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The Custom Of The Country
The Custom Of The Country
Nov 5, 2025 5:22 AM

Author:Edith Wharton

The Custom Of The Country

THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY is probably Edith Wharton's most savage satire on the manners of late nineteenth-century America. It is the story of the exquisitely beautiful but brutally ambitious Undine Spragg who marries her way into the high aristocracy of Europe, abandoning several husbands along the way. This novel, which has scences of comedy and even farce, is a commentary on both certain aspects of feminisim and certain aspects of capitalism in Edith Wharton's time. The novel makes a fitting companion to THE AGE OF INNOCENCE and THE HOUSE OF MIRTH and shows Wharton to be one of the greatest American novelists.

Reviews

It is unsurpassed in Hemingway's oeuvre. Every word tells and there is not a word too many

—— Anthony Burgess

A quite wonderful example of narrative art. The writing is as taut, and at the same time as lithe and cunningly played out, as the line on which the old man plays the fish

—— Guardian

The best story Hemingway has written...No page of this beautiful master-work could have been done better or differently.

—— Sunday Times

A very good and varied collection, with delightful oddities

—— The Times

Unfailingly honest

—— Sunday Times

Andric possess the rare gift in a historical novelist of creating a period-piece, full of local colour, and at the same time characters who might have been living today

—— Times Literary Supplement

Just as the bridge on the Drina brought East and West together so your work has acted as a link, combining the culture of your country with other parts of the planet

—— Göran Liljestrand, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences member
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