The Reef

A diplomat, delayed in Paris by a letter putting him off, spends a few days with a girl he meets by chance ¿ and months later finds her installed in the French château where he has come to marry the widow he has loved for years. Wharton wrote this in 1912 in the middle of her own affair and her divorce; James called it her finest book. Nothing is confessed and everything is understood, which is worse.

Edith Wharton (1862¿1937) was an American novelist and short story writer who lived in New York and, from 1907, in France. She was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for The Age of Innocence (1920). Her work, which includes Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth, examines the rigid social codes of New York's upper class.