The House Of Mirth

The House of Mirth is Edith Wharton’s biting critique of New York’s upper classes around the end of the 19th century. The novel follows socialite Lily Bart as she struggles to maintain a precarious position among her wealthy friends in the face of her own diminished finances and fading youth. Lily has resolved to gain social and financial security by marrying into wealth, but callous rivals and her own second thoughts undermine Lily’s plans. Wharton’s insights into high society were largely built on her own experiences growing up among the upper crust, and her confident portrayal of a morally lax aristocracy found an eager audience. The novel sold over a hundred thousand copies within a few months of its release and became her first great success as a published author.

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For the 150th anniversary of Edith Wharton's birth: her three greatest novels, in a couture-inspired deluxe edition featuring a new introduction by Jonathan Franzen Born into a distinguished New York family, Edith Wharton chronicled the lives of the wealthy, the well born, and the nouveau riches in fiction that often hinges on the collision of personal passion and social convention. This volume brings together her best-loved novels, all set in New York. The House of Mirth is the story of Lily Bart, who needs a rich husband but refuses to marry without both love and money. The Custom of the Country follows the marriages and affairs of Undine Spragg, who is as vain, spoiled, and selfish as she is irresistibly fascinating. The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence concerns the passionate bond that develops between the newly engaged Newland Archer and his finacée's cousin, the Countess Olenska, new to New York and newly divorced. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Penniless and unable to marry the woman he loves, the financially struggling lawyer Stephen Glennard discovers a way out of his predicaments by selling love letters written to him by deceased author Margaret Aubyn.

Edith Wharton is recognized as one of the twentieth century's most important American writers. The House of Mirth not only initiated three decades of Wharton's popular and critical acclaim, it helped move women's literature into a new place of achievement and prominence. The House of Mirth is perhaps Wharton's best-known and most frequently read novel, and scholars and teachers consider it an essential introduction to Wharton and her work. The novel, moreover, lends itself to a variety of topics of inquiry and critical approaches of interest to readers at various levels. This casebook collects critical essays addressing a broad spectrum of topics and utilizing a range of critical and theoretical approaches. It also includes Wharton's introduction to the 1936 edition of the novel and her discussion of the composition of the novel from her autobiography.

Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) is a sharp and satirical, but also sensitive and tragic analysis of a young, single woman trying to find her place in a materialistic and unforgiving society. The House of Mirth offers a fascinating insight into the culture of the time and, as suggested by the success of recent film adaptations, it is also an enduring tale of love, ambition and social pressures still relevant today. Including a selection of illustrations from the original magazine publication, which offers a unique insight to what the contemporary reader would have seen, this volume also provides: an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of The House of Mirth a critical history, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publication to the present a selection of new critical essays on the The House of Mirth, by Edie Thornton, Katherine Joslin, Janet Beer, Elizabeth Nolan, Kathy Fedorko and Pamela Knights, providing a range of perspectives on the novel and extending the coverage of key critical approaches identified in the survey section cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism suggestions for further reading. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of The House of Mirth and seeking not only a guide to the novel, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Wharton’s text.

This Companion examines a number of issues related to the terms realism and naturalism. The introduction seeks both to discuss the problems in the use of these two terms in relation to late nineteenth-century fiction and to describe the history of previous efforts to make the terms expressive of American writing of this period. The Companion includes ten essays which fall into four categories: essays on the historical context of realism and naturalism by Louis Budd and Richard Lehan; essays on critical approaches to the movements since the early 1970s by Michael Anesko, essays on the efforts to expand the canon of realism and naturalism by Elizabeth Ammons; and a full-scale discussion of ten major texts, from W. D. Howell's The Rise of Silas Lapham to Jack London's The Call of the Wild, by John W. Crowley, Tom Quirk, J. C. Levenson, Blanche Gelfant, Barbara Hochman, and Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin.

The House of Mirth is a 1905 novel by the American author Edith Wharton. It tells the story of Lily Bart, a well-born but impoverished woman belonging to New York City's high society around the turn of the last century.[a] 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. The House of Mirth traces Lily's slow two-year social descent from privilege to a tragically lonely existence on the margins of society. In the words of one scholar, Wharton uses Lily as an attack on "an irresponsible, grasping and morally corrupt upper class.