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.”
Short Summary
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.
Detailed Summary
Lily Bart is twenty-nine years old — 'old' by the marriage market standards of Gilded Age New York — and she is running out of time. Beautiful, witty, and well-bred, she has been trained since childhood for one purpose: to marry rich. Her parents squandered their money; her mother died in bitter pov...