Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Claire Preston (Queen Mary, University of London)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: J. Michael Duvall (College of Charleston), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Tony Papanikolas (San Jose State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1905

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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Edith Wharton had written only one other full-length novel when she began

The House of Mirth

in 1904. Her first work,

The Valley of Decision

(1902), had been a historical novel set in eighteenth-century Italy. Characterised by meticulous, almost obsessively replete local detail, it had been admired but not warmly received, except by Henry James, who immediately wrote what became a famous letter to Wharton urging her to abandon remote subjects and “do New York”.

Her setting for the bestselling story was the high society of her contemporary New York. Lily Bart, nearly thirty, a celebrated society beauty who has never succeeded in attaching the sort of rich man she needs to marry in order to maintain her accustomed style of life, is encountered, typically transient, between trains at

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2854 words

Citation: Preston, Claire. "The House of Mirth". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 October 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=524, accessed 26 November 2024.]

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

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