> Skip to content
[]
  • Published: 26 December 2007
  • ISBN: 9780553904451
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 464

The House of Mirth




Launching a major new paperback series: Penguin English Library

In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton depicts the glittering salons of Gilded Age New York with precision and wit, even as she movingly portrays the obstacles that impeded women's choices at the turn of the century.

 

The beautiful, much-desired Lily Bart has been raised to be one of the perfect wives of the wealthy upper class, but her spark of character and independent drive prevents her from becoming one of the many women who will succeed in those circles. Though her desire for a comfortable life means that she cannot marry for love without money, her resistance to the rules of the social elite endangers her many marriage proposals. As Lily spirals down into debt and dishonor, her story takes on the resonance of classic tragedy. One of Wharton's most bracing and nuanced portraits of the life of women in a hostile, highly ordered world, The House of Mirth exposes the truths about American high society that its denizens most wished to deny. With an introduction by Pamela Knights.

  • Published: 26 December 2007
  • ISBN: 9780553904451
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 464

Other books in the series

Emma
Persuasion
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
On Sparta
Man and Superman
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton was born into a wealthy New York family in 1862, during the American Civil War. She married at twenty-three, and subsequently divided her time between homes in New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The House of Mirth, perhaps her most famous work, appeared in 1905, and was followed by Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, Summer and The Age of Innocence. Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She died in 1937.

Also by Edith Wharton

See all