House of Mirth

A portrait of American manners and morals at the turn of the century offers the saga of Lily Bart, a beautiful heroine who lacks one requirement for marrying well in New York society--her own money.

ISBN 0375753753   Pages 368 ISBN13 9780375753756 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Random House USA Inc   Weight (grammes) 307 Imprint Modern Library Inc   Published in New York Format Paperback   Series title Modern Library Publication date 31 Aug 1999   Height (mm) 200 Writer of introduction Hardwick, Elizabeth   Width (mm) 132 Library of Congress PS3545.H16   Spine width (mm) 21 DEWEY 813.52   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC21   Alternative ISBN 9781601360748

With an introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick, Contemporary Reviews, and LettersBetween Edith Wharton and Her Publisher " A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys."--Edith Wharton Lily Bart knows that she must marry--her expensive tastes and mounting debts demand it--and, at twenty-nine, she has every artful wile at her disposal to secure that end. But attached as she is to the social world of her wealthy suitors, something in her rebels against the insipid men whom circumstances compel her to charm. "Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape," Lily muses as she contemplates the prospect of being bored all afternoon by Percy Grice, dull but undeniably rich, "on the bare chance that he might ulti-mately do her the honor of boring her for life?" Lily is distracted from her prey by the arrival of Lawrence Selden, handsome, quick-witted, and penniless. A runaway bestseller on publication in 1905, The House of Mirth is a brilliant romantic novel of manners, the book that established Edith Wharton as one of America's greatest novelists. " A tragedy of our modern life, in which the relentlessness of what men used to call Fate and esteem, in their ignorance, a power beyond their control, is as vividly set forth as ever it was by Aeschylus or Shakespeare." --The New York Times Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in1920 for The Age of Innocence. But it was the publication of The House of Mirth in 1905 that marked Wharton's coming-of-age as a writer.

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