Crucial Instances

Seven early pieces from the writer who would become the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction - and two of them are ghost stories.

Crucial Instances, published in March 1901, is Edith Wharton's second collection of short fiction, written in the years when she was making her name in the pages of Scribner's and before The House of Mirth made her famous. Art and artists, inheritance and marriage, moral compromise and the long consequences of a single decision: these are her subjects, and she works them in Italy as often as in New York.

The collection contains 'The Duchess at Prayer', her chilling reworking of a Balzac tale, and 'The Moving Finger' - two of her best-known excursions into the Gothic - alongside 'The Angel at the Grave', 'The Recovery', 'Copy: A Dialogue', 'The Rembrandt' and 'The Confessional', which had not been published before.