"First published in 1913 and regarded by many critics as her most substantial novel, The Custom of the Country is Edith Wharton's powerful saga about the beautiful, ruthless Undine Spragg. A woman of extraordinary ambition and exuberant vitality, Undine is consigned by virtue of her sex to the shadow world of the drawing room and boudoir. Marriage remains the one institution through which she can exercise her will as she entrances man after man, marrying...

Virtually unpublished in her lifetime and unknown at her death in 1886, Emily Dickinson stands today in the front rank of American poets. Though she lived as a recluse in her father's house in Amherst, Massachusetts, her imagination knew no bounds, ranging with utter fearlessness through a vast landscape of love, immortality, nature, joy, faith, and despair. After Dickinson's death, her sister Vinnie was stunned to discover a locked box containing...