Reading Order
The House of Mirth Reading Order
The House of Mirth (1905) by Edith Wharton is one of the great American tragedies — the story of Lily Bart, a beautiful, intelligent woman of thirty who has been trained by her upbringing to exist as an ornament of New York society but who lacks both the money to maintain herself in the world she was made for and the willingness to sacrifice her values to get it. The novel follows Lily's progressive exclusion from the social world she was born to inhabit, as her position becomes more precarious with each failed attempt to secure herself through marriage. Wharton described it as 'a study of the way in which a society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers destroys a woman who has been nurtured by and is representative of that society' — and it remains the most devastating portrait of Old New York's cruelty toward those it cannot use.
Where to start
The House of Mirth (1905) — the complete novel; no prequel required
Complete The House of Mirth Book List
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The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton·1905
The House of Mirth — Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Lily Bart a tragic figure in The House of Mirth?
Lily Bart is tragic because she is trapped between two worlds she cannot fully inhabit. She was raised to be beautiful, decorative, and socially skillful — but she was also given intelligence and a conscience that make her unable to perform the hypocrisies that her world requires. She can see clearly what she is supposed to do (secure a rich husband by any means necessary) but she cannot bring herself to do it — not from passivity but from a kind of moral fastidiousness that the novel presents as both her finest quality and her fatal flaw. Every moment in which Lily might have saved herself, she doesn't, because saving herself would require her to become someone she despises. Her tragedy is not bad luck but the impossibility of being both the woman her world made her and the woman she actually is.
Is Lawrence Selden in love with Lily Bart in The House of Mirth?
This is the novel's great question and it never quite answers it directly. Selden is clearly drawn to Lily — he is the one person who seems to see her clearly, who appreciates what she is rather than what she represents. But he is also a coward: he retreats from her at the moments when commitment would have required sacrifice, he judges her when scandal destroys her reputation, and he comes to her too late at the novel's end. Wharton's treatment of Selden is deliberately ambiguous: he represents an ideal of life 'beyond the gift of circumstance' that he talks about but never demonstrates by living it. Whether he genuinely loves Lily or merely appreciates her at a safe distance is a question readers have debated since 1905.
What does the title The House of Mirth mean?
The title comes from Ecclesiastes 7:4: 'The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.' Wharton is describing the New York society world of pleasure and display — the 'house of mirth' — as a world for fools, and suggesting that Lily Bart, who is too wise for it, ultimately cannot survive in it. The irony is that Lily is neither fully inside the house of mirth (she has too much intelligence and moral feeling) nor outside it (she has no other world to inhabit) — she is destroyed precisely because she belongs neither to the world of pleasure she was made for nor to any alternative.
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