Collected here in one volume are six works that represent nearly a quarter century in the productive life of one of the most accomplished and admired of American writers. They explore the private worlds of our "Gilded Age." A once free-spirited American woman in Paris tries to extricate herself from her marriage to a French aristocratin "Madame de Treymes." A divorced mother finds herself ina strange romantic triangle in "The Mother's Recompense." Repressed passions smolder in small town New England in the classic "Ethan Frome," a tale of unhappy marriage and desperate love which erupts in an act of shattering violence, and in "Summer," which Wharton called the "hot 'Ethan.'" Also included here are "Old New York," four linked novellas set in succeeding decades from the 1840s to the 1870s, Wharton's renowned autobiography "A BackwardGlance," and "Life and I," an autobiographical fragment published here for the first time. Chronology of the author's life and career, essay on the choice of texts andsome necessary notes by Cynthia Griffin Wolfe.