Reading Order
The House of Mirth Reading Order
Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905) is a standalone novel — there is no series and no sequel. Lily Bart, beautiful and intelligent, belongs to Gilded Age New York society but has no money of her own and must make a profitable marriage to survive. She is too fastidious and too honest to make the match she needs, and the novel traces her slow, inevitable descent through the social hierarchy. Wharton's first major novel and a devastating portrait of a social system that destroys what it cannot accommodate.
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The House of Mirth
Complete The House of Mirth Book List
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The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton·1905·Standalone novel — Lily Bart's descent through Gilded Age New York; approximately 350 pages; one of the most precisely observed portraits of a social system in American fiction; the Norton Critical Edition has the most useful scholarly apparatus - Buy
The Age of Innocence
OptionalEdith Wharton·1920·Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — Newland Archer in 1870s Old New York, choosing between the woman he loves and the life his world has prepared for him; the companion to The House of Mirth from the male perspective; often considered her masterwork - Buy
The Custom of the Country
OptionalEdith Wharton·1913·Undine Spragg's relentless 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 has no scruples; the two novels make a perfect pair
The House of Mirth — Frequently Asked Questions
What does 'The House of Mirth' mean?
The title comes from the Bible: Ecclesiastes 7:4 says 'The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.' Wharton is setting up an ironic contrast between the glittering social world of her novel — which calls itself the house of mirth — and the house of mourning, which is where wisdom actually lives. Lily Bart is too wise for the house of mirth but cannot quite bring herself to leave it, and this is what destroys her.
Is Lily Bart sympathetic?
Most readers find Lily sympathetic — but this is complicated. Wharton makes clear that Lily's situation is genuinely unjust: she is more intelligent, more honest, and more capable than most of the people around her, and she is destroyed for these qualities by a system that rewards the willingness to dissemble and compromise. At the same time, Lily's own standards — her fastidiousness, her aesthetic sensitivity, her refusal to take the easy and dishonest way out — are themselves a kind of vanity, and Wharton does not entirely excuse her. The novel's power comes from holding both readings simultaneously.
How does The House of Mirth end?
Lily Bart, reduced to working in a millinery shop after her social fall, takes an overdose of chloral hydrate — a sleeping medication she has become dependent on — and is found dead in her room. Whether her death is accidental or deliberate is deliberately left ambiguous by Wharton, in a way similar to Chopin's ambiguity about Edna Pontellier's final swim in The Awakening. The novel ends with Lawrence Selden arriving at her room the morning after her death, having finally understood what she meant to him, and finding her gone.
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