The Cruise of the Vanadis

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 she wanted more in the world than to take a cruise in the Mediterranean. Van Alen arranged for the charter of a yacht called the Vanadis, and Edith and her husband Teddy set off on the trip she would call ‘a taste of heaven'.

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‘In her log of the Vanadis we have a kind of dress rehearsal for the fiction of one of America's greatest novelists … We see in what she wrote about her cruise that she was ready to set her stages, to fill her backgrounds, to create the world in which her characters would enact her plots. The characters and plots would come in due time’ - From the Introduction by Louis Auchincloss
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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 marks the diary's first publication in the UK and provides a rare glimpse into the early career of one of America's most important writers. Annotated with timeless photographs by distinguished photographer Jonas Dovydenas, who faithfully retraced Wharton's route, this book is an invaluable addition to the Wharton canon.