The House of Mirth
(6 votes)The House of Mirth, first published in 1905, is about New York socialite Lily Bart and her attempts to secure a husband amidst the social whirl of New York's Fifth Avenue at the dawn of the Twentieth Century. Wharton pictures a new class of self-made millionaires created by Wall Street, casts a shadow over the tenuous position of those in the "leisure class" and offers a peek at the ascendancy of the self-supporting career woman.
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Rachel Cusk, reporting in The Wall Street Journal, listed "The House of Mirth" as number 1 in her list of five best portraits of disgrace (July 3-4 Weekend Journal, 2010.) Cusk indicates that Wharton moves readers from a Victorian view of "the compromised woman" to a "more modern account of female dependence and vulnerability, one better suited to the social and material aspirations of her time."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704212804575333062976400880.html?KEYWORDS=Edith+Wharton
I thought this book was much too long. Lily was her own worse enemy, she had many chances to marry and ruined each herself. A movie of this book might be more interesting than reading it. I knew the ending quite some time before I got there without peeking I might say. I gave this only 2 stars because it was rather boring, that's the way it hit me about third way through and I felt the characters were not worthy of sympathy.
I agree that "The House of Mirth" had very little mirth in it, but anyone who reads Edith Wharton for the joy of it is missing the point. You can count on Wharton's characters to come to a bad ending, because that's Wharton's style. I don't often read her, Willa Cather, or Virginia Woolf because I can count on them to depress me, and I like a happy ending. Still, one cannot discount the talent of the author and the importance of what she has to say. All of these women are geniuses and pioneers of realism. I celebrate them for giving us options regarding what we have to read.