Recommendations
Books Like The House of Mirth
What to read after The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905) is one of the most precise social novels in American literature — Lily Bart's gradual destruction by a society she is too honest to manipulate and too poor to survive without manipulating. If you were drawn to its cold precision and its portrait of the invisible machinery that determines who belongs and who does not, these novels will find you in the same territory.
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The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — Newland Archer in 1870s Old New York, choosing between Ellen Olenska and the life his world has prepared for him; the companion to The House of Mirth from the male perspective and generally considered her masterwork; set slightly earlier in the same social world, and the two novels make a perfect pair
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The Custom of the Country
by Edith Wharton
Undine Spragg's ruthless social climbing — the dark comic counterpart to Lily Bart's tragedy; where Lily is destroyed because she is too good for the social system, Undine succeeds because she is entirely without conscience; the two novels together give you the full range of what the Gilded Age social world could do to a woman with ambition
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Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
Emma Bovary's romantic self-destruction in provincial France — the European predecessor to The House of Mirth; Wharton acknowledged Flaubert as one of her primary influences, and the two novels are structurally similar: a woman whose desires and nature are incompatible with her social position, traced with cool narrative precision to her destruction
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
Isabel Archer, an American woman in Europe who makes a catastrophic marriage — James and Wharton were close friends and each other's most important literary interlocutors; The Portrait of a Lady and The House of Mirth ask the same question about what a free, intelligent American woman does when the social world closes around her
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The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
Edna Pontellier's awakening in 1890s New Orleans — the immediate American predecessor to The House of Mirth; Chopin published The Awakening in 1899 and Wharton published The House of Mirth in 1905, and the two novels are in close dialogue: both are about a woman who will not perform the required social role, and both trace the consequences with unflinching clarity
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Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
The Russian Lily Bart — a woman who violates the social rules of her world and is destroyed for it; the scale and the social world are completely different, but the underlying logic — the social machinery that destroys a woman who insists on being herself — is the same; Tolstoy is the major nineteenth-century novelist of social convention and its human cost that Wharton most resembles
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The Forsyte Saga
by John Galsworthy
The Forsyte family across three generations in late Victorian and Edwardian England — the British parallel to Wharton's Gilded Age portraits; Galsworthy won the Nobel Prize in 1932 partly on the strength of the Forsyte Saga's portrait of the English propertied class, and the series shares Wharton's precise attention to how money, property, and social convention shape individual lives
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Washington Square
by Henry James
Catherine Sloper in 1840s New York, courted by a man her father believes is only interested in her money — James's shortest and most accessible novel, set in the same New York world as The House of Mirth but at an earlier period; the most direct James for Wharton readers in its portrait of a woman manipulated by the people who claim to protect her
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