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  • Published: 1 May 1993
  • ISBN: 9781101640241
  • Imprint: PEN US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

The House of Mirth




Launching a major new paperback series: Penguin English Library

An immensely popular bestseller upon its publication in 1905, The House of Mirth was Edith Wharton’s first great novel. Set among the elegant brownstones of New York City and opulent country houses like gracious Bellomont on the Hudson, the novel creates a satiric portrayal of what Wharton herself called “a society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers” with a precision comparable to that of Proust. And her brilliant and complex characterization of the doomed Lily Bart, whose stunning beauty and dependence on marriage for economic survival reduce her to a decorative object, becomes an incisive commentary on the nature and status of women in that society. From her tragic attraction to bachelor lawyer Lawrence Selden to her desperate relationship with social-climbing Rosedale, Lily is all too much a product of the world indicated by the title, a phrase taken from Ecclesiastes: “The heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” For it is Lily’s very specialness that threatens the elegance and fulfillment she seeks in life. Along with the author’s other masterpiece, The Age of Innocence, this novel claims a place among the finest American novels of manners.

  • Published: 1 May 1993
  • ISBN: 9781101640241
  • 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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