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Bunner Sisters — cover
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Aeneas Press edition Edwardian

Bunner Sisters

by Edith Wharton 1862–1937

The book, and the century it came out of.

Two sisters keep a small shop in a New York basement, selling artificial flowers and buttons, and buy a clock for a birthday — which means meeting the man who repairs it. Wharton, born into old New York money and the first woman to take the Pulitzer, wrote this novella early, could not place it for twenty years, and it is the only thing she wrote entirely about poverty. It is also the best short work she did. Illustrated with 60 full-page plates — paintings by Kurzbauer, Manet and Cazin among them.

In the days when New York’s traffic moved at the pace of the drooping horse-car, when society applauded Christine Nilsson at the Academy of Music and basked in the sunsets of the Hudson River School on the walls of the National Academy of Design, an inconspicuous shop with a single show-window was intimately and…
The first sentence of Bunner Sisters
A note on this edition

Bunner Sisters, by Edith Wharton, complete and unabridged. Spelling and punctuation follow present-day American usage; the sentences, the paragraphs and the voice are the author’s, word for word.

It was written in another era and may carry attitudes a reader today will find dated. They are kept for the sake of the work and do not reflect the views of this house.

The edition
Format
Ebook
Extent
about 96 pages
Reading time
about 2 hours
Illustrations
Full-page plates, credited
Text
Complete, unabridged
Language
en
This edition
2026
ISBN
9785501776777
The plates

60 paintings are bound into this edition

Six of them are shown here, taken from the volume itself. Each is reproduced full page and named with its painter and year.

The Spinners, Eduard Kurzbauer
The Spinners Eduard Kurzbauer 1877
Little Beggars, William-Adolphe Bouguereau
Little Beggars William-Adolphe Bouguereau 1890
The Café-Concert, Édouard Manet
The Café-Concert Édouard Manet 1878
Street in a Village, Fyodor Vasilyev
Street in a Village Fyodor Vasilyev 1868
Recollection of Mortefontaine, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
Recollection of Mortefontaine Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot 1864
Landscape under snow (Paysage sous la neige), Gustave Courbet
Landscape under snow (Paysage sous la neige) Gustave Courbet 1867
The setting

A page from this edition

Not a mock-up: this page is taken from the finished volume. The ornament above the chapter belongs to its shelf and to no other, the opening letter is set as a drop capital, and the plate below carries the name of the painter and the year.

A page of Bunner Sisters as set for this edition
The opening of a chapter
A page of Bunner Sisters as set for this edition
A page where a plate falls

Both photographed from the finished volume.

Colophon

Bunner Sisters, issued in this edition by Aeneas Press in 2026 on the Literary Classics shelf. Newly set, with the ornament of its series above each chapter and a drop capital on the opening page. Illustrated with full-page plates, each named with its painter.

Published as an ebook and not issued in print by this house; it carries one ISBN, 9785501776777, and is supplied worldwide. This edition — its setting, its ornament, its cover art, and the selection and attribution of its plates — © 2026 Aeneas Press.

Before you buy

Questions readers ask

Is this the whole of Bunner Sisters?
Yes — complete and unabridged. Nothing is cut, condensed or paraphrased. This is the book, not a summary of it.
What exactly did you change?
The spelling and the punctuation follow present-day American usage. Edith Wharton's sentences are untouched — same words, same order, same rhythm.
Are the pictures really in the book?
Yes. The edition carries full-page plates bound into the text, each one named with its painter and the year it was made. Six of them are shown on this page.
How long is it?
About 96 pages, which is roughly about 2 hours of reading.
What do I actually get?
An illustrated ebook with its own ISBN, sold worldwide. One file, yours to keep, readable on any device.
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Bunner Sisters
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