Old New York (Annotated)

Old New York is Edith Wharton's elegant cycle of four novellas—"False Dawn," "The Old Maid," "The Spark," and "New Year's Day"—each set in a successive decade of nineteenth-century Manhattan, from the 1840s to the 1870s. With her characteristic irony, architectural precision, and moral acuity, Wharton reconstructs a vanished patrician society governed by lineage, etiquette, and repression. The boo...