A Motor-Flight through France

Freed from the dependency upon the timetables and routes of the railway, the early years of the 20th century were a golden age for motorists. This book describes three of Wharton's journeys in this era, travelling in a chauffeur-driven Panhard with servants and luggage sent on ahead. The journeys are: a three-week run from Boulogne to Clermont-Ferrand to Paris in May 1906

a circuit of the South-West, the Pyrenees and the Rhone Valley in March-April 1907, accompanied by Henry James

and a short weekend in Picardy in 1907. Wharton wrote of her "flights" for the "Atlantic Monthly" and collected them into the present volume, which was first published in 1908.

One of America's most important novelists, Edith Wharton was a refined, relentless chronicler of the Gilded Age and its social mores. Along with close friend Henry James, she helped define literature at the turn of the 20th century, even as she wrote classic nonfiction on travel, decorating and her own life.