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First edition, first printing, presentation copy, inscribed by the author to her closest companion in later life, Robert Norton, on the front free endpaper, "R.N. from E.W., May 4 1925", with Norton's armorial bookplate on the front pastedown. After making a small fortune in London, Norton (1868-1939) retired from business to devote himself to watercolour painting. He and Wharton first met in 1904, but "their intimacy took on a new dimension after the First World War" (Goodman, p. 24), around the time Wharton took up residence at Sainte-Claire in the south of France. Norton "was associated from the first with the discovery and invention of Sainte-Claire, and the whole story of the place was threaded through, to the end, with the pleasant amenity of his presence" (Lubbock, p. 178). Norton spent whole winters and summers at Sainte-Claire, and he and Wharton lived closely together there. "Each worked through the morning, she writing and he sketching. Afternoons tended to include a picnic... Following a typical lunch of eggs, cheese, olives, chicken, salads, chocolate, oranges, and coffee, they would take a long walk until teatime. In the evenings, he frequently read aloud from Hardy's The Return of the Native or Austen's Sense and Sensibility, to name two favourites" (Goodman, p. 24). Together, they co-edited the anthology Eternal Passion in English Poetry, "the first attempt to gather between two covers a selection of the most beautiful of English love poems", First edition, first printing, presentation copy, inscribed by the author to her closest companion in later life, Robert Norton, on the front free endpaper, "R.N. from E.W., May 4 1925", with Norton's armorial bookplate on the front pastedown. After making a small fortune in London, Norton (1868-1939) retired from business to devote himself to watercolour painting. He and Wharton first met in 1904, but "their intimacy took on a new dimension after the First World War" (Goodman, p. 24), around the time Wharton took up residence at Sainte-Claire in the south of France. Norton "was associated from the first with the discovery and invention of Sainte-Claire, and the whole story of the place was threaded through, to the end, with the pleasant amenity of his presence" (Lubbock, p. 178). Norton spent whole winters and summers at Sainte-Claire, and he and Wharton lived closely together there. "Each worked through the morning, she writing and he sketching. Afternoons tended to include a picnic... Following a typical lunch of eggs, cheese, olives, chicken, salads, chocolate, oranges, and coffee, they would take a long walk until teatime. In the evenings, he frequently read aloud from Hardy's The Return of the Native or Austen's Sense and Sensibility, to name two favourites" (Goodman, p. 24). Together, they co-edited the anthology Eternal Passion in English Poetry, "the first attempt to gather between two covers a selection of the most beautiful of English love poems", published by Appleton in 1939, two years after Wharton's death. This copy is from the British issue; there was also an American issue published simultaneously. READ MORE Octavo. Original red cloth, spine and front cover lettered in gilt. A couple of spots of wear to spine, covers marked and a little stained, cloth lightly frayed at extremities, gutter cracked between a few gatherings, but sound. A good copy. Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton's Inner Circle, 1994; Percy Lubbock, Portrait of Edith Wharton, 1947.

'The Mother's Recompense' opens on Kate Clephane in a hotel in the French Riviera, marooned by the world and by her own choices in life. She receives a summon from her estranged daughter in New York, which propels her to confront the past she left behind.