Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the works of Wharton (1862-1937) such as The Age of Innocence for which she won the Pulitzer Prize and was the first woman to do so, The House of Mirth, and The Custom of the Country. Her novels explore the world of privileged New Yorkers in the Gilded Age of the late C19th, of which she was part, drawing on her own experiences and written from the perspective of the new century, either side of WW1 . Among her themes, she examined the choices available to women and the extent to which they could ever really be free, even if rich.

With

Dame Hermione Lee
Biographer, former President of Wolfson College, Oxford

Bridget Bennett
Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds

And

Laura Rattray
Reader in North American Literature at the University of Glasgow

Producer: Simon Tillotson