The Custom of the Country

Ruthless and predatory, Edith Wharton’s seductive young heroine Undine Spragg exploits a series of husbands from the American west to New York and France in her search for one with the ideal combination of social power, money, and material possessions―something “more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her!” Wharton’s criticism of the leisure-class marriage market becomes a brilliant satire on the nature of desire, as the novel links marriage and divorce with selfish ambition and the culture of consumerism.

This Broadview edition provides a critical introduction and appendices that include Wharton’s outline for and correspondence about The Custom of the Country, excerpts from Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s novella Undine, and passages from works by Charles Darwin, Emma Goldman, Henry James, and Thorstein Veblen, among others.

Sarah Emsley is a Preceptor of Expository Writing at Harvard University and the author of Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).