House of Mirth, The

Author: Wharton, Edith

Brand: Penguin Random House

Edition: Reprint

Features:

• Vintage Classics

Binding: Paperback

Number Of Pages: 368

Release Date: 06-06-2011

Details: Product Description


The House of Mirth follows the tragic fall of Lily Bart, a beautiful socialite who loses her footing in the savage social-climbing world of New York high society in the nineteenth century.Lily Bart has no fortune, but she possesses everything else she needs to make an excellent marriage: beauty, intelligence, a love of luxury and an elegant skill in negotiating the hidden traps and false friends of New York's high society. But time and again Lily cannot bring herself to make the final decisive move: to abandon her sense of self and a chance of love for the final soulless leap into a mercenary union. Her time is running out, and degradation awaits. Edith Wharton's masterful novel is a tragedy of money, morality and missed opportunity.‘Edith Wharton's 1905 novel gave literature one of its most complicated tragic heroines’ Independent


Review


Edith Wharton was a natural story-teller. As plots do in real life, hers flow directly from character. Her prose is so effortlessly elegant that you're rarely aware as they purl by that the sentences are so pretty...I was born after the heavy spade work of female emancipation was done. But 100 years ago, Edith Wharton's drive, independence, wilfulness and autodidactic mastery of the English language were extraordinary, and I bashfully claim her as a kindred spirit -- Lionel Shriver ―
Guardian

A cautionary tale of social disaster, told with wit and elan ―
Independent

Like Henry James, Wharton has a wonderful gift of revealing the inner life of her characters while also documenting the elegance and hypocrisy of high society...the accumulation of desolation in the final three chapters reduces me to tears -- Jonathan Bate ―
Sunday Telegraph

[Edith Wharton was] an ambitious, brilliant and industrious woman who created "her own personal and professional revolution" ―
Sunday Times

Edith Wharton's 1905 novel gave literature one of its most complicated tragic heroines ―
Independent


About the Author


Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones to George and Lucretia Jones in New York City on January 24, 1862. Edith married Teddy Wharton, 12 years older than she. They lived a life of relative ease with homes in New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Novels flowed from her mind in the years between 1900 and 1938. Indeed her novels became so popular with the general public that Ms. Wharton was able to live comfortably on her earnings the rest of her life. Edith divorced Teddy in 1912, having no immediate heirs, and never married again. Instead she traveled extensively by motorcar, helped untiringly with refugees in Paris during the first World War, and only returned once again in her lifetime to the United States to accept the Pulitzer prize for her novel, The Age of Innocence. She held salons where the gifted intellectuals of her time gathered to discuss and share ideas. F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway were guests of hers.Edith lived in two homes in France, one in the north of Paris, Pavillon Colombe, and one at Hyere, Ste. Claire. Her flat in Paris was at 53 Rue de Varenne. She retired to Pavillon Colombe and continued to write until a stroke took her life in August 1937. She is buried in the American Cemetery at Versailles. The inscription on her grave stone reads: "O Crux Ave Spes Unica", which translates: "Hail, o cross, the one hope."

EAN: 9780099540762

Package Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.2 x 1.2 inches

Languages: English