With the publication of her controversial novel The Custom of the Country - Edith Wharton leveled her most biting critique of the limitations that late nineteenth-century society placed upon the ambitious woman. Undine Spragg, the book's central character, is a magnificent antiheroine, viciously and precisely rendered. She is boundlessly ambitious and ready to ruthlessly sell herself to whatever man she believes can provide her with the success she desperately desires.

The Custom of the Country plays brilliantly upon the contradictions between Undine's determined strivings and the completely passive feminine ideal of her place and time.

This Collector's Edition evokes - with photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn and drawings by Charles Dana Gibson - the changing New York of which Wharton became the premier observer and critic. It also brings readers closer to the author herself, with letters in her hand and other archival traces of her life from the special collections of The New York Public Library.