Edith Wharton

The House of Mirth
Introduced by Mary Gordon

“If there is a more highly regarded female American author of the twentieth century,” writes John Updike, “her name doesn’t come readily to mind.” Born in 1862 into an exclusive New York society—against whose rigid mores she often rebelled—Edith Wharton bridged the literary worlds of two continents and two centuries in her rich and glamorous life. The House of Mirth (1905), her tenth book, is the story of Lily Bart and her tragic sojourn among the upper class of turn-of-the-century New York, touching upon the insidious effects of social convention and the sexual and financial aggression to which free-spirited women were exposed. “A frivolous society,” Wharton wrote, “can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.”

Mary Gordon is the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College. Among her many books are the novels Final Payments and Pearl, the memoir Circling My Mother, and The Stories of Mary Gordon.