Imprint: Vintage Classics
Published: 03/03/2011
ISBN: 9780099540762
Length: 368 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 23mm x 129mm
Weight: 255g
RRP: £5.99
The House of Mirth follows the tragic fall of Lily Bart, a beautiful socialite who loses her footing in the savage social-climbing world of New York high society in the nineteenth century.
Lily Bart has no fortune, but she possesses everything else she needs to make an excellent marriage: beauty, intelligence, a love of luxury and an elegant skill in negotiating the hidden traps and false friends of New York's high society. But time and again Lily cannot bring herself to make the final decisive move: to abandon her sense of self and a chance of love for the final soulless leap into a mercenary union. Her time is running out, and degradation awaits. Edith Wharton's masterful novel is a tragedy of money, morality and missed opportunity.
‘Edith Wharton's 1905 novel gave literature one of its most complicated tragic heroines’ Independent
Imprint: Vintage Classics
Published: 03/03/2011
ISBN: 9780099540762
Length: 368 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 23mm x 129mm
Weight: 255g
RRP: £5.99
Edith Wharton was a natural story-teller. As plots do in real life, hers flow directly from character. Her prose is so effortlessly elegant that you're rarely aware as they purl by that the sentences are so pretty...I was born after the heavy spade work of female emancipation was done. But 100 years ago, Edith Wharton's drive, independence, wilfulness and autodidactic mastery of the English language were extraordinary, and I bashfully claim her as a kindred spirit
A cautionary tale of social disaster, told with wit and elan
Like Henry James, Wharton has a wonderful gift of revealing the inner life of her characters while also documenting the elegance and hypocrisy of high society...the accumulation of desolation in the final three chapters reduces me to tears
[Edith Wharton was] an ambitious, brilliant and industrious woman who created "her own personal and professional revolution"
Edith Wharton's 1905 novel gave literature one of its most complicated tragic heroines