Summary
Published in 1905, Edith Wharton's first novel, THE HOUSE OF MIRTH, navigates the murky waters of class-bound courtship and marriage in turn-of-the-century upper-crust Manhattan. Ironic, sharp, and tragic, the novel follows beautiful, orphaned Lily Bart in her search for a rich husband-the only route open to her if she is to survive in a ruthlessly materialistic world. Mercilessly, Wharton exposes the cruelty and indifference of a society in which such a woman has no role except to be exploited and looked down upon. Nor does she neglect to expose the vanity and delusions of poor Lily herself-qualities that undermine her considerable intelligence and charm. As always, Wharton is writing about a world she knows first-hand, and one in which she suffered her own trials. The complex and poignant tale of Lily Bart is one of her most popular and successful novels
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"There is perhaps no more searing indictment of the cruelties of capitalism... THE HOUSE OF MIRTH is a cruel book, but it is not a cynical one... Nowhere else in fiction are the contradictions-economic, social, sexual-embodied in the person of the desirable female explored with a clearer eye." -- Mary Gordon
"THE HOUSE OF MIRTH appears to be the novel of the season...[and] has occasioned the most discussion of a serious sort. It is a work which has enlisted the matured powers of a writer whose performance is always distinguished, and whose coupling of psychological insight with the gift of expression is probably not surpassed by any other woman novelist of our time." -- William Payne Morton
-- Dial
"There are certain subjects too shallow to yield anything to the most searching gaze... Now my problem was how to make use of a subject-fashionable New York-which, of all ofthers, seemed most completely to fall within the condemned category... A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys... The answer was my heroine, Lily Bart." -- Edith Wharton
"[U]niquely authentic among American novels of manners." -- Louis Auchincloss
"Perhaps the finest study of American social life, certainly the strongest and most artistic novel of the year...." -- George H. Fitch
-- San Francisco Chronicle
"The first pages of this novel make it obvious, even if the writer's name had not conveyed the information, that we have to consider a serious work of fiction....There is no doubt that Mrs. Wharton has so illuminated THE HOUSE OF MIRTH for us that we shall not soon forget it." -- Virginia Woolf
-- Times Literary Supplement
Bibliographic Details
Publisher: Alan Rodgers Books
Published date: 2006
Size: 6.25 x 9.25 inches
Weight: 1.25 pounds
Pages: 289
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