Pauline Manford fills every quarter-hour with committees, gurus and good causes, guarded by her perfect secretary, while her daughter Nona watches the family drift. Behind the bright surface of their New York household lie a restless husband, a son’s troubled marriage and a refusal to feel any pain at all.
Wharton’s sharpest satire of the Jazz Age rich, still uncomfortably modern in its portrait of anaesthetised lives. Download the free EPUB.