The House of Mirth

About the book

Lily Bart has beauty, taste, and an intimate knowledge of fashionable New York society, but limited money makes her place within it uncertain. Opportunities for security repeatedly require bargains she finds difficult to accept or even fully acknowledge. Wharton follows visits, invitations, financial arrangements, and circulating stories whose effects depend on who has the power to define them. Lily is both skilled in this world and vulnerable to its expectations, making her neither a simple outsider nor merely its obedient product. The novel examines how dependence can hide inside the appearance of leisure. Small decisions acquire weight through the social machinery around them, asking what happens when a person's abilities have been cultivated for a life whose material conditions she cannot independently sustain.

• Economic dependence
• Reputation
• Social exclusion

Why read it

For a closely observed account of how money and reputation turn apparent freedom into a sequence of narrowing choices.

English text