The House of Mirth

An impoverished member of the privileged high society of Old New York, Lily Bart is beautiful and socially agreeable, but remains unmarried at the age of thirty – a dangerous threshold for a young woman. Now she is desperate to secure a wealthy husband to confirm her status in society, but her penchant for gambling at cards, her reduced circumstances, her determination to marry for love and the constant gossip she attracts from malevolent tongues through her heedless behaviour and constant social faux pas make her prospects look bleak. As suitor after suitor appears and fades away, and she is drawn further and further down a spiral of debt and unhappiness, she realizes that she is just one step away from losing everything she has. Published in 1905 to immediate critical and commercial success, The House of Mirth is perhaps Edith Wharton’s most popular work – a brilliant evocation of the economic and social changes wrought by the Gilded Age which transcends the novel of manners, as well as a universal satire on the constraints and follies of upper-crust conventions.