Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    False Dawn
    False Dawn
    False Dawn
    Ebook78 pages1 hour

    False Dawn

    By Edith Wharton

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Twenty-one-year-old Lewis Raycie about to embark on a Grand Tour is advised by his father to seek out works of art for a gallery with their family name. However, when Lewis returns, the paintings he has selected are not what his father expected.


    Art Fiction is a literary genre in which art is not solely an object, but is a ref

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPortmay Press
    Release dateFeb 1, 2021
    ISBN9781736053607
    False Dawn
    Author

    Edith Wharton

    Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was an American novelist—the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence in 1921—as well as a short story writer, playwright, designer, reporter, and poet. Her other works include Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, and Roman Fever and Other Stories. Born into one of New York’s elite families, she drew upon her knowledge of upper-class aristocracy to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age.

    Read more from Edith Wharton

    Related to False Dawn

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      What Steve Bannon Saw: On Joshua Green’s ‘Devil’s Bargain’

      Jan 9, 2018

      It can be hard to keep track of who’s up and who’s down in our nation’s Gonzo Presidency. Just days ago, as I was finishing Joshua Green’s Devil’s Bargain, the book’s central figure, Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, Steve Bannon, was still rumored t

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Homo Narrativus and the Trouble With Fame: We Think That Fame Is Deserved. We Are Wrong.: We think that fame is deserved. We are wrong.

      Sep 5, 2013

      Our understanding of fame is critical to how we see each other and our society. But it is also badly wrong. Let me tell you why. We humans are storytelling and story-finding machines: homo narrativus, if you will. In making sense of the world, we loo

      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      May Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)

      May 2, 2023

      New books Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Emma Cline, Samantha Irby, Brandon Taylor, and more. The post May Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month) appeared first on The Millions.

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      You Have to Invent Yourself: An Interview with Jaron Lanier

      Jun 11, 2018

      I think of a social media company, in particular Facebook and to a degree Google, as an existential mafia. They’re saying, you have to work with us or you effectively won’t exist. You’ll become invisible to everybody. Your very corporeality is in our

      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Year in Reading: Lisa Halliday

      Dec 12, 2018

      It has been a year of reading in fits and starts, indeed of doing everything in fits and starts, fits and starts being the general run of things when you have a baby. For articles I was writing, I happily revisited passages from several books, includ

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Weirdly Wonderful

      Oct 9, 2022

      Weirdly Wonderful
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Writers Bloc

      Jun 1, 2017

      We asked authors and artists to suggest books that bring solace and understanding in this age of political rancor. You can read their complete responses at motherjones.com/trump-reading.

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Good GRACE

      Jan 6, 2022

      Grace is usually peddled as the stuff of cover-ups; the added ingredient that takes all your failures and mistakes and the times when you’ve fallen short, and makes up the difference, hiding them away as if they were never there. Grace makes your par

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Yoga For Mental Health

      Nov 19, 2021

      Yoga For Mental Health
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      You’re With Us On This Journey

      Nov 22, 2022

      WE DON’T HAVE TO look very far to see hurt in the world. As if the underlying uncertainty, anxiety, and trauma in our own lives were not enough, we’re surrounded by countless examples of suffering in the world—climate change, pandemic, war, economic

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Tell Me A Story

      May 5, 2022

      Tell Me A Story
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Searching for a Soul Mate Is Futile. The Ideal Partner Is the One You Create

      May 20, 2017

      “GIVEN THAT YOU HAVE 500,000,000 POTENTIAL soul mates,” writes Randall Munroe in the science book What If?, “you would find true love only in one lifetime out of 10,000.” A cousin of mine gave a toast along these lines at his brother’s wedding. He c

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Top Ten Adult Fiction and Nonfiction Chosen Monthly by America’s Library Staff

      Jul 29, 2024

      Find out more at www.LibraryReads.org Sarah Pekkanen (St. Martin’s Press) Best interest attorney Stella Hudson is assigned as counsel for nine-year-old Rose during the family’s custody case. Working with the child—mute after witnessing the tragic dea

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Real Mr Hyde

      Oct 10, 2019

      The Real Mr Hyde
      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Do Great Books Still Matter? For Roosevelt Montás, They Are Essential.

      Dec 15, 2021

      The study of the Great Books – a fluctuating list of predominantly Western texts hailed by academics – has long been criticized as elitist, sexist, and Eurocentric. But Roosevelt Montás is coming to the books’ defense. The Columbia University alumnus

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Inside Meghan’s First Marriage!

      Jan 17, 2021

      Inside Meghan’s First Marriage!
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Our literary HEROINES

      Aug 27, 2020

      Our literary HEROINES
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Yoga For Honesty

      May 5, 2021

      Yoga For Honesty
      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for False Dawn

    4/5

    13 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Audiobook..................A lovely novella by Edith Wharton about what happens when a person sees the dawn of a new era before everyone else. In this case, the foreseer is a young man discovering the artwork of some of the Italian masters of religious art in the late 1800s. The story is moving because of the man's passion and deep belief in the art, along with the sacrifices he makes waiting for the "one man" to come along who will "unerstand" his collection.

    Book preview

    False Dawn - Edith Wharton

    False Dawn

    False Dawn

    (The ’Forties)

    Edith Wharton

    A drawing of a face Description automatically generated

    Portmay Press

    New York

    This work by Edith Wharton was originally published in 1924 in Old New York, published by D. Appleton and Company.

    Cover image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum’s Open Access initiative: Vincent Van Gogh, Corridor in the Asylum (September 1889), Bequest of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 1948.

    Published in 2020 by Portmay Press, New York

    ISBN 978-1-7360536-0-7 (ebook)

    Project management and design by Emily Albarillo

    A drawing of a face Description automatically generated

    Portmay Press, LLC

    244 Madison Avenue

    New York, NY 10016

    False Dawn

    I

    Hay, verbena and mignonette scented the languid July day. Large strawberries, crimsoning through sprigs of mint, floated in a bowl of pale yellow cup on the verandah table: an old Georgian bowl, with complex reflections on polygonal flanks, engraved with the Raycie arms between lions’ heads. Now and again the gentlemen, warned by a menacing hum, slapped their cheeks, their brows or their bald crowns; but they did so as furtively as possible, for Mr. Halston Raycie, on whose verandah they sat, would not admit that there were mosquitoes at High Point.

    The strawberries came from Mr. Raycie’s kitchen garden; the Georgian bowl came from his great-grandfather (father of the Signer); the verandah was that of his country-house, which stood on a height above the Sound, at a convenient driving distance from his town house in Canal Street.

    Another glass, Commodore, said Mr. Raycie, shaking out a cambric handkerchief the size of a table-cloth, and applying a corner of it to his steaming brow.

    Mr. Jameson Ledgely smiled and took another glass. He was known as the Commodore among his intimates because of having been in the Navy in his youth, and having taken part, as a midshipman under Admiral Porter, in the war of 1812. This jolly sunburnt bachelor, whose face resembled that of one of the bronze idols he might have brought back with him, had kept his naval air, though long retired from the service; and his white duck trousers, his gold-braided cap and shining teeth, still made him look as if he might be in command of a frigate. Instead of that, he had just sailed over a party of friends from his own place on the Long Island shore; and his trim white sloop was now lying in the bay below the point.

    The Halston Raycie house overlooked a lawn sloping to the Sound. The lawn was Mr. Raycie’s pride: it was mown with a scythe once a fortnight, and rolled in the spring by an old white horse specially shod for the purpose. Below the verandah the turf was broken by three round beds of rose-geranium, heliotrope and Bengal roses, which Mrs. Raycie tended in gauntlet gloves, under a small hinged sunshade that folded back on its carved ivory handle. The house, remodelled and enlarged by Mr. Raycie on his marriage, had played a part in the Revolutionary war as the settler’s cottage where Benedict Arnold had had his headquarters. A contemporary print of it hung in Mr. Raycie’s study; but no one could have detected the humble outline of the old house in the majestic stone-coloured dwelling built of tongued-and-grooved boards, with an angle tower, tall narrow windows, and a verandah on chamfered posts, that figured so confidently as a Tuscan Villa in Downing’s Landscape Gardening in America. There was the same difference between the rude lithograph of the earlier house and the fine steel engraving of its successor (with a specimen weeping beech on the lawn) as between the buildings themselves. Mr. Raycie had reason to think well of his architect.

    He thought well of most things related to himself by ties of blood or interest. No one had ever been quite sure that he made Mrs. Raycie happy, but he was known to have the highest opinion of her. So it was with his daughters, Sarah Anne and Mary Adeline, fresher replicas of the lymphatic Mrs. Raycie; no one would have sworn that they were quite at ease with their genial parent, yet every one knew how loud he was in their praises. But the most remarkable object within the range of Mr. Raycie’s self-approval was his son Lewis. And yet, as Jameson Ledgely, who was given to speaking his mind, had once observed, you wouldn’t have supposed young Lewis was exactly the kind of craft Halston would have turned out if he’d had the designing of his son and heir.

    Mr. Raycie was a monumental man. His extent in height, width and thickness was so nearly the same that whichever way he was turned one had an almost equally broad view of him; and every inch of that mighty circumference was so exquisitely cared for that to a farmer’s eye he might have suggested a great agricultural estate of which not an acre is untilled. Even his baldness, which was in proportion to the rest, looked as if it received a special daily polish; and on a hot day his whole person was like some wonderful example of the costliest irrigation. There was so much of him, and he had so many planes, that it was fascinating to watch each runnel of moisture follow its own particular watershed. Even on his large fresh-looking hands the drops divided, trickling in different ways from the ridges of the fingers; and as for

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1