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the library of, [11] 42; The Custom of the Country, [77] 16

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The Girl from Apex City

Margaret Drabble on Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913) is one of the most sparkling and enjoyable novels I have ever read, and I’ve read it now several times. Each time it manages to surprise and delight me. I put it in a class with Pride and Prejudice, as a book that offers endlessly renewable pleasure. That’s high praise, but I mean every word of it.

Collecting Edith

George Ramsden on Edith Wharton’s library

In March 1984, full of the joys of spring and possibly slightly mad, I bought the library of the American novelist Edith Wharton from Maggs Bros., the London booksellers, and subsequently discovered that it was incomplete. Maggs had purchased about two thousand books from Edith Wharton’s godson, Colin Clark, which for forty-seven years had been at Saltwood Castle in Kent. Here his father, the art historian Kenneth Clark, Edith Wharton’s friend, had completely integrated them into his own library, which complicated the process of identification and extraction. This had been supervised by Colin’s brother Alan who was by then the custodian of Saltwood.

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