In her autobiography, Edith Wharton admits to a feeling of homelessness due to her alienation from the aristocracy of late nineteenth-century New York, where she was raised. Her sense of exile urges Wharton to settle in Europe, where she appreciates French culture and develops a vision of literary cosmopolitanism. In her major fiction—The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), and The Age of Innocence (1920)—Wharton looks back on her American country, and reflects on the gender and class roles that restrict the individual. Her experience with the continuity of traditions in Europe fuels her critique of the “custom of the country,” namely, women’s exile from American politics and business. In French Ways and their Meaning (1919), she further contrasts French cosmopolitanism to American provincialism, illustrating her emotional, intellectual, and sexual growth. Wharton’s development as an individual and an author triggers her experimentation with various genres, from novels and architectural treatises to travel memoirs, essays, and ghost stories. Although her late career is more reserved in its tenor and conservative in its politics, it illustrates a keen awareness of the importance (and the complexities) of cosmopolitanism as well as her loyalty to her literary homeland.