Recommendations
Books Like The House of Mirth
Best books to read after The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Wharton's 1905 novel traces the progressive exclusion of Lily Bart from the New York society she was made for — beautiful, intelligent, and unable to perform the hypocrisies that survival in that world requires. These recommendations extend the experience through Wharton's other work, through fiction that shares its portrait of women destroyed by the social systems that formed them, and through novels that dissect Old New York and its codes with the same satirical precision.
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The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (1920) and the essential companion to The House of Mirth: where Lily Bart is destroyed by Old New York, Newland Archer is simply trapped by it. Both novels dissect the same society with the same surgical precision — but where The House of Mirth shows what happens to someone the system rejects, The Age of Innocence shows what happens to someone the system keeps.
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The Custom of the Country
by Edith Wharton
Wharton's most satirically savage novel (1913): Undine Spragg, an ambitious woman from the Midwest, rises through New York society by a series of strategic marriages with no regard for the people she destroys. Where Lily Bart is destroyed by her inability to play the social game, Undine Spragg wins it — and Wharton's portrait of her is as damning as her portrait of Lily, just differently so.
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Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
The great Victorian companion: Becky Sharp and Lily Bart are the two women in English-language fiction who most clearly understand the social game they are forced to play and who nearly win it by their own intelligence and charm — and are ultimately destroyed not by the game's unfairness but by individual moral failures. Thackeray satirizes his society with the same sharpness Wharton brings to hers.
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
James's 1881 novel — Isabel Archer, another American woman of intelligence and feeling who is trapped by a bad marriage. Where Lily Bart's trap is poverty and social exclusion, Isabel's trap is her own misguided commitment to a man who has deceived her. Both James and Wharton are analyzing the specific ways that the societies of the Gilded Age destroy the women who are most alive to the possibilities of life.
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot's masterpiece (1871–72) is the great Victorian predecessor in the tradition of the novel that traces what happens to a woman of exceptional feeling and intelligence in a world that cannot accommodate her. Dorothea Brooke, like Lily Bart, is destroyed by the gap between what she is capable of and what her world permits her to do — though Eliot's conclusion is more ambiguous and more consoling than Wharton's.
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Sister Carrie
by Theodore Dreiser
Dreiser's 1900 novel — Carrie Meeber arrives in Chicago and rises through relationships with men who can advance her, while Hurstwood, the man who gives up everything for her, falls into ruin. Where Wharton shows a woman who can't play the game, Dreiser shows a woman who plays it instinctively — and both novels are devastating about what American society does to those who need more than it offers.
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Une Vie
by Guy de Maupassant
Maupassant's first novel (1883) — the French equivalent of The House of Mirth: Jeanne de Lamare, a young aristocratic woman whose entire adult life is systematically destroyed by the men around her and the indifference of the world. Both novels are portraits of women destroyed by the gap between the life they were formed to expect and the reality of their experience, told with an unsparing refusal to console.
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The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
Chopin's 1899 novella — Edna Pontellier's awakening to her own desires and the impossibility of satisfying them within the social structure of turn-of-the-century New Orleans. Like The House of Mirth, it is a novel about a woman who can clearly perceive the social world that is destroying her but cannot find a way to survive outside it.
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