The House of Mirth

Lily Bart is twenty nine, beautiful, and broke, moving through the drawing rooms of Gilded Age New York on charm alone while she hunts for a husband rich enough to keep her inside the only life she has ever known. Wharton tracks her decline in a series of small, believable missteps rather than one dramatic fall: a card debt she lets a married man cover, a broken engagement, an inheritance that shrinks to almost nothing once her aunt's will is read, a job in a milliner's shop she proves too poorly trained to keep. Each loss costs Lily a little more of the social credit she needs to recover from the last one, until she is living alone in a boarding house with nothing left to trade on. She dies from an overdose of the sedative chloral hydrate the morning after spending her last money paying off every debt she owes, the ambiguity of accident against intent left for the reader to sit with rather than resolved. Lawrence Selden, the one man Lily loved and kept refusing for practical reasons across the whole book, arrives that same morning to finally propose, and finds her dead instead, along with the paid receipts that prove she never took the dishonorable way out her enemies had assumed.

Wharton writes Lily's world from the inside, fluent in exactly which slight or rumor can end a woman's prospects and exactly how little room her characters have to maneuver once one goes wrong. The novel reads slowly at first, patient with the drawing room maneuvering that will eventually strangle Lily, and that patience pays off once the trap closes; a reader who sticks with the early chapters ends up understanding precisely how each small compromise led here.

Wharton considered calling the book A Moment's Ornament, from Wordsworth, before settling on the title drawn from Ecclesiastes. She later wrote that writing convincingly about her own New York required a subject she alone had the inside access to critique.