Editions

The House of Mirth

  • Imprint: Vintage Classics

  • ISBN: 9780099540762

  • Length: 368  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 23mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 255g

  • RRP: £5.99

The House of Mirth

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

  • ISBN: 9780099540762

  • Length: 368  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 23mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 255g

  • RRP: £5.99

Reviews

  • 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

    Lionel Shriver, Guardian

  • A cautionary tale of social disaster, told with wit and elan

    Independent

  • 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

    Jonathan Bate, Sunday Telegraph

  • [Edith Wharton was] an ambitious, brilliant and industrious woman who created "her own personal and professional revolution"

    Sunday Times

  • Edith Wharton's 1905 novel gave literature one of its most complicated tragic heroines

    Independent

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About the Author

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on 24th January 1862, during the American Civil War. Wharton published her first short story in 1891; her first story collection, The Greater Inclination, in 1899; a novella called The Touchstone in 1900; and her first novel, The Valley of Decision, in 1902. Her most famous work, The House of Mirth, was published in 1905. She died in 1937.

Edith Wharton

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