Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder.
The Glimpses of the Moon
Susy and Nick Lansing, both broke, marry on a bargain: they will live for a year on wedding presents and the villas their rich friends lend them, and part as soon as either finds a better match. Their honeymoon runs from Lake Como to Venice before the arrangement falls apart. The title comes from Hamlet; a 1923 silent film is lost, and in 2024 Francis Ford Coppola announced a musical version.
Old New York
Four novellas, one for each decade from the 1840s to the 1870s: False Dawn, The Old Maid, The Spark and New Year’s Day. In The Old Maid, Charlotte Lovell secretly has a child, Tina, who is raised by her cousin Delia Ralston. Zoë Akins’s stage version of The Old Maid won the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and Bette Davis starred in the 1939 film.
Twilight Sleep
A satire of a rich New York family in the 1920s. Pauline Manford fills every hour with appointments and fashionable cures, while her daughter Nona watches her father Dexter’s affair with Lita, the wife of her half-brother Jim. The title is the name of a drug treatment of the time that erased the memory of childbirth pain. It reached number one on a bestseller list two months after publication, though critics were cool.
A Backward Glance
Her memoir, published in April 1934, is more about the people and places that shaped her than about herself: old New York, The Mount, London, Paris and the First World War, with a whole chapter on her friend Henry James. It leaves a great deal out. Her husband Teddy, whom she divorced in 1913, gets a handful of sentences, and her affair with the journalist Morton Fullerton, which only came to light in 1968, is not there at all.
The Buccaneers
Her last novel, unfinished when she died and published in 1938. In the 1870s five rich American girls, shut out of New York society, take the London Season by storm and marry into the impoverished English aristocracy; Nan St George marries the Duke of Tintagel and falls for Guy Thwarte. Wharton wrote 29 of a planned 35 chapters; Marion Mainwaring completed it from her outline in 1993. The BBC adapted it in 1995 and Apple TV+ in 2023.
In What Order to Read Edith Wharton
None of Wharton’s novels is a sequel, so you can read them in any order. A good route is to start with The Age of Innocence, then go back to The House of Mirth, which shows the same New York thirty years later and far less kindly. The Custom of the Country completes the picture from the outside, through a newcomer who breaks every rule the other two books take for granted.
Ethan Frome and Summer belong together: both are short, both are set in poor hill towns of western Massachusetts, and they show a different Wharton from the society novels. Read Old New York after The Age of Innocence, since it covers the same streets decade by decade. Keep A Backward Glance for later, and The Buccaneers for last, bearing in mind that its final chapters are not hers.
A reading path
1. The Age of Innocence (1920)
2. Ethan Frome (1911)
3. The House of Mirth (1905)
4. The Custom of the Country (1913)
5. Summer (1917)
Everything Else Edith Wharton Published
Beyond the 11 key books: 38 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Other novels and novellas
12
12 books · 1900–1977
- 1900The Touchstonenovella
- 1902The Valley of Decisionher first full-length novel, set in 18th-century Italy
- 1903Sanctuarynovella
- 1906Madame de Treymesnovella
- 1907The Fruit of the Tree
- 1918The Marnea short novel of the First World War
- 1923A Son at the Front
- 1925The Mother’s Recompense
- 1928The Children
- 1929Hudson River Bracketed
- 1932The Gods Arrive
- 1977Fast and Loosea novella written in 1877, when she was 15
Short stories and ghost stories
13
13 books · 1899–1973
- 1899The Greater Inclinationher first story collection
- 1901Crucial Instances
- 1904The Descent of Man and Other Stories
- 1908The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories
- 1910Tales of Men and Ghosts
- 1916Xingu and Other Stories
- 1926Here and Beyond
- 1930Certain People
- 1933Human Nature
- 1936The World Over
- 1937Ghostsher ghost stories, gathered in the year she died
- 1968The Collected Short Storiesedited by R. W. B. Lewis
- 1973The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
Houses, gardens and travel
8
8 books · 1897–1992
- 1897The Decoration of Houseswith the architect Ogden Codman Jr.
- 1904Italian Villas and Their Gardens
- 1905Italian Backgrounds
- 1908A Motor-Flight Through France
- 1915Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfortfrom five trips to the front in 1915
- 1919French Ways and Their Meaning
- 1920In Morocco
- 1992The Cruise of the Vanadisa travel diary, published posthumously
Poetry, criticism and wartime anthology
5
5 books · 1878–1926
- 1878Versesprivately printed when she was 16
- 1909Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses
- 1916The Book of the Homelessan anthology she edited to raise money for war refugees
- 1925The Writing of Fictionessays on the craft
- 1926Twelve Poems
The years · 1862–1937
Quick facts about Edith Wharton
- Known for
- Wharton is known for her novels of manners about the old-money New York society she was born into, written with an insider’s knowledge of its rules and the price paid by those, especially women, who break them.
- 1862
- Born in New York City
- 1902
- Designs The Mount, Lenox, Massachusetts
- 1937
- Dies at Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France
- Born
- 24 January 1862, 14 West 23rd Street, New York City, as Edith Newbold Jones
- Died
- 11 August 1937, Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France, aged 75; buried at Versailles
- Married
- Edward “Teddy” Wharton, 1885; divorced 1913
- Homes
- The Mount, Lenox, Massachusetts (her main home until 1911); Paris; Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt
- War work
- Workrooms for unemployed women, American Hostels for Refugees and the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee, 1914–1915
- Honours
- Chevalier of the Legion of Honour (1916); Pulitzer Prize (1921); honorary doctorate, Yale (1923); Nobel nominations 1927, 1928, 1930
The red mark is 1920: The Age of Innocence, which made her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
How Edith Wharton Writes: An Insider’s Rulebook
Wharton wrote about a society she knew from the inside, and her novels are built on its rules: who may be invited where, who may divorce, what money may be mentioned. The Age of Innocence opens at the opera in the 1870s and reads every box and every glance; The House of Mirth follows the same codes in the 1890s, when Lily Bart can no longer afford to obey them.
Her plots turn on women with few choices and a market for marriage. Lily Bart must marry money; Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country treats marriage and divorce as a way up; Susy Lansing in The Glimpses of the Moon marries on a one-year bargain. Wharton shows the cost of each choice without rescuing anyone, and her endings are often closed doors rather than resolutions.
She was also a writer of houses and places before she was a novelist: The Decoration of Houses (1897) came eight years before The House of Mirth, and rooms, gardens and streets carry meaning throughout her fiction. In Ethan Frome and Summer she turned the same exact eye on poor New England hill towns, and in her ghost stories on the unseen.
Frequently asked questions about Edith Wharton’s books
How many books has Edith Wharton written?
She published more than 40 books in her lifetime: novels, novellas, short-story collections, poetry, travel writing, books on houses and gardens, and a memoir. This page covers her 11 key books; the rest, including posthumous collections, are listed in the bibliography above.
What are Edith Wharton’s books in order?
Her key books in order are The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), The Reef (1912), The Custom of the Country (1913), Summer (1917), The Age of Innocence (1920), The Glimpses of the Moon (1922), Old New York (1924), Twilight Sleep (1927), A Backward Glance (1934) and The Buccaneers (1938).
Where should I start with Edith Wharton?
With The Age of Innocence. If you want something short, read Ethan Frome, which is under 200 pages; if you want her darkest society novel, The House of Mirth.
What is Edith Wharton’s most famous book?
The Age of Innocence (1920), which won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize and was filmed by Martin Scorsese in 1993. Ethan Frome (1911) and The House of Mirth (1905) are close behind.
Was Edith Wharton the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize?
Yes, for fiction. The Age of Innocence won in 1921. The three fiction judges had voted for Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, but Columbia University’s advisory board overturned their decision. She was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930.
Which Edith Wharton books have been adapted for film and television?
The Age of Innocence (1924, 1934 and Martin Scorsese’s 1993 film; Netflix ordered a series in 2025), The House of Mirth (Terence Davies, 2000, with Gillian Anderson), Ethan Frome (1993, with Liam Neeson), The Old Maid from Old New York (1939, with Bette Davis), The Reef (1999) and The Buccaneers (BBC, 1995; Apple TV+, 2023). A film of The Custom of the Country starring Sydney Sweeney began shooting in 2026.
Did Edith Wharton finish The Buccaneers?
No. She had written 29 of a planned 35 chapters when she died in 1937, and it was published unfinished in 1938. Marion Mainwaring completed it from Wharton’s outline in 1993; critics were divided about the new ending.
Did Edith Wharton write ghost stories?
Yes, many. Tales of Men and Ghosts appeared in 1910, and Ghosts (1937), gathered in the year she died, collects her supernatural tales. The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton followed in 1973.
Why did Edith Wharton live in France?
As her marriage to Teddy Wharton broke down she moved to Paris, to an apartment on the Rue de Varenne; they divorced in 1913. During the First World War she ran workrooms and hostels for refugees and reported from the front, and France made her a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1916. After the war she settled at Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, north of Paris, where she died in 1937.
Is there antisemitism in Edith Wharton’s books?
Yes, and readers still discuss it. In The House of Mirth the financier Simon Rosedale is drawn with antisemitic stereotypes; the narrator calls him “a plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type” and credits him with “his race’s accuracy in the appraisal of values”. Later writers have answered back: Lev Raphael’s Rosedale in Love retells the novel from Rosedale’s side. Wharton also called herself a “rabid imperialist”, and In Morocco (1920) praises French colonial rule.
Footnotes
- Edith Wharton — Wikipedia
- The Age of Innocence — Wikipedia
- The House of Mirth — Wikipedia
- Works by Edith Wharton — Donna M. Campbell, Washington State University
- A Backward Glance — The Mount, Edith Wharton’s Home
- What to Do About Edith Wharton’s Anti-Semitism — Tablet
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all hers.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“There are two ways of spreading light: to be / The candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
— Edith Wharton, “Vesalius in Zante (1564)”, Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses (1909)
If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations