Key themes
- Social position as a trap with no exit
- The cost of beauty and charm as sole currency
- A woman's failure to choose in a world of impossible choices
About this book
Lily Bart is beautiful, witty and socially brilliant — and she is slowly sliding toward ruin. Wharton's first major novel traces Lily's downfall with the precision of a social scientist and the sympathy of someone who understood exactly how the gilded cage of New York society worked.
Published in 1905, The House of Mirth was Wharton's first major success and sold 140,000 copies in its first two months. It established her as one of the sharpest critics of the Gilded Age.
Discussion questions
- Lily Bart has opportunities to secure herself financially several times and doesn't take them. Is this weakness, integrity, or something the novel refuses to categorise simply?
- Wharton shows New York society at its most artificial and its most brutal. What system is she critiquing — capitalism, patriarchy, or the specific cruelty of social performance?
- Selden is presented as a potential alternative to conventional society. Does the novel endorse his worldview, or gently satirise it alongside the world it critiques?
- The ending is deliberately ambiguous. What do you think happens in the final scene — and does the ambiguity feel earned?
- The novel was published in 1905. Which of its observations about women, money and social power feel most prescient today?
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