“As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep”

American writer and designer

Edith Wharton was an American writer and designer. Born in 1862 and active in the early 20th century, she is known for fiction that drew on her knowledge of upper-class New York society, especially the manners and constraints of the Gilded Age. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921 for The Age of Innocence, becoming the first woman to receive it. Her best-known works also include The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories, which helped define her reputation for sharp social realism and careful observation.