In this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Edith Wharton has written the story of an affable conformist whose marriage of convenience cannot extinguish his passion for another woman… and whose moral limitations make both women seem unreal to him. Handsome, affluent, with great promise as a lawyer, Newland Archer’s interest in his cold, beautiful, and conventional wife gradually flags. His attraction to Countess Ellen Olenska–bizarre and challenging, separated from her husband–becomes the single threat to his secure position in high society, and, at the same time, leads him to question the values of that society.

Said to be “the finest of her novels … painted with a richness of colour and detail that delights the imagination…”