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1Author:  Wharton review: Cooper, Frederic TaberAdd
 Title:  "Custom of the Country," in: "The Sense of Personality and Some Recent Novels.  
 Published:  1996 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text 
 Description: Three husbands seem to be the customary allowance granted by novelists to the pushing, climbing, heartless type of American woman, who will sacrifice everything to her social ambitions and insatiable love of pleasure. Three husbands, it will be remembered, were given by Robert Grant to Selma White, the heroine of Unleavened Bread; three also by Winston Churchill to the heroine of A Modern Chronicle; and similarly, Mrs. Wharton is equally generous to Undine Spragg, the central figure of her latest volume, The Custom of the Country. It is a brilliantly cynical picture of feminine ruthlessness, and a fundamental inability to conceive of father, mother, friends and husbands having been created for any other purpose than to gratify every passing whim of this one beautiful and utterly spoiled young woman. Mrs. Wharton has painted Undine Spragg with an unsparing mercilessness that almost makes the reader wince. It is a splendid and memorable piece of work, a portrait to form a worthy contrast to the equally unforgettable one of Lily Bart. But there is little object in analysing in detail the separate episodes which make Miss Spragg successively Mrs. Ralph Marvell, the Marquise de Chelles, and Mrs. Elmer Moffatt. They are of a nature that cannot be adequately conveyed at second hand; it is not what happens that matters, it is the play of human motives and human limitations behind the happenings that makes this volume one of Mrs. Wharton's finest achievements. And the final touch of the closing paragraph is a perfect climax, a crowning touch of comprehension of monumental and perennial dissatisfaction:
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