Audiobook · read by volunteers
Custom of the Country
Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
Read by Isosceles, Katie Gibboney, Elizabeth Klett, musil, musici123, kristiface, Lucy Burgoyne (1950-2014), Maire Rhode, Kristen McQuillin, Anna Simon · 46 chapters · 14 h 59
About the book
Undine Spragg is beautiful, determined and from nowhere in particular, and she is on her way up. Arriving in New York from the Midwest, she sets her sights on high society and uses marriage as her means of climbing, moving from one husband to another with each step up. Undine is pretty, charming and ruthless, and the novel follows her across the Atlantic. Edith Wharton, who knew that society from inside, writes a sharp and often comic satire of ambition, money and manners, and creates in Undine one of the most unforgettable heroines in American fiction. The novel is set in the glittering world of New York and, later, Paris. Forty-six chapters, read by ten LibriVox volunteers, last about fifteen hours: a brilliant portrait of an age and of a woman who will stop at nothing.
Introduction
Edith Wharton, who lived from 1862 to 1937, was an American novelist and a close observer of the society in which she grew up. She was born into New York’s upper class and spent much of her life in France. In her fiction she explored the rules and costs of that world, with irony and psychological depth, and she later became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for The Age of Innocence in 1921.
The Custom of the Country, published in 1913, is a novel of manners about the social climber Undine Spragg, a beauty from the American Midwest who arrives in New York intent on getting ahead and marries more than once on the way up. As she moves through marriages and across the Atlantic, the book becomes a study of the pursuit of status and the commercial values of the new rich, set against the older families and their codes. Wharton’s satire is sharp, and she does not make her heroine a simple villain: Undine’s energy and appetite are part of what makes her interesting.
The novel is classed as general fiction. It rewards patient listening, since its scenes build a detailed picture of social customs, and the long span of the story allows characters to change and repeat their mistakes. Modern readers may find some of its attitudes, especially about class and foreigners, reflect the prejudices of its time.
The recording has forty-six chapters, shared among ten LibriVox volunteers, and lasts about fifteen hours. Today it is worth hearing as one of the great American novels of manners, with a heroine who still provokes debate.
Public domain
Edith Wharton died in 1937: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text