Publisher's Synopsis
The House of Mirth, a novel by Edith Wharton (1862-1937), tells the story of Lily Bart, a well-born but impoverished woman belonging to New York City's high society around the turn of the last century. Wharton creates a portrait of a stunning beauty who, though raised and educated to marry well both socially and economically, is reaching her 29th year, an age when her youthful blush is drawing to a close and her marital prospects are becoming ever more limited.The House of Mirth traces Lily's slow two-year social descent from privilege to a tragically lonely existence on the margins of society. Wharton uses Lily as an attack on "an irresponsible, grasping and morally corrupt upper class." The commercial and critical success of The House of Mirth solidified Wharton's reputation as a major novelist. Because of the novel's commercial success, some critics classified it as a genre novel. However, Edith's pastor, then rector of Trinity Church in Manhattan, wrote to tell her that her novel was "a terrible but just arraignment of the social misconduct which begins in folly and ends in moral and spiritual death."This moral purpose was not lost on the literary reviewers and critics of the time who tended to categorize it as both social satire and a novel of manners.
