Enter the brownstone boarding house on Twenty-Third Street and meet two women waiting for a life that never arrives. Read Edith Wharton’s most heartbreaking New York story completely free online.
Published in 1916, Bunner Sisters is Edith Wharton’s quiet masterpiece of urban desolation. It was written much earlier—probably in 1892—and set aside, perhaps because its subject was too grim, its characters too insignificant, its vision of New York too distant from the fashionable society that was Wharton’s usual domain. When it finally appeared, in the collection Xingu and Other Stories, it surprised readers who thought they knew Wharton’s range. This was not the New York of Fifth Avenue mansions and Newport cottages. This was the New York of basement shops and back bedrooms, of women who lived on the edge of respectability and the edge of poverty, sustained by nothing but habit and hope.
The Bunner sisters—Ann Eliza, the elder, and Evelina, the younger—keep a small shop on a side street near Stuyvesant Square. They sell hats, ribbons, artificial flowers. Their customers are few, their profits meager, their lives measured in yards of silk and ounces of coffee. They have never married, never traveled, never expected anything more than this narrow existence. Then a German clockmaker named Herman Ramy enters their shop to have his watch repaired. And everything changes.
On this page, you can experience the story that Henry James called “a little masterpiece of quiet tragedy.” We offer the complete 1916 text for online reading.
Book Info
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Title | Bunner Sisters |
| Author | Edith Wharton |
| Year of Publication | 1916 (written c. 1892) |
| Genre | Novella, Realism, Tragedy |
| Language | English |
| Legal Status | Public Domain in the U.S. |
| Format | Online Reading |
Read Bunner Sisters Online
Hear the bell above the shop door and the German accent asking for repairs. Begin this quiet tragedy by entering the Bunner sisters’ world interactively below.
This preview introduces the sisters, their routines, and the stranger who disrupts them. However, the full, devastating narrative—the slow growth of love, the sacrifice concealed, the marriage that is not a rescue, and the final, solitary survival—is available in the complete text for our subscribers.
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About the Novella Bunner Sisters
Bunner Sisters is a story about waiting. Ann Eliza waits for a proposal that will never come; Evelina waits for a life that never arrives; the sisters wait, together, for a future that is already behind them. Wharton renders this waiting with excruciating precision, noting every hesitation, every unspoken thought, every hope that is also a fear.
Ann Eliza: The Elder Sister
Ann Eliza is the novel’s protagonist and its martyr. She is plain, patient, self-sacrificing. She has spent her life caring for her younger sister, suppressing her own desires, denying her own needs. When Herman Ramy appears, Ann Eliza allows herself to hope—briefly, secretly, guiltily. She imagines a life with this quiet, gentle man, a life of companionship and modest comfort. Then she realizes that Ramy prefers Evelina. And Ann Eliza does what she has always done: she steps aside. She encourages the match. She gives her blessing. She watches her sister marry the man she loves and tells no one what it costs her.
Evelina: The Younger Sister
Evelina is prettier than Ann Eliza, more vivacious, more impatient with the narrowness of their existence. She has not surrendered her dreams of romance; she still believes that a man might rescue her from the shop and the boarding house. When Ramy appears, she is ready to be rescued. But Evelina is also fragile, febrile, subject to mysterious illnesses that confine her to bed for weeks at a time. Her body rebels against the life she is forced to live; her illness is both symptom and strategy, a way of expressing desires she cannot articulate and escaping duties she cannot bear.
Herman Ramy: The Failed Rescuer
Ramy is not a villain. He is kind, gentle, sincerely attached to Evelina. He is also weak, ineffectual, incapable of the steady work that might support a family. His clockmaking business fails; he moves the sisters to a cheaper neighborhood; he becomes dependent on morphine, acquired from a physician who prescribes it for his vague complaints. His love for Evelina is genuine, but it is not enough. He cannot save her; he can only drag her deeper into poverty and despair.
The Brownstone World
Wharton’s depiction of the boarding-house milieu is documentary in its precision. She knows the cost of coal, the price of a good cup of coffee, the humiliation of accepting charity. She knows the hierarchies of the respectable poor: the distinction between a private house and a boarding house, between a shop that sells hats and a shop that sells second-hand goods. The Bunner sisters occupy a precarious position, always one illness, one winter, one unexpected expense away from destitution. Their respectability is their only capital, and it is insufficient.
The Sacrifice
The emotional climax of the novella occurs when Ann Eliza, desperate to finance Evelina’s wedding, sells her mother’s clock. This clock is her only inheritance, her only tangible connection to the past, her only possession of any value. She sells it to buy her sister a chance at happiness. The scene is rendered without sentimentality; Ann Eliza does not weep, does not hesitate, does not permit herself to regret. She simply does what must be done. The clock disappears into the pawnshop. The wedding proceeds. Ann Eliza returns to her solitary room.
The Aftermath
The final section of the novella is unrelenting. Evelina’s marriage fails; Ramy’s addiction deepens; Evelina falls ill and dies. Ann Eliza, alone, attempts to reconstruct her life. She moves to cheaper lodgings, seeks employment, tries to imagine a future without the sister who has been her sole companion for forty years. The ending is not redemptive; there is no late marriage, no unexpected inheritance, no reconciliation. Ann Eliza survives. That is all.
Why Read the Novella Bunner Sisters Today?
Because it is Edith Wharton’s most radical act of empathy. She who moved among the rich and fashionable turned her attention, in this early work, to women who had nothing: no money, no status, no education, no hope of escape. She rendered their lives without condescension and without melodrama. She showed that their sufferings were as real, as significant, as the sufferings of Lily Bart or Ellen Olenska. Bunner Sisters is Wharton’s testament to the invisible women of nineteenth-century New York, the ones who left no diaries, wrote no letters, built no monuments. They had only Edith Wharton to speak for them. She spoke.
FAQ
Why was this written so early and published so late?
Scholars speculate that Wharton’s editors considered the novella too bleak for publication. The 1890s were the decade of her marriage and her emergence as a professional writer; she may have set aside the manuscript and simply forgotten it. Its eventual publication in 1916, after her reputation was secure, allowed it to find the audience it deserved.
Is this a novel or a short story?
It is a novella, approximately 100 pages in standard editions. It is longer than a story, shorter than a novel, perfectly proportioned to its subject.
How does it compare to The House of Mirth?
Thematically, Bunner Sisters anticipates Wharton’s great novel of 1905. Both works concern women destroyed by poverty and the limitations of their social position. But Lily Bart moves in high society; the Bunner sisters move in no society at all. The novel is tragedy in the grand manner; the novella is tragedy in miniature.
Is it autobiographical?
No. Wharton was born into wealth and moved effortlessly through the highest circles of New York society. She did not share the Bunner sisters’ poverty. She did, however, share their gender and their historical moment. She understood, from observation if not from experience, the constraints that confined unmarried women of limited means.
Can I read it on my phone?
Yes. The novella is long enough to absorb you for an evening, short enough to complete in a single sitting. Clear your schedule. You will not want to interrupt.