Edith Wharton wrote about New York as only a native can. Her Manhattan is a city
of well-appointed drawing rooms, hansoms and broughams, all-night cotillions, a
nd resplendent Fifth Avenue flats. Bishops' nieces mingle with bachelor industri
alists; respectable wives turn into excellent mistresses. All are governed by a
code of behavior as rigid as it is precarious. What fascinates Wharton are the p
oints of weakness in the structure of Old New York: the artists and writers at i
ts fringes, the free-love advocates testing its limits, widows and divorcees str
uggling to hold their own.
