Well...I've enjoyed my first classic book of 2009, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. Lily Bart's character was exhaustingly entertaining. Her world gave me a glimpse into the social goals, stresses, and perspectives of the early 1900's upper class. It was a love/hate relationship with the main character for me. I cringed at many of her decisions, yet I rooted for her to rise above her superficial tendencies. I know it may do me good to experience the type of ending that Wharton leaves us in The House of Mirth, but that does not mean that I feel good about it right now(I just finished the book a few seconds ago). Let's just say that I enjoyed the book enough to finish it in two days.

The Custom of the Country...
If Lily Bart's character made me cringe then Undine (she had many last names because of all her husbands) repulsed me. She was everything that I do not like in a person...superficial, selfish, greedy, one dimensional, and oblivious. This book forced me to grow as a reader. Instead of always having to identify with the characters, I can read a good novel objectively, through critical thinking. It was a struggle to finish this book, because of all the horrible things that Undine does. I am still very glad that I read it.

The Age of Innocence
I've enjoyed this book so far. I have a few more pages to go, but at this point the book has been entertaining and insightful into the interactions of the privileged class of 1900 New York. Reading Edith Wharton has provoked many tangents of thought that relate to the present. Her books have helped me understand the motivations and behaviors of people I come across today. In the past, I may have thought myself superior to the people I speak of. The reason I felt this superiority was I felt that those who were preoccupied with image and wealth seemed to be missing the point of life. Reading these books reminds me yet again that just because something is different does not make it wrong. We are all made of our experience. I do not believe that experience is all we are made of, but I feel strongly that it molds a good portion of who we are and who we become. There are many other factors in this creation of self like genetics, ambition, decisions, the unexplainable, etc. All of Wharton's characters come from a similiar experience, those who have money in New York(and other states and countries) and those who want or are acquiring money in the same time period. I find it fascinating to have a peek into the world of these classes and what occupies their thoughts and lives.

This is a review for House of Mirth, which Natalie told me to read. I did read Age of Innocence and liked it. I just couldn't get into this one. I didn't seem to like any of the characters and didn't like the one who I think is the main character.

The House of Mirth I think is my new favorite book. Upon finishing I was too tired to fully digest the ending, but it's absolutely the way it had to happen. Incredible!

The Reef was not good. It felt very obvious the story had been originally published in installments. The main female character was very tedious. I didn't even care that the end was abrupt and didn't tie much up. The book was a bore.

The Custom of the Country was much more fluent and readable than the reef. The main character was pretty well-developed. An okay read.

The Age of Innocence interesting because it was from a guy's perspective. Too many society rules contradicted rules in the other stories. Probably would've been fine if I hadn't read them all back to back. Really wish in the end they had paid their dues and did chose the happy road.

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton was a book containing, drama, romance, scandal, and heartbreak. The book begins in the 1890s in New York, with a woman who is twenty-nine years old. Now during this time period, most women at that age would be married by now. Which is why in this novel the young Lily Bart is chasing down rich men to marry her in order to stay in her social circle. But when an opportunity strikes, she passes them up. This could be because she thinks that she can do better, the fact that she might just not want to be married to anyone, or because she is in love with a man named Lawrence Selden, but he is not rich enough to become her husband. This quote explains very well Lily’s attitude in life, when a man she decided she wanted to marry had become engaged to another woman, “Lily’s passing light-heartedness sand beneath a renewed sense of failure. Life was too stupid, too blundering! Why should Percy Gryce’s millions be joined to another great fortune, why should this clumsy girl be put in possession of powers she would never know to use?” (95). She is already made rich by growing up with her Aunt Peniston, and she knows that she is an attractive woman, which leads to the coming and going of men in this novel. It seems as soon as she has picked one, they either decline or have become engaged to someone else. But Selden remains her constant throughout the novel, and they have intelligent conversations that she can never have with the boring wealthier men. Wharton does an excellent job at keeping the reader involved with the story and making predictions on what will happen next. Lily then gains almost ten thousand dollars in debt from playing cards and gambling. She thought this was money Gus Trenor, a grumpy business man in her social circle, had invested in stock for her, but instead had given her his own money. In return for his help he wanted Lily to spend more quality time with him. She refused, so he wanted her to pay the money back. Lily decides to get away when offered to go on a cruise in the Mediterranean with a wealthy couple, Bertha and George Dorset, and another man named Ned Silverton. Bertha only wanted Lily to come to occupy George’s time enough so that she could sleep with Ned. When George finds out and is trying to divorce Bertha, she tells everyone on a stop in the cruise that Lily will not be returning to the boat. She also spreads the rumor that Lily slept with her husband George.
When Lily’s aunt finds out that Lily has been gambling and is now in debt, she decides to give most of her money as well as her house to other relatives. She has given Lily ten thousand dollars. Now as a social outcast and a woman in debt, Lily tries to get a job, but struggles holing one. In the end of the novel Lily takes an overdose on medicine and passes away. The heart wrenching tragedy in this is the morning after she dies, Selden rushes to her house to tell her he loves her and wants to be with her, but he is too late. This is what was stated after he sees her says goodbye, “But at least he had loved her—had been willing to stake his future on his faith in her—and if the moment had been fated to pass from them before they could seize it, he saw now that, for both, it had been saved whole out of the ruin of their lives.” (347).
Wharton’s novels have endings where the reader does not find what might be expected to happen, and usually ambiguous, where there are questions at the end that are left unanswered, they are left for the reader to decide what they believed took place. The greatest question was at the end, as to whether or not Lily killed herself or had an accidental overdose.
The greatest theme in this book is the importance of social classes. Most people during this time wanted to be wealthy and have nice things like high society did, and it was somewhat easier to become wealthy because of the booming stock markets. This is Lily thought of being poor once it happened to her, “It was indeed miserable to be poor—to look forward to a shabby, anxious middle-age, leading by dreary degrees of economy and self—denial to gradual absorption in the dingy communal existence of the boarding house. But there was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude of her own heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years.” (336). Not only was she poor, but she was alone, besides Selden and his cousin Gerty Farish, who is not rich but is kind to Lily. This is Gerty and Selden speaking of Lily while she was in a sort of fashion show, “ It was though her beauty, thus detached from all that cheapened and vulgarized it, had held out suppliant hands to him from the world in which he and she had once met for a moment… ‘Wasn’t she too beautiful, Lawrence? Don’t you like her best in that simple dress? It makes her look like the real Lily-the Lily I know…’ ‘The Lily we know,’ he corrected.” (142-143). Lily had given up her intelligent mind to be one of the beautiful, almost airhead women who could not be smarter than the men. But behind the glamour Lily was still gorgeous and very smart, but she wanted to live in the only way she knew how, and unfortunately she failed. Another point to make in this book is deciding who to put your trust in. Lily seems to put her trust in all of the wrong people or at the wrong time, thinking that she is going to get what she needs, but then it backfires and she has to start over or work her way out of it.
I enjoyed reading this book, it was interesting for me because when I watch movies or television shows based from around this time period, I never put much thought of women who did not want to marry or only married based on economic status but had no choice other than to become a social outcast. I usually believed they would just marry whom they loved, even if that meant leaving the higher classes of society. But there is much more to it, especially if the only thing a woman has ever known is being wealthy. That kind of life change can be a miserable one, and can change you into another person. We see what being cast out of society can do with Lily Bart’s case, and it was too much to her.

There is something about the way Wharton describes the very rich of late 1800s America, in The House of Mirth, that can only really be captured with the very delicate paper of this edition. Of the story, it is the imperfect natures of the characters that draws me in and the fact that, whilst they resolve some issues, they are still flawed in the end. It may not be as gritty as some novelists with the setting, but it feels as though the emotions are...it helps to remind me that the glittering world of money isn't an Austen-esque world.

Write what you know, says the common advice. An unspoken corollary: read what you don’t know. Although Wharton’s roots were geographically close to my own, the world she depicts is almost as alien to me as a distant planet. Yet her intimate knowledge of intricacies of Manhattan’s old society and its confrontation with the fabulous new wealth that sprang up in the corrupt aftermath of the Civil War gave her the material she needed to go from being a good, moderately successful author to a great and popular one. She found her theme in the particular difficulty of being a female offspring of wealth. They are cultivated like hothouse flowers to adorn the arm of a young man, preferably either from a venerable old society family or from European nobility.
This Library of America volume collects four of her full-length novels.
The first, The House of Mirth, presents Lily Bart, a woman who “had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.” Lily’s father dies, leaving her and her mother financially insecure. Unfortunately, mother had already inculcated in Lily a dread of anything tawdry. Mother is convinced that Lily’s exceptional beauty is as good as money in the bank but dies before Lily can be launched in society. From then on, Lily is an appendage, dependent on the goodwill of relatives.
When the book opens, we find Lily hasn’t invested her capital wisely. She’s approaching thirty and has been on the market too long. The bloom on the lily is beginning to fade. Unique among Lily’s admirers is Lawrence Selden. Unlike the other men, he is neither vapid nor wealthy. The first quality might be what Lily longs for, but the second means that he has no prospect.
Selden knows this but can’t help being fascinated by Lily. She seems divided: she embodies much of what Selden disdains yet appears to share his sense of the follies of her class. Lawrence is a sort of pre-Nick Carraway: he has a vantage point from which he can observe while also being an outsider. Spoiler alert: the tale doesn’t end well.
Of the four novels collected here, The Reef is the one in which the exploration of the two central male characters is as deep as the two main females. It is a comedy of manners about Americans who have relocated to the aristocratic French countryside. None of the quartet at the heart of the plot are particularly bad, but each is flawed; sometimes, the flaw is nothing more than a momentary lapse. The reader wishes them happiness, but this seems not to be. It appears that the author is suggesting that a degree of happiness may be attainable if they were all more honest about their feelings and more tolerant of each other. As one of them reflects: “Mankind would never have needed to invent tact if it had not first invented social complications.” My takeaway is that morality is something other than observing the social conventions of good behavior.
Going into the third novel included here, The Custom of the Country, I assumed the “custom” in question was the nonchalance with which the women of the new industrial wealthy class in America divorced and remarried, oblivious to what this would do to their standing in the aristocratic European circles in which they aspired to move. That's undeniably theme of the book, but the first time the phrase is used, it is in the mouth of one of the secondary characters, a member of the old Washington Square society now being pushed aside. He is an ironic but not unsympathetic observer of the new class. What he calls the custom of the country is the strict division of roles among the newly wealthy. The men occupy themselves with gaining (or losing) fortunes and never let the women know where the money comes from or why frugality might sometimes be necessary. The role of the women is limited to the ostentatious display of that wealth.
Perhaps that is the point. Indeed, Wharton herself was aware of the evanescence of the wealth she was born into. But her protagonist, Undine Spragg, is not. Like a water sprite, Undine squiggles away whenever anyone—her father, one of her husbands—tries to clue her in. She absolutely refuses to know. She is twinned here with another character, equally elusive: her first and fourth husband, Elmer Moffatt. Together, they are the embodiment of Henry Adams’s dynamo: As indomitable as the steam engine they harness, they are beyond morality, oblivious of the destruction they leave in their wake.
The Age of Innocence, the final novel included here, reminded me of The Old Man and the Sea. Not that the two novels are similar in the slightest way. But, as many have noted, Hemingway’s Nobel Prize honored him for a book that read as if someone had written a parody of Hemingway’s style. Similarly, The Age of Innocence is the book for which Wharton was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (the first woman so honored). Yet it is written with a self-conscious nostalgia for old New York that had not weighed down the other novels collected here. Her characters seem preternaturally attuned to inventions or projects that lay in the future. For instance: "He remembered that there were people who thought there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run straight into New York.”
Wharton even brings in her recently deceased friend Theodore Roosevelt for a cameo appearance.
To me, an even more serious flaw is that Wharton's previous expertise in intimating the subtle currents of a conversation and the dissonance between what was said and what was meant has partially deserted her. She is reduced to telling us what she was previously able to show us: “That was the only word that passed between them on the subject, but in the code in which they had both been trained it meant . . . ”, followed by Wharton detailing what it meant.
And yet . . . . In general, Wharton’s central female characters are more vital than their male counterparts, and in The Age of Innocence, she created her most memorable, Ellen Mingott, Countess Oleska. A woman from old New York who had been confronted with the life that old New York pretended didn’t exist, her experience left her truly principled, while the others in her set are merely respectful of convention. Not the same thing.
Wharton’s depiction of the farewell dinner given for Ellen before she returns to Europe can serve as an epitome of all four of the novels collected here: “It was the old New York way of taking life ‘without effusion of blood’: the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than ’scenes,’ except the behavior of those who gave rise to them.”
Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (not included here) is one of those books I was supposed to have read in high school but didn’t. The world Wharton portrayed seemed too alien to me (strange that the dust-bowl migrant camps in California didn’t). For a long time, she appeared to me to be Henry James in a skirt. I was mistaken. Their milieu was the same, but Wharton’s language, perceptions, and values are her own. She is an ironist. At her best, she conveys a subtle awareness of the eddies and swirls of the inner lives of her characters and their elaborately choreographed interactions. What a strange, foreign world existed unsuspected by me just seventy years before I was born and only twenty miles from my home.

Well I didn't get through all 4 stories in the book. I started with "The House of Mirth," and it was all I could do to get through that one! I think I would have done better with an English teacher or Cliff notes to help me through it.

The House of Mirth - finished 09/07/11

The Reef - finished 10/16/12

The Custom of the Country - finished 10/06/13

The Age of Innocence - finished 10/16/14
wow. what a tremendous novel. what a master wharton is at showing you just what she wants to show you and when. stunning, really.

House of Mirth: A thought-provoking piece by Wharton. Powerful tale of money and the consequences of being without it.

House of Mirth is on my short list of best books ever read.

The Age of Confusion.

Certainly an age among the wealthy classes of New York which managed to adhere to conventions and extreme morals of the time, yet at the risk of scandal, wIlling to forego life time dreams and promises. The love affair which was doomed from the outset, was mainly hampered by Archer's ill-timed marriage to innocent youngling, and seemed a good idea at the time. But swiftly realising his mistake, when May revealed herself to be the steady unambitious cosseted creature she was. And yet astute enough to subtly end the star- crossed romance. She had enormous influential family support. And Archer, withdrew from the love of his life.
He was given a last chance to meet with Ellen, but declined, probably because of wasted years too many to contemplate.

I recently re-read this book and enjoyed it even more than the first time. It is a sad comment on the way women were treated in those times. It really brings home to me how lucky we are now to be able to earn a living.