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The House of Mirth (World Digital Library Edition)

ebook
Published in 1905 to enormous critical and financial success, The House of Mirth is the book that made Edith Wharton famous and marked the beginning of the author’s mature phase of novel writing. It continues to attract a readership today for its scathing portrait of fashionable New York society at the turn of the century — an earlier generation of the same moneyed class F. Scott Fitzgerald satirized in The Great Gatsby.

Like Fitzgerald’s novel, The House of Mirth achieves something much more than satire. It is a comedy of manners that turns into grim tragedy as Lily Bart, the novel’s central character, lets numerous marriage opportunities (her only means of escape from material worry) slip between her fingers through painful error and impulse of heart. Possessing a spirit much larger than that which she is allowed to express in the ornamental role prescribed for her by society, Lily begins a descent from which she cannot recover. In the course of events, she finds herself gradually stripped of all trappings of wealth and shunned both by family and former friends.

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Publisher: Barnes & Noble World Digital Library

Kindle Book

  • Release date: February 27, 2002

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 0594084385
  • Release date: February 27, 2002

PDF ebook

  • ISBN: 0594084385
  • File size: 1185 KB
  • Release date: February 27, 2002

Formats

Kindle Book
OverDrive Read
PDF ebook
Kindle restrictions

subjects

Fiction Literature

Languages

English

Published in 1905 to enormous critical and financial success, The House of Mirth is the book that made Edith Wharton famous and marked the beginning of the author’s mature phase of novel writing. It continues to attract a readership today for its scathing portrait of fashionable New York society at the turn of the century — an earlier generation of the same moneyed class F. Scott Fitzgerald satirized in The Great Gatsby.

Like Fitzgerald’s novel, The House of Mirth achieves something much more than satire. It is a comedy of manners that turns into grim tragedy as Lily Bart, the novel’s central character, lets numerous marriage opportunities (her only means of escape from material worry) slip between her fingers through painful error and impulse of heart. Possessing a spirit much larger than that which she is allowed to express in the ornamental role prescribed for her by society, Lily begins a descent from which she cannot recover. In the course of events, she finds herself gradually stripped of all trappings of wealth and shunned both by family and former friends.

Expand title description text