The study emphasizes the crucial role that Wharton's contact with Europe had on her writing, and the significance intellectually and politically of her relationship with Morton Fullerton and her reading of his books on politics. It locates Wharton in her period, surrounded as she was by discourses which called for political and social change, change which an outlook that Peel calls "American Toryism" made her reluctant to embrace. Her love of motorcars and her excitement about other technological developments such as aeroplanes was inspired by a feeling of exclusivity and not the democratization of culture, which she feared and condemned. France, England, Italy, and America formed the quartet of countries that contained the best and worst of culture, and Peel emphasizes how ironical it was that a writer whose ideological beliefs endorsed the importance of home, roots, and tradition should have spent so much of her life as a restless, apparently rootless traveler."--BOOK JACKET.