A Motor-Flight Through France.

WHARTON, Edith.

Item Number: 3013

New York: Scribner's, 1908.

First edition of “this portrait of a long-forgotten France, a country that, when Wharton ranged over it in her 1904 Panhard-Levassor, was largely unchanged from medieval times” (New York Times Book Review). Octavo, original green cloth with gilt titles to the spine and front panel, top edge gilt. Illustrated throughout. Fine in the original dust jacket which shows some chips to the spine and a large chip to the rear panel. Very rare in the original dust jacket.

A Motor-Flight Through France captures all of the riches and charm of France during the Belle Époque in Edith Wharton's, beautiful romantic prose. Wharton was utterly beguiled by France at the dawn of the twentieth century, and in this volume her brilliant sketches of "l’Hexagone" provide an enchanting and indelible portrait of the land during this era. But Wharton’s travelogue is as much about the thrill of travel as it is about place. With the automobile in its infancy, Wharton was experiencing the countryside as few people ever had, liberated from the ugliness of train yards and the constraints of passage by rail. "The motor-car has restored the romance of travel," she wrote.