The first book-length critical analysis of its kind, Edith Wharton's Travel Writing is an engaging study of Wharton's travel writing as the embodiment of her connoisseurship. Wright reveals how Wharton enacted a new dialectic of tourism by reconstituting what Blake Nevius calls the 'aesthetic spectra' in her travel texts. Wharton abandoned the examples set by American predecessors such as Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who led the 'artless travelers' of her parents' day to lakes, waterfalls, mountains, and ruins echoing sentimental legends and chose to emulate John Ruskin's precise visual observation and Bernard Berenson's scientific methods of appraisal.

Edith Wharton's seven works of travel have been called "brilliantly written and permanently interesting." For the first time, excerpts from each of these works have been made available to the general reader in a single volume. The collection spans a period of three decades: from the time of leisurely travel by chartered steam yacht, diligence, railway, and motor car during the belle epoque, through the horror and pathos of the French landscape during World War I, to the Morocco of 1917 - a country previously forbidden to most women and foreigners. Scornful of guidebooks, Edith Wharton focused instead on the "parentheses of travel" - the undiscovered by-ways of Europe, Morocco, and the Mediterranean. Among the sites she describes are the towns of Tirano, Brescia, Poitiers, and Chauvigny; the gardens of the Villa Caprarola and the Villa Aldobrandini, Frascati; Hippone and Goletta. Her account of Mount Athos in Greece (written in the recently discovered diary of her 1888 Mediterranean cruise), may be the first ever by an American. An intrepid reporter, she also depicts the front lines of Lorraine and the Vosges during World War I. She describes art, architecture, sculpture, and landscape with the eye of a knowledgeable connoisseur and the sensitivity of an observant and imaginative novelist. Open to all experiences, she is a voracious intellectual wanderer who often interprets the sights she sees in the light of the extensive historic, literary, and classical reading begun in her youth.