feathery white snow, I joined a book club meeting in Edith Wharton’s home, The Mount, featured in her vanguard 1887 book Decoration of Houses with Ogden Codman.  Up the back kitchen-stairs (keeping wet boots off the vestibule marble), we lounged comfortably in her living room and lived in her Manhattan gilded age, context of the Age of Innocence, where setting becomes almost protagonist character. And then . . .  And then we held a first edition from her library!

‍

Together with Henry James Portrait of a Lady, Age of Innocence can be read and relished over and again.  Here follow excerpts from the 1920 New York Times book review, to further entice you to read and join the Chamberdiscussion.

‍

Following a blizzard in the western Massachusetts Berkshires that layered the winter-bare boughs in feathery white snow, I joined a book club meeting in Edith Wharton’s home, The Mount, featured in her vanguard 1887book Decoration of Houses with Ogden Codman. Up the back kitchen-stairs (keeping wet boots off the vestibule marble),we lounged comfortably in her living room and lived in her Manhattan gilded age, context of the Age of Innocence, where setting becomes almost protagonist character. And then . . .  And then we held a first edition from her library!

‍

Together with Henry James Portrait of a Lady, Age of Innocence can be read and relished over and again.  Here follow excerpts from the 1920 New York Times book review, to further entice you to read and join the Chamber discussion.

‍

Those who are interested in good dinners — and who is not? —will find much to admire in these brilliant pages. . . The formal and elaboratedinner parties in New York in the seventies are described here with a gustothat the studied undercurrent of irony quite fails to conceal; there wereepicures in those days who sailed from their Fifth Avenue mausoleums not totalk, but to dine.

‍