The Reef (1912)

The Reef, a semi-autobiographical novel that attacks the hypocrisies of New York society of which author Edith Wharton had long been a member, was praised by contemporaries as her best work since Ethan Frome. The novel challenged the morality of the times in the person of George Darrow, a diplomat who drifts into an affair with another woman after his proposal of marriage to widow Anna Leath receives a cool response. When The Reef appeared in 1912, reviewers found Edith Wharton's novel of American expatriates in France sordid and even shocking. George Darrow, an American diplomat, is in love with the recently widowed Anna Leath. On his way to visit her in France, he finds himself accompanying Sophy Viner, a young American he has briefly met in the past, on her way to Paris. A minutely rendered anatomy of social ambiguity, the implications of this Parisian prologue inform the remainder of the novel, as Darrow's, Anna's, and Sophy's lives become increasingly and intricately interdependent. Obliquely but intensely autobiographical, written following the dissolution of her marriage and her move from America to France, The Reef explores Wharton's ambivalent sense of both her newly adopted country and her unexpectedly awakened sexuality. A brilliant and compelling work, it is both a neglected and genuinely distinguished novel and a revealing document in modern sexual history.