Old New York (Annotated)

Old New York is Edith Wharton's elegant cycle of four novellas—"False Dawn," "The Old Maid," "The Spark," and "New Year's Day"—each set in a successive decade from the 1840s to the 1870s. With her characteristic precision, irony, and moral intelligence, Wharton reconstructs the codes of a vanished patrician society, exposing the tensions between taste, duty, passion, and social conformity. The wor...