There are many ways of organizing critical considerations of Wharton's writing; it is possible, for instance, to shape a discussion around form, as I have done in the previous chapter in talking about the shorter fiction, around generic concerns, like Wharton's use of the historical novel, around place, as in my chapter on ‘Writing New York’, or simply according to chronology. The choice to bring an author's work into a particular focus can shape a critical argument distinctively and in this chapter I intend to bring together fictions that not only have a European setting but that crucially implicate that setting in the narrative and structure of the text. In addition, these texts can also be explored productively in terms of the various literary influences on Wharton's work that they make manifest. Whilst, to a certain extent, the vast majority of Edith Wharton's fiction can be said to be engaged in some way or another with the international scene, there is a distinct and interesting group of texts that are set substantially, if not entirely, in Europe, and I propose to treat them as having discrete concerns. It is true to say that in all her fiction, from her earliest New York novel, The House of Mirth, onwards, there is usually an international dimension in terms of both story and setting and this is, indeed, inevitable, because of the social class she is mainly concerned with: members of the American leisure classes have always travelled extensively in Europe. In some texts, like the 1928 novel, The Children, the setting is almost exclusively European, but the concerns that drive the narrative are quintessentially American, and discussion of them belongs, for the purposes of this study at least, with the other novels of the 1920s and 1930s that treat contemporary American society. The novels that I want to consider here begin and end Wharton's career as a writer and also mark her expatriation to France and her involvement in the First World War.