What do you think?
Rate this book
Edith Wharton Abroad: Selected Travel Writings, 1888-1920
In EDITH WHARTON ABROAD, Sarah Bird Wright has carefully chosen selections from Edith Wharton's travel writing that convey the writer's control of her craft. Wharton disliked the generality of guidebooks and focused instead on the "parentheses of travel" - the undiscovered hidden corners of Europe, Morocco, and the Mediterranean. This collection spans a period of three decades and takes the reader with Wharton from France to Italy and to Greece. Included is an excerpt from her unpublished memoir, THE CRUISE OF THE VANDIS, as well as front line depictions of Lorraine and the Vosges during World War I.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1920
2 people are currently reading
93 people want to read
About the author
Edith Wharton
1,434 books5,255 followersEdith Wharton emerged as one of America’s most insightful novelists, deftly exposing the tensions between societal expectation and personal desire through her vivid portrayals of upper-class life. Drawing from her deep familiarity with New York’s privileged “aristocracy,” she offered readers a keenly observed and piercingly honest vision of Gilded Age society.
Her work reached a milestone when she became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded for The Age of Innocence. This novel highlights the constraining rituals of 1870s New York society and remains a defining portrait of elegance laced with regret.
Wharton’s literary achievements span a wide canvas. The House of Mirth presents a tragic, vividly drawn character study of Lily Bart, navigating social expectations and the perils of genteel poverty in 1890s New York. In Ethan Frome, she explores rural hardship and emotional repression, contrasting sharply with her urban social dramas.
Her novella collection Old New York revisits the moral terrain of upper-class society, spanning decades and combining character studies with social commentary. Through these stories, she inevitably points back to themes and settings familiar from The Age of Innocence. Continuing her exploration of class and desire, The Glimpses of the Moon addresses marriage and social mobility in early 20th-century America. And in Summer, Wharton challenges societal norms with its rural setting and themes of sexual awakening and social inequality.
Beyond fiction, Wharton contributed compelling nonfiction and travel writing. The Decoration of Houses reflects her eye for design and architecture; Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort presents a compelling account of her wartime observations. As editor of The Book of the Homeless, she curated a moving, international collaboration in support of war refugees.
Wharton’s influence extended beyond writing. She designed her own country estate, The Mount, a testament to her architectural sensibility and aesthetic vision. The Mount now stands as an educational museum celebrating her legacy.
Throughout her career, Wharton maintained friendships and artistic exchanges with luminaries such as Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, and Theodore Roosevelt—reflecting her status as a respected and connected cultural figure.
Her literary legacy also includes multiple Nobel Prize nominations, underscoring her international recognition. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature more than once.
In sum, Edith Wharton remains celebrated for her unflinching, elegant prose, her psychological acuity, and her capacity to illuminate the unspoken constraints of society—from the glittering ballrooms of New York to quieter, more remote settings. Her wide-ranging work—novels, novellas, short stories, poetry, travel writing, essays—offers cultural insight, enduring emotional depth, and a piercing critique of the customs she both inhabited and dissected.
Her work reached a milestone when she became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded for The Age of Innocence. This novel highlights the constraining rituals of 1870s New York society and remains a defining portrait of elegance laced with regret.
Wharton’s literary achievements span a wide canvas. The House of Mirth presents a tragic, vividly drawn character study of Lily Bart, navigating social expectations and the perils of genteel poverty in 1890s New York. In Ethan Frome, she explores rural hardship and emotional repression, contrasting sharply with her urban social dramas.
Her novella collection Old New York revisits the moral terrain of upper-class society, spanning decades and combining character studies with social commentary. Through these stories, she inevitably points back to themes and settings familiar from The Age of Innocence. Continuing her exploration of class and desire, The Glimpses of the Moon addresses marriage and social mobility in early 20th-century America. And in Summer, Wharton challenges societal norms with its rural setting and themes of sexual awakening and social inequality.
Beyond fiction, Wharton contributed compelling nonfiction and travel writing. The Decoration of Houses reflects her eye for design and architecture; Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort presents a compelling account of her wartime observations. As editor of The Book of the Homeless, she curated a moving, international collaboration in support of war refugees.
Wharton’s influence extended beyond writing. She designed her own country estate, The Mount, a testament to her architectural sensibility and aesthetic vision. The Mount now stands as an educational museum celebrating her legacy.
Throughout her career, Wharton maintained friendships and artistic exchanges with luminaries such as Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, and Theodore Roosevelt—reflecting her status as a respected and connected cultural figure.
Her literary legacy also includes multiple Nobel Prize nominations, underscoring her international recognition. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature more than once.
In sum, Edith Wharton remains celebrated for her unflinching, elegant prose, her psychological acuity, and her capacity to illuminate the unspoken constraints of society—from the glittering ballrooms of New York to quieter, more remote settings. Her wide-ranging work—novels, novellas, short stories, poetry, travel writing, essays—offers cultural insight, enduring emotional depth, and a piercing critique of the customs she both inhabited and dissected.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 18, 2020
Verdun. In World War One. Doesn’t sound like a tourist destination, but Edith Wharton tours it, among many other villages and trenches along the frontiere-front.
Men die for a song, say “Land of the free, home of the brave,” or in WWI France, a tune from the recent 1870 War, “Sauvez, suavez La France,/ Ne l’abandonnez pas!” Sung in the village church of Sainte Menehould that had been turned into a hospital, “The church was without aisles, and down the nave were four rows of wooden cots with brown blankets”(142). The women wailed it from the altar, women dressed in black “(they all seemed to be dressed in mourning),” with “silver haze floating out from the acolyte’s censer.”
Wharton uses the word "ambulance" in its French meaning, a field hospital, possibly movable though not just a cart pulled by mules—which reminds me, this must have been the last war when cavalry actually rode horses. Our writer describes the rutted mudhole between buildings in Verdun, hard to tramp through, because of the horses having roiled it.
It’s a wealthy book, in more than one sense, filled with insights and analysis, but also with delightful comparisons, say, a Moroccan child, the youngest of many, “lay like a squirrel” in his father’s arms (205).
Nuggets of insight appear throughout this book, chinks of density, so it does not read like a travel book, but more like comparative cultures, France, Italy, and Morocco. Look at this: “England and France: the one feels the need of defining what the other finds it simpler to take for granted. England has never had a written Constitution, yet her constitutional government has long been the model of free nations. England’s standards are all implicit. She does not feel the French need for formalizing and tabulating” (174).
As Thoreau’s Maine Woods includes a great Penobscot dictionary, Wharton uses French and German phrases (like "marmitons," cook’s boys) with which this edition prefaces the “Preface.” S.B. Wright’s introduction informs us that young Edith grew up in Europe from age four to ten, in Paris and Rome. Just post-Civil War. Yet this collection takes us into WWI, a long career of foreign commentary—unless Europe was really her home, like Isabel Archer’s.
Edith Wharton, née Jones, grew up in Europe, Paris and Rome, just after the American Civil War. She spent from age four to ten there, so in fact, Wharton is as European as any American like Henry James or Hemingway, both of whom were much older when they encountered the Old World. She writes with insight on my daughter’s Milano, where the Ospedale Maggiore, a grand columned space built for lepers, a lazaretto, impressed northern visitors who saw it as a stately palace “compared to the miserable pest-houses north of the Alps.” “One wonders whether this poetizing of philanthropy, this clothing of charity in the garb of beauty, may not have had its healing uses: whether the ugliness of the modern hospital may not have made it, in another sense, as unhygienic as the more picturesque buildings it has superceded”(105).
May I testify that beauty does tend to heal: consider the art of Susan Mohl Powers, which was first exhibited at Squibb International Headquarters, and was invited to Sloan Kettering by none other than Lewis Thomas, and now graces the foyer of Prima Care in Fall River, MA, as well as fourteen walls of the schizophrenic ward in Butler Hospital, Providence. Childrens Hospital Boston showed a large piece for years. (Check her name on wikipedia.) Perhaps the most salubrious effect (in its etymological sense) has been on this reviewer and critic whose bilious contempt has been brightened through large stained-glasslike wall colors and images.
This collection ends with Morocco, where our writer admires the “instinct of skillful drapery,” “Moroccan crowds are always a feast to the eye”(188). But she finds the harem ignorant, uncleanly, and only treating childhood illness with amulets and Koran verses. She explains the premature sexuality of the harem, “At eight or nine the little girls are married, at twelve the son of the house is ‘given his first negress’; and thereafter, in the leisured class, both sexes live to old age in an atmosphere of sexuality without seduction”(204).
I lived near her palatial home,The Mount, which staged Shakespeare plays outdoors in evenings, when I taught at Berkshire Community College in the 70’s. Read a couple of her novels, Ethan Frome, and one set more in New York City. Think it’s still on my shelf upstairs. Must review.
Men die for a song, say “Land of the free, home of the brave,” or in WWI France, a tune from the recent 1870 War, “Sauvez, suavez La France,/ Ne l’abandonnez pas!” Sung in the village church of Sainte Menehould that had been turned into a hospital, “The church was without aisles, and down the nave were four rows of wooden cots with brown blankets”(142). The women wailed it from the altar, women dressed in black “(they all seemed to be dressed in mourning),” with “silver haze floating out from the acolyte’s censer.”
Wharton uses the word "ambulance" in its French meaning, a field hospital, possibly movable though not just a cart pulled by mules—which reminds me, this must have been the last war when cavalry actually rode horses. Our writer describes the rutted mudhole between buildings in Verdun, hard to tramp through, because of the horses having roiled it.
It’s a wealthy book, in more than one sense, filled with insights and analysis, but also with delightful comparisons, say, a Moroccan child, the youngest of many, “lay like a squirrel” in his father’s arms (205).
Nuggets of insight appear throughout this book, chinks of density, so it does not read like a travel book, but more like comparative cultures, France, Italy, and Morocco. Look at this: “England and France: the one feels the need of defining what the other finds it simpler to take for granted. England has never had a written Constitution, yet her constitutional government has long been the model of free nations. England’s standards are all implicit. She does not feel the French need for formalizing and tabulating” (174).
As Thoreau’s Maine Woods includes a great Penobscot dictionary, Wharton uses French and German phrases (like "marmitons," cook’s boys) with which this edition prefaces the “Preface.” S.B. Wright’s introduction informs us that young Edith grew up in Europe from age four to ten, in Paris and Rome. Just post-Civil War. Yet this collection takes us into WWI, a long career of foreign commentary—unless Europe was really her home, like Isabel Archer’s.
Edith Wharton, née Jones, grew up in Europe, Paris and Rome, just after the American Civil War. She spent from age four to ten there, so in fact, Wharton is as European as any American like Henry James or Hemingway, both of whom were much older when they encountered the Old World. She writes with insight on my daughter’s Milano, where the Ospedale Maggiore, a grand columned space built for lepers, a lazaretto, impressed northern visitors who saw it as a stately palace “compared to the miserable pest-houses north of the Alps.” “One wonders whether this poetizing of philanthropy, this clothing of charity in the garb of beauty, may not have had its healing uses: whether the ugliness of the modern hospital may not have made it, in another sense, as unhygienic as the more picturesque buildings it has superceded”(105).
May I testify that beauty does tend to heal: consider the art of Susan Mohl Powers, which was first exhibited at Squibb International Headquarters, and was invited to Sloan Kettering by none other than Lewis Thomas, and now graces the foyer of Prima Care in Fall River, MA, as well as fourteen walls of the schizophrenic ward in Butler Hospital, Providence. Childrens Hospital Boston showed a large piece for years. (Check her name on wikipedia.) Perhaps the most salubrious effect (in its etymological sense) has been on this reviewer and critic whose bilious contempt has been brightened through large stained-glasslike wall colors and images.
This collection ends with Morocco, where our writer admires the “instinct of skillful drapery,” “Moroccan crowds are always a feast to the eye”(188). But she finds the harem ignorant, uncleanly, and only treating childhood illness with amulets and Koran verses. She explains the premature sexuality of the harem, “At eight or nine the little girls are married, at twelve the son of the house is ‘given his first negress’; and thereafter, in the leisured class, both sexes live to old age in an atmosphere of sexuality without seduction”(204).
I lived near her palatial home,The Mount, which staged Shakespeare plays outdoors in evenings, when I taught at Berkshire Community College in the 70’s. Read a couple of her novels, Ethan Frome, and one set more in New York City. Think it’s still on my shelf upstairs. Must review.
October 27, 2017
Having never read any of Wharton's non-fiction, I enjoyed her musings and observations. Such a different time...
July 17, 2024
a bit of a disappointment but still has some good insight
Want to read
August 28, 2008These are excerpts from longer travel books. Another is "French Ways and Their Meaning" written in 1926. I liked it, Wright didn't! I'm just starting this so I can't rate it yet.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews