The Custom of the Country.

WHARTON, Edith.

$1,200.00

Item Number: 110264

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913.

First edition of one of Wharton’s finest novels, which tells the story of Undine Spragg, a Midwestern girl who attempts to ascend in New York City society. Octavo, original cloth. In near fine condition, name to the front free endpaper. Housed in a custom half morocco chemise and clamshell box. An exceptional presentation.

“In some ways her most successful work, in that it draws on all her strengths as a novelist, especially as satirist and social chronicler… Custom is filled with penetrating satire, acute observations of the new Gilded Age, forcefully drawn characters, and international settings charged with a new power and direction… Undine is a creature of glaring light, a blinding, raw force of primitive beauty” (Lowe, 391-92).