The House of Mirth

About this edition

Introduction

The House of Mirth is a novel about a woman with expensive tastes and no money, written by a woman who had both. That is not a criticism; it is the reason the book is as precise as it is. Edith Wharton had grown up inside the society she describes — the New York of inherited connections and visible expenditure — and she wrote about it with the unsentimental clarity of someone who knew exactly what the furniture cost.

Lily Bart is twenty-nine, beautiful, well connected and unmarried, which in the world of this novel means she is an asset with a closing window. She understands the rules perfectly: marriage is a transaction, her face and manner are her capital, and the alternative is “dinginess” — Wharton’s word for the shabby, respectable poverty that awaits a gentlewoman who has failed to be placed. What she cannot do is play the game without flinching. Every time she refuses a small humiliation, she loses a little ground; every time she accepts help, she takes on a debt that is not financial.

That is the engine of the plot, and it is a machine for producing tragedy out of manners. The men who offer to “invest” for her are not villains in the ordinary sense; they are the market, doing what the market does. The woman who ruins her is doing what the market does too. The novel’s argument is that a society which prices everything will eventually price a person, and that the person being priced has almost no way to refuse without becoming nothing.

Wharton is often described as a novelist of manners, which can make the books sound lighter than they are. This one is closer to a thriller about reputation: a lost letter, a borrowed sum, a story that can be told about a woman that cannot be untold. It moves fast, it is frequently very funny, and it ends in a room that is small, cheap and entirely without consolation. It is one of the few nineteenth-century-style social novels that a reader today can finish in a state of genuine anger, which is what its author intended.

This edition gives the complete text, unaltered, in twenty-nine chapters across two books. The notes gloss the social machinery that the plot turns on — the marriage market, the settlement, the house party, the “investment” — and the reading guide is for anyone who wants to argue with the book rather than simply be devastated by it.

The author

Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on 24 January 1862 into a New York family whose name had been in the city for generations, and who wintered in Europe partly because it was cheaper as well as more agreeable. She was educated at home, in the manner thought suitable for a young woman of her class, and married at twenty-three into a match that was, by every account including her own, a mistake.

She published fiction for years before The House of Mirth (1905) made her reputation; that novel’s success changed her position entirely, from a well-connected amateur to a professional writer with an audience. Ethan Frome (1911), The Custom of the Country (1913) and The Age of Innocence (1920) followed, the last winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction — she was the first woman to receive it.

Her marriage ended in divorce in 1913, after which she lived mainly in France. During the First World War she organised relief work for refugees and was decorated by the French government for it. She died at Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt in 1937, having published more than forty books of fiction and non-fiction. Her reputation has been through the usual cycles — dismissed as a chronicler of the rich, then reclaimed as one of the sharpest social critics American fiction has produced.

Publication history

The House of Mirth was serialised in Scribner’s Magazine in 1905 and published as a book by Charles Scribner’s Sons in the same year. The serialisation itself is part of the story: the magazine’s readers followed Lily Bart month by month, and Wharton, who was writing to a deadline with the ending already fixed, used the instalments to build a trap that the reader can see closing from a long way off.

The novel made her famous and, for the first time, well paid. It also produced the reaction any successful American novel about American society produces: readers assumed it was a roman à clef and looked for themselves and their neighbours in it, which annoyed Wharton and did nothing to slow the sales.

Wharton revised her texts for later editions, but The House of Mirth has come down to us substantially in its 1905 form. The text reproduced here follows that text as transcribed for Standard Ebooks, and not a word of it has been changed.

Notes

A short glossary of the social machinery the plot runs on. Almost all of it is financial, and the novel’s cruelty comes from the fact that its characters know the arithmetic perfectly well.

• The marriage market — the informal but strictly understood system by which wealthy families placed daughters and sons. Its currency was connections, expenditure and reputation, and a bad season could permanently reduce a woman’s value.
• Coming out — a young woman’s formal introduction into society, after which she was eligible to be courted and was expected to be married within a few years. Lily is twenty-nine and unmarried, which is the novel’s opening problem.
• Settlement — the legal instrument drawn up before a marriage, fixing what property the bride brings and what she would receive as a widow. A woman negotiating without money negotiates with nothing.
• Dinginess — Wharton’s word for respectable poverty: the cheap boarding-house, the retrimmed dress, the gradual loss of the small expenditures that make a person visible. It is what Lily fears more than she fears death, and the novel takes her fear seriously.
• House party — a stay of several days at a country house, at which the guest’s clothes, luggage and manners are all on display and all assessed. Bellomont is a stage, and Lily is always performing.
• Tableau vivant — a posed scene in which living people hold the positions of a painting or sculpture. The episode at Bellomont is the moment Lily is most fully herself and most completely exposed, at the same time.
• “Investment” — the euphemism by which money is offered to Lily. The word is doing double duty: an investment is supposed to produce a return, and the men who use it intend to collect.
• Chloral — a sedative in common use and easy to misuse. It is the novel’s final instrument, and Wharton handles it without a word of moral commentary.
• The double standard — the asymmetry by which a woman’s sexual reputation is property that can be destroyed by rumour, while a man’s is barely an asset at all. The letters that drive the last third of the book are worth what they are worth because of it.
• The leisure class — the term Thorstein Veblen gave in 1899 to a class whose status is demonstrated by visible expenditure rather than by work. The House of Mirth is the novel that term was invented to describe.

Reading guide

Six questions for a first or a fifth reading. None of them has a settled answer.

1. Lily is repeatedly offered help and repeatedly refuses it. Is her refusal dignity, pride, or a failure to understand her own situation clearly?
2. Wharton shows us the ending coming for hundreds of pages. Why make the outcome legible rather than surprising — what does the novel gain by destroying suspense?
3. The men in the book are mostly not cruel, and the women are mostly not kind. What does that distribution say about where Wharton locates responsibility?
4. Selden is presented as the one person who values Lily for herself. Is he a refuge, or the most sophisticated version of the market’s judgement?
5. Money is discussed in almost every scene and rarely named honestly. Track the euphemisms — “investment”, “help”, “a loan”. What does the language do that the plot does not?
6. The novel’s last image is a room that is clean, cheap and quiet. Is that a defeat, or the first place in the book where Lily is not being looked at?