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  • Published: 1 February 2000
  • ISBN: 9781101098059
  • Imprint: PEN US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

The House of Mirth




Launching a major new paperback series: Penguin English Library

Edith Wharton's classic novel, The House of Mirth, is a brillaint exposé of the pretense and greed of fashionable New York Society.

In The House of Mirth, which helped to establish Edith Wharton’s literary reputation, she honed her acerbic style and discovered her defining subject: the fashionable New York society in which she had been raised and that held the power to debase both people and ideals. In this devastatingly accurate and finely wrought tale, Lily Bart, the poor relation of a wealthy woman, is beautiful, intelligent, and hopelessly addicted to the moneyed world of luxury and grace. But her good taste and moral sensibility render her unfit for survival in a vulgar society whose glittering social edifice is based on a foundation of pure greed. A brilliant portrayal of both human frailty and nobility, and a bitter attack on false social values, The House of Mirth has been hailed by Louis Auchincloss as “uniquely authentic among American novels of manners.”

With an Introduction by Anna Quindlen 
and an Afterword by Michael Gorra

  • Published: 1 February 2000
  • ISBN: 9781101098059
  • Imprint: PEN US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

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.

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