The newly discovered travel memoir of one of America's greatest writers.
In the winter of 1888, Edith Wharton, twenty-six years old, confided in a Newport friend and cousin-in-law, James Van Alen, that there was nothing in the world that she wanted more than to take a cruise on the Mediterranean. Van Alen arranged for the charter of a yacht called the Vanadis, and Edith and her husband Teddy set off on a trip she would call 'a taste of heaven'.
'The Cruise Of The Vanadis' is Wharton's elegant record of that journey. As sophisticated and erudite as any of Wharton's novels, the diary lay undiscovered until recently when scholar Claudine Lesage found it on a dusty library shelf in France. This beautiful illustrated edition, published for the first time in 2004, provides a rare glimpse into the early career of one of the greatest writers in the English language. Annotated with 50 colour photographs by distinguished photographer Jonas Dovydenas, who faithfully retraced Wharton's route, this book is an invaluable addition to the Wharton canon.
