The House of Mirth

An
impoverished member of the privileged Old New York society, Lily Bart is
beautiful and socially agreeable, yet she has almost reached the age of
thirty - a dangerous threshold for a young woman - and is still unmarried.
Now she is desperate to secure a wealthy husband to confirm her status in
society, but her penchant for gambling at cards, her reduced circumstances,
her determination to marry for love and the constant gossip she attracts from
malevolent tongues through her heedless behaviour and her constant social
faux pas make her prospects look bleak. As suitor after suitor appears and
fades away, and she is drawn further and further down into a spiral of debt
and unhappiness, she realizes that she is just one step away from losing
everything she has.

Published in 1905 to immediate critical and commercial success, The House
of Mirth is perhaps Edith Wharton’s most popular work - a brilliant evocation
of the economic and social changes wrought by the Gilded Age which transcends
the novel of manners, as well as a universal satire on the constraints and
follies of upper-crust conventions.