Charles Scribner wrote Wharton in November 1905 that the novel was showing “the most rapid sale of any book ever published by Scribner.” By the end of December, sales had reached 140,000 copies. It attracted a readership among housewives and businessmen alike. In the words of one scholar, Wharton uses Lily as an attack on “an irresponsible, grasping and morally corrupt upper class.”īefore publication as a book on October 14, 1905, The House of Mirth was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine beginning in January 1905. The House of Mirth traces Lily’s slow two-year social descent from privilege to a tragically lonely existence on the margins of society. Wharton creates a portrait of a stunning beauty who, though raised and educated to marry well both socially and economically, is reaching her 29th year, an age when her youthful blush is drawing to a close and her marital prospects are becoming ever more limited. It tells the story of Lily Bart, a well-born but impoverished woman belonging to New York City’s high society around the end of the 19th century. The House of Mirth: Jennifer Egan on Edith Wharton’s masterpiece.

Is Lily Bart a victim of circumstance or an agent of her own destruction? Edith Wharton’s acutely observed novel poses this question as it follows Lily’s tragic path through the country houses, card tables and drawing rooms of New York’s beau monde at the turn of the 20th century.

Something rarely seen in more modern novels, which have our sensibilities and cynicisms more in mind. But Wharton’s protagonist is such a great creation that she takes hold of the reader completely. Perhaps she could have done with a few rough edges. Perhaps a little too blurred for modern standards. It’s in the creation of the character of Lily Bart however, that luck cannot play much part: a more or less unsentimental presentation of a sophisticated and complex character. Which is a hell of a lot of luck for one author in one novel. The ending was always going to be tricky though, but Wharton manages to get that just right to. Wharton’s protagonist is so very well drawn, and the story adroitly structured, the few years it follows are dipped into with sublime skill perhaps, Wharton got lucky: just managing to stop and start at the right point, have just enough of each bit, so that it’s just right. Indeed, as these things are said of every author’s prose, all the time, so there’s no point saying them howsoever one feels on reading a great novel. And this can be said of Wharton’s prose, without saying very much at all. Also of its ‘sophistication’ or its ‘cleverness’. At least, it’s a great novel.Ī lot of things are said about the ‘clarity’ of certain authors’ prose. However, what Wharton’s novel does achieve is greatness. No, this isn’t the finest novel ever written but then, no novel ever was, is or will be.

The house of mirth review