Maverick in Mauve

The landscapes of Edith Wharton form the backdrop to this diary of a beautiful, passionate woman who lived at the pinnacle of New York society at the turn of the twentieth century. Florence Adele Sloane was barely twenty when she swirled through the ballrooms of New York and Newport, cruised in the Mediterranean, and took in the sights of London and Paris. In these pages, interspersed with the commentary of Louis Auchincloss and 85 period photographs, the reader sees Adele moving through the opulence and extravagance of that privileged world: an enchantress who is like a prisoner in a gilded cage-her talent constrained by conventions, her creativity stifled by the seductive splendor of New York's Four Hundred. In the end we see her marry a rich, socially prominent young man and embark on a life we are not sure will live up to her dreams.