Edith Wharton 
The Glimpses of the Moon (Annotated) 

• This edition includes the following editor’s introduction: Edith Wharton, the feminism of a Pulitzer Prize winner

American author Edith Wharton composed “The Glimpses of the Moon” after the end of World War I. Wharton began to work on it within a year after receiving the
Pulitzer Prize in May 1921 for “The Age of Innocence.” The novel was published in August 1922, and the following spring she made her last trip to America where she was awarded by Yale University a Doctor of Letters degree, the first such given to a woman by a major university in the United States.



“The Glimpses of the Moon” tells the story of Nick Lansing and Susy Branch, a couple of young, attractive, but impoverished New Yorkers. They are in love and decide to marry, but realize their chances of happiness are slim without the wealth and society that their more privileged friends take for granted.

The two agree to separate when either encounters a more eligible proposition. However, as they honeymoon in friends’ lavish houses, from a villa on Lake Como to a Venetian palace, jealous passions and troubled consciences cause the idyll to crumble.



Wharton was able to insightfully and masterfully describe the choices faced by Nick and Susy; the same dilemma still faced by those seduced by the pleasures of society.