Scribner Book Company Reef, paperback/edith wharton

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I put most of myself into that opus, Edith Wharton said of The Reef, possibly her most autobiographical novel.

Published in 1912, it was, Bernard Berenson told Henry Adams, better than any previous work excepting Ethan Frome.

A challenge to the moral climate of the day, The Reef follows the fancies of George Darrow, a young diplomat en route from London to France, intent on proposing to the widowed Anna Leath.

Unsettled by Anna's reticence, Darrow drifts into an affair with Sophy Viner, a charmingly naive and impecunious young woman whose relations with Darrow and Anna's family threaten his prospects for success.

For its dramatic construction and acute insight into social mores and the multifaceted problem of sexuality, The Reef stands as one of Edith Wharton's most daring works of fiction.

About the Author America's most famous woman of letters, and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, Edith Wharton was born into one of the last leisured class families in New York City, as she put it, in 1862.

Educated privately, she was married to Edward Wharton in 1885, and for the next few years, they spent their time in the high society of Newport (Rhode Island), then Lenox (Massachusetts) and Europe.

It was in Europe that Wharton first met Henry James, who was to have a profound and lasting influence on her life and work.

Wharton's first published book was a work of nonfiction, in collaboration with Ogden Codman, The Decoration of Houses (1897), but from early on, her marriage had been a source of distress, and she was advised by her doctor to write fiction to relieve her nervous tension.

Wharton's first short stories appeared in Scribner's Magazine, and though she published several volumes of fiction around the turn of the century, including The Greater Inclination (1899), The Touchstone (1900), Crucial Instances (1901), The Valley of Decision (1902), Sanctuary (1903), and The Descent of Man and Other Stories (1904), it wasn't until 1905, with the publication of the.