Isabel Colegate The Shooting Party a slender novel at just 195 pages, brims with characters so vividly drawn that each could sustain a novel of their own. Colegate paints Oxfordshire with a delicacy reminiscent of Hardy—meadows, woods, and manor rooms rendered in fine, precise strokes. With a single line here, a deft dab there, she…

by Henry James Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, first published in one volume in 1882, follows Isabel Archer, a young American woman of idealism and intellect determined to pursue a life of independence and self-discovery despite the constraining social norms of the Victorian era. At a time when women without independent means were…

The House of Mirth Edith Wharton When the Astors Owned New York Justin Kaplan Vast wealth, scandals, lavish parties – no this is not an episode of Real Housewives. It is New York at the height of emerging global dominance, of oil, steel, and real estate titans, competing to show off their immense wealth and…