The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton (1905)
“A woman too smart to play the game and too beautiful to be forgiven for failing — Wharton's masterpiece is a cold autopsy of a society that destroys what it cannot own.”
At a Glance
Lily Bart, a beautiful and witty woman of reduced circumstances in 1890s New York high society, spends two years trying to secure a wealthy husband while resisting the one man she might actually love. Each near-success collapses — through bad luck, moral scruple, or her own self-sabotage — until she descends from ballrooms to boarding houses to a rented room where she dies of a chloral overdose. Lawrence Selden, the lawyer who loved her without acting on it, arrives too late to tell her.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Published serially in Scribner's Magazine in 1905, it sold 140,000 copies in its first year — the fastest-selling novel in Scribner's history. Immediately recognized as a major work. While Fitzgerald's Gatsby took decades to find its readership, Wharton's novel was a sensation from publication. It is the founding text of American social fiction by a woman and the template for every subsequent novel about women navigating patriarchal social structures.
Diction Profile
High formal with sustained social irony — Latinate vocabulary, precise class distinctions, surfaces of polite exchange underset by economic reality
High, but disciplined