Books with title Bunner Sisters

Ann Eliza and Evelina Bunner have never been apart. Unmarried, the sisters fill their days making hats in their millinery shop, located on the seedy side of New York City, and their evenings quietly in their apartment. But when Ann Eliza buys Evelina a clock that does not work for her birthday, the sisters commence a relationship with Herman Ramsay, setting in motion a series of events that will prove to be everyone’s undoing.

"Bunner Sisters," written in 1892 but not published until 1916 in Xingu and Other Stories, takes place in a shabby neighborhood in New York City. The two Bunner sisters, Ann Eliza the elder, and Evelina the younger, keep a small shop selling artificial flowers and small handsewn articles to Stuyvesant Square's "female population."Ann Eliza gives Evelina a clock for her birthday. The clock leads the sisters to become involved with Herbert Ramy, owner of "the queerest little store you ever laid eyes on." Soon Ramy is a regular guest of the Bunner sisters, who realize that their "treadmill routine," once so comfortable, is now "intolerably monotonous."

The Bunner sisters were proud of the neatness of their shop and content with its humble prosperity. It was not what they had once imagined it would be, but though it presented but a shrunken image of their earlier ambitions it enabled them to pay their rent and keep themselves alive and out of debt; and it was long since their hopes had soared higher.

EDITH WHARTON (1862-1937), née Newbold Jones, American novelist and short story writer, born in New York of a distinguished and wealthy family. She was educated privately at home and in Europe. She married Edward Robbins Wharton in 1885 and they settled in France in 1907. They were divorced in 1913. She devoted her energy to a cosmopolitan social life, which included friendship with H. James, and to a literary career, which began with the publication of poems and stories in “Scribner´s Magazine”. Her first volume of short stories, “The Greater Inclination” (1899), was followed by a novella, “The Touchstone” (1900), but it was “The House of Mirth” (1905), the tragedy of failed social climber Lily Bart, which established her as a leading novelist. Edith Wharton´s chief preoccupation is with the conflict between social and individual fulfilment which frequently leads to tragedy.

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In the days when New York's traffic moved at the pace of the drooping horse-car, when society applauded Christine Nilsson at the Academy of Music and basked in the sunsets of the Hudson River School on the walls of the National Academy of Design, an inconspicuous shop with a single show-window was intimately and favourably known to the feminine population of the quarter bordering on Stuyvesant Square.

Ann Eliza and Evelina Bunner have never been apart. Unmarried, the sisters fill their days making hats in their millinery shop, located on the seedy side of New York City, and their evenings quietly in their apartment. But when Ann Eliza buys Evelina a clock that does not work for her birthday, the sisters commence a relationship with Herman Ramsay, setting in motion a series of events that will prove to be everyone’s undoing.

The Bunner sisters were proud of the neatness of their shop and content with its humble prosperity. It was not what they had once imagined it would be, but though it presented but a shrunken image of their earlier ambitions it enabled them to pay their rent and keep themselves alive and out of debt; and it was long since their hopes had soared higher.

Originally published in 1916, but actually written in 1890, "Bunner Sisters" is a compelling, heartbreaking little novella about two sisters, who have never been apart, struggling to eek an existence as small shopkeepers on the margins of late nineteenth-century society in New York. They barely make enough money to live on. But when Ann Eliza the elder buys Evelina the younger a clock that does not work for her birthday, the sisters commence a relationship with Herbert Ramy, who operates a "queer little" shop, setting in motion a series of events that will prove to be everyone's undoing. Edith Wharton provides a vivid description of the life of shop keepers and their friends in the poorer urban areas of New York City.