30 Books in 30 Beach Days Day 27: Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton

This weekend, I spent two impossibly beautiful, blue-skied days in the Berkshires. Of course, I made a stop at The Mount, Edith Wharton's home, and I found its gardens absolutely breathtaking. A designer as well as an author (the first woman ever to win the Pulitzer Prize!), Wharton's first published work was a book about interior decoration. Her home was painstakingly curated and arranged, with influences from her European travel, and her gardens were truly outdoor rooms, with picturesque tableaux that differed from every angle.

Wharton's literary canon is massive; she was a prolific writer who enjoyed commercial success during her lifetime. Her best-known works are not exactly beach reads; The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome, for example, are both dense tomes that don't exactly feature happy endings. They're definitely novels worth visiting, but perhaps not in the final days of August, when summer and attention spans are starting to fade.

Wharton was also an avid short story writer, though, and the tales in her collection range from the philosophical to the fanciful, including a deep repository of ghost stories. Wharton's mastery of realism, and her early glimpses of feminism, abound throughout. These are certainly worthy of one of your final beach trips of summer 2017.

Rating: 4/5

#classicnovel #recommendations #45