The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton

by Edith Wharton

Although Edith Wharton is best known for her novels The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, this extensive collection of her short fiction shows her to be a master of all its varieties.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, Classics

625 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1937

About the author

Edith 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.

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This 600+ page collection provides a generous 28 story sampling of the 87 short stories Edith Wharton wrote. She is quoted as saying short stories are about situation, while novels are about character, but there is plenty of both displayed here. It's the kind of book where you would have a different collection of favorites every time you read it, since the stories range from portrayals of social mores, to explorations of relationships, to the supernatural, and character sketches. What I loved (this time) were the unexpected humorous stories...Charm Incorporated, Expiation and Full Circle...and the sad, morally twisted story of "Her Son", which plays on themes of trust and deception explored in many of her stories.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

If it seems like I've been reading this book for a month I have; but it's a super long book, so there. 28 stories, only one of which (the amaaazing ghost story, "Afterward") I had read before. At any rate 95% of these I loved because they are fantastic; I may not have liked the plots of the other 5% but still enjoyed them because, well, Edith wrote them and who else writes like her?

Favorites, urg, let me see: "Autres Temps...", "Pomegrante Seed", "All Souls'", "The Lamp of Psyche", "The Moving Finger", "The Day of the Funeral".

[Erica]

I always fall into Wharton's writing, like an old wingback chair. Her stories follow similar lines as her stories and I believe all of her novels came out of a short story, but I think that's probably pretty common. My favorite story would be perfect to read around the fire on All Hallows Eve--The Lady Maid's Bell.

If you prefer a novel, I would recommend Wharton's Glimpses of the Moon and Age of Innocence.

[Sarahjane · Rating 5 out of 5]

All were near perfect

[Julie Mercer · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVED IT!

[Wherefore Art Thou · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a journey! Not a one of Wharton’s characters in this collection wants for money or struggles with anything uncontrollable except for the occasional mysterious illness, and it is these lack of restraints that allow her to explore the personal, the psychological and the emotional.

While varying in subject, each one of these stories follows a lot of the same beats and patterns, so if you like some, you’ll probably like all, and vice versa.

The greatest strength of this collection is its remarkable consistency. Not a sentence, or word, seems to be misplaced, overlong, or unnecessary. Each story is at least good, and there were very few I did not think shined brightly on their own. Of course, I must also give props to Anita Brookner for putting these stories together, as it looks like the majority of the stories in this collection do not overlap with the other collections — it’s not an Edgar Allan Poe situation where story collections typically tend to contain the same set of stories. However, maybe Wharton is just always good, and the difficulty was more in picking what to exclude!

Wharton certainly could have taken more risks, structurally, or with more diverse characters. Yet, I don’t think she needed to do so to create this body of incredibly solid, very good stories.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few repeats from The New York Stories of Edith Wharton. Unwrapping each story is enriching in so many ways.

[Jimgosailing · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Autres Temps”

“ she had set out on the voyage quietly enough— in what she called her ‘reasonable’ mood— but the week at sea had given her too much time to think of things and had left her too long alone with the past.”

“A shadow lengthened down the deck before them, and a steward stood there, proffering a Maconigram.” [!]

“ she could not recall having ever been more luxuriously housed, or having ever had so strange a sense of being out alone, under the night, in a wind-beaten plain.”

“ you say it’s preposterous that the women who didn’t object to accepting Leila‘s hospitality should have objected to meeting me under her roof… but I begin to understand why… it’s simply that society is much too busy to revise its own judgments. Probably no one in the house stopped to consider that my case and Lilla’s were identical. They only remembered that I’ve done something which at the time I did, it was condemned by society. My case had been passed on and classified.: on the woman who has been cut for nearly 20 years. The older people have have forgotten why, and the younger ones have really never known:, it’s simply become a tradition to cut me . A traditions that have lost all their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy. “


“After Holbein” - two of NYC’s upper crust, now in their dotage, having avoided one another for years ( decades?) come together for a last dinner.. how he comes to find his way there…well, maybe the Norns…and they revel in what they perceive to be a crowded dinner, as it had been decades ago

“Les Metteurs en Scène” - a very Whartonian twist at the end.

Wharton is an excellent short story writer who has master the art of depicting women in the timeframe in which she was writing in their circumstances of being dependent, typically on a man for that financial security, and the effects of loneliness and ostracizing that may occur when they don’t marry; that an unmarried woman is a perceived as a threat to marriages.

[Jenna Hazzard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short stories included on this audiobook:
The Eyes, The Daunt Diana, The Debt, and The Moving Finger

I appreciated the skill of the writer and the themes that are looked at in these short stories. However, these stories are all about upper class Victorian-esque characters which isn't what usually interests me. These stories take a little bit to get into, and I definitely missed some of the details, but overall I enjoyed it.

Edith Wharton isn't an author that I'm dying to read more of, but I'm also not going to run away if I see her in my future assigned readings.

[Suzanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love Wharton in doses, good to read and pick back up when the mood strikes!