Pastaruoju metu vis prisibijodavau klasikos – kažkaip atrodė, kad jai reikia ypatingo susikaupimo, abejojau, ar pavyks turėti pakankamai kantrybės toms kartais itin ilgoms pastraipoms, nesusikalbėjimams, tekstui, kuris, palyginus su didžiąja dalimi populiariosios literatūros, visgi yra sunkesnis tiek turiniu, tiek prasme. Tačiau pirmoji pažintis su Edith Wharton labai nusisekė – „Linksmybės namai“ ne tik maloniai nustebino, bet ir atskleidė kiek kitokią aukštuomenės gyvenimo pusę, nei tikėjausi.

Romanas gerokai užliūliuoja – nuo pat pirmųjų puslapių, kai mums pristatoma pagrindinė veikėja Lili Bart, atrodo, kad patekome į panašų į Jane Austen pasaulį, kur ir problemos panašios, ir veikėjai turi daug bendro. Moteris, kuri pagal visus to meto visuomenės standartus jau senų seniausiai turėjo būti ištekėjusi ir gyventi ramų bei sėslų gyvenimą, tačiau ji, siaubingai sąmojinga, kartais visiškai lengvabūdiška ir vis dar tikinti tikra meile, tuo keliu nežengė. Autorė nuostabiai atskleidžia veikėjų portretus, kartais šiek tiek juos šaržuodama, kaip dažnai ir būdinga to meto literatūroje, bet nuo realybės toli neatsitraukdama – netgi ir dabar galima rasti nemažai panašumų su artimaisiais ar pažįstamais. Ir net jei tam tikros socialinės normos pasikeitė, šioks toks spaudimas išliko, ir jį čia galima užčiuopti kiekviename puslapyje.

Žaismingoji ir sąmojingoji Lili gerokai užburia. Tiek, kad antroje knygos pusėje imi nejučia suvokti, kad gal ši istorija ir nebus vien džiaugsminga, viltinga ir pašiepianti visuomenės santvarką. E. Wharton žaidžia su skaitytojo lūkesčiais ir iš tiesų padovanoja kur kas tamsesnį žvilgsnį į tą auksu inkrustuotą pasaulį, kuriuo visi taip žavisi. Ironiškų pastabų vis mažėja, juokas ir šypsenos blėsta, o Lili Bart tampa ne šiaip sau pagrindinė herojė, o kur kas svarbesnis simbolis. Netikėtai gilus, sodrus ir tragiškas pasakojimas, atsiskiriantis nuo Austen ir panašių autorių istorijų savo triuškinančia realybe ir noru neužglaistyti visko plačiomis šypsenomis, turtais ir lengvomis išeitimis. Be galo įsimintinas kūrinys, tapęs man priminimu, kodėl visgi myliu klasiką.

"What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe."

What is truth? Truth is that Lily Bart is Madame Bovary dying without even having engaged in the love affairs - dying a virgin in reality, a promiscuous siren in the world of evil gossip.

If you want to suffer the pain of sexual injustice and social brutality, read this book and die with Lily, step by step. There were moments when I wanted to step into the story and shake the disgusting predators - that is how angry it made me to think of the entitlement with which they thought they could buy access to a body - or ruin the person if access was denied.

There was this moment when I thought I had to kill Bertha Dorset for being an absolute monster Lady Macbeth, but then I thought that she too is a victim of a sexual code that means she has to lash out or suffer Lily's fate herself. Not a gentlewoman, for sure, but a predator facing a bigger hunter. The falcon in front of the falconer...

Lily had the misfortune of thinking she could play the game without a falconer by her side. No woman, and especially no beautiful woman, can fight the gossip of a society that is happy to ignore compassion and decency to support the privileged double standard that allows rich men to rule by decree.

This was a very, very exhausting read, considering I took it randomly from my bookshelf to fill a few minutes of commuter time. But, oh, so good! Whenever we think we can rest on our laurels and pat ourselves on the back and say that the world is better nowadays, we have to read books like these and compare them with the headlines in the gossip papers to remember that the Trenors and Dorsets and Rosedales etc are still out there, buying their prey with glamour. These days, however, the predators occasionally end up in jail.

Cheers to that...

Halfway through, I am in agony!

This story rings so acutely true it hurts my ears. When women are raised to be marriageable (today we would use a more vulgar expression but at least it wouldn't be a lifetime sentence) objects on a market of disgraceful lust - mostly for power - then the likes of Lily Bart are sacrificed on the bonfire of the vanities without even considering whether these girls are actually human beings. Legal prostitution sanctioned by family and society, that is what it boils down to. The biggest threat to the market: free love, as it destroys the prices... Ugly as can be!

On my way to catch a train to town, I realised that I had misplaced the book I was officially "currently reading".

But you can't commute without a book, and I was about to miss the train, so I jumped up and down impatiently in front of one of my bookshelves in the hallway, trying to make an instant decision what to grab and read on the go - feeling it is quite similar to the "coffee-on-the-go" issue, which burns your fingers and ruins your shirt on the way to the ever-annoying train - and in the end, it was colour -coding that made the decision for me.

Bright red it shines and doesn't repel me by any prejudiced foreknowledge either - nothing poisonous in my mind telling me that The House of Mirth won't be good for my reading equilibrium.

That was yesterday.

Today I consider myself best friends with Lily Bart, and I would love to go and tell her where to stuff her wish for luxuries and society. EMBRACE DINGINESS, LILY! It is the only way to live life fully.

But I fear she won't. We will see. I will live with her for another 283 pages, and she might just listen to me after all.

And I caught the train too! (But by the time I was getting to my destination, I was already immersed in Lily and her world, and only just got off it!)

I enjoyed the social commentary and the author's beautiful way with words. The character of Lily Bart was portrayed excellently and I also liked Seldon very much and would even have appreciated more of him.
However the book was overwhelmingly depressing. Lily's fall from grace was so unfair and so extreme and I constantly wanted to see her find some way back. The ending is the ultimate in downers. So only three stars from me:(

Love? Or money? You’ve read this story approximately 3,472 times before. But I encourage you to read it again.

Lily Bart, a Manhattan socialite at the beginning of the 20th century, must choose between love and money. It’s a seemingly tired plot, though truly it is not. Because nowadays the question is not love or money? The question is both please? in extra large quantities if possible? Somehow in the past hundred years, love and money have been concatenated. Simply consider recent trends: the greatest romance of the 2000s was that of Edward Cullen and Bella Swan, a romance that convinced many women to fight for it all—a man that can both capture your heart and wallpaper his 20,000 square foot mansion with dollar bills, if he so wishes. Love is money; money is love.

But for Lily Bart, that is not so. It is a choice, a crucial choice, and not as easy as any romantic would make you believe. The most interesting part of the love/money dichotomy has always been what these choices represent. Love is not just throbbing hearts and flushed cheeks; love is morality and goodness. And money is not just an estate on Long Island, a mansion in Newport, an apartment on Fifth Avenue, and a yacht harbored at Monte Carlo; money is corruption and superficiality.

So Lily is actually choosing who she wants to be. And for her, that’s incredible. The fact that this impulse to consider love in a marriage still remains is impressive since her parents tried to beat it from her brain with silk dresses and fifteen course luncheons galore. But Lily is a deeply frustrating character. Wharton thwarts her at every turn; whenever it seems that she might recover, that she might make a good decision, she is thrown back to the wolves, that is, the shallow and noxious New York socialites. Her struggle for love, faith, and freedom figures heavily on fascinating gender dynamics. As a woman, her choices are already constrained, but she admirably works as hard as she can against the opposing forces. She’s heroic but far from a hero.

Lily is brilliantly characterized, which is no surprise since Wharton’s greatest strengths seem to be characterization and writing. Her writing is dense, every word placed so carefully in order to complicate these characters (For instance, this description of a tertiary character: ...Young Silverton, who had meant to live on proof-reading and write an epic, and who now lived on his friends and had become critical of truffles and later, in a delightful dispatch of depressed youth, Ned Silverton was probably smoking the cigarette of young despair in his bedroom.) It’s hilariously pithy, especially about money: “I know there’s one thing vulgar about money, and that’s the thinking about it; and my wife would never have to demean herself in that way.” Wharton’s words require some sifting through, but they are beautiful.

Depending on interpretation, The House of Mirth answers, somewhat answers, and doesn’t answer the question of love or money. It’s romantic while being completely unromantic. If you read it, do tell me what you think of the ending. I still can’t decide what I think about it.

This was my first novel by Edith Wharton and it won't be my last. A great depressing classic read, if that's your sort of thing. My only criticism, looking back after a few months, is that I can't really remember much that happened, just a couple of main events. It was more just the overall feel of the book and great writing that pulled me in.

"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." — Oscar Wilde

Published in 1905, The House of Mirth was set in New York in the late 1800s — America's Gilded Age.

Miss Lily Bart was one of the 'in crowd'; high society was what she was born and bred for. She was blessed with remarkable beauty and her prospects of a 'good marriage' seemed to be set in stone. But no one in her well-to-do circle should have counted those unhatched chickens, for Lily had a streak of independence a mile wide — and it went against her baser instincts to accept any of the suitors who had dented her sofa cushions over the years.

But an unfortunate illness left Miss Bart without family or means and placed her at the mercy of an aunt's reluctant offer to take her in. Lily quickly realized her situation was tenuous and, at twenty-nine, had resigned herself to bite the bullet and choose from one of the Dapper Dans, whose numbers were dwindling by the day.

Enter Lawrence Selden, the Rhett Butler of this story, darkly handsome with a twinkle in his eye. Mr. Selden had been upfront with Lily. He had no wish to marry her but found her game-playing with the other fellows all very amusing. She could be herself with him because he wasn't a prospect; so good friends they would be.

The rich and the righteous had set standards for unmarried young women. Even a toe over the line of what was considered proper would get one tossed out of society on one's ear, and there were those who would have loved nothing more than to witness the downfall of charming Miss Bart.
Will Lily succeed in walking the line?

As one of the most beautiful snowfalls I've ever seen softly coated Kansas in white, I read the final pages of this captivating novel. This did not have the same humor I experienced with my previous read of her work, but the characters leapt flamboyantly from each page. The tale was touching and sometimes harsh, with writing that was dependably on-point.
I shed a few tears before all was said and done and the brilliant, unexpected ending put this squarely in the five-star category.

The House of Mirth will be a hard one to beat this year.
If you are a fan of the television show The Gilded Age, this book is for you.

A few of the quotes that I highlighted:
"She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate."

"Miss Corby's role was jocularity: she always entered the conversation with a handspring."

"It was one of those still November days when the air is haunted with the light of summer…"

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4.5 stars

n  “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.”n

As many readers have already pointed out, there is little mirth to be found in The House of Mirth (and I thought that The Age of Innocence and Summer had despairing endings...I was clearly misguided).
As with the majority of her works, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth is chiefly concerned with depicting the conflict between social and individual fulfilment, and it focuses on the experiences of American's upper social class during the turn of the last century.
Wharton demonstrates incredible social nuance in her almost anthropological-like study of New York's elite society. Her commentary regarding the prevailing behaviours found within this group of people is insightful, satirical, and witty. Her portrayal of this privileged class emphasises its pettiness, giving us the impression that beneath their refined appearances and manners lies hatred, envy, and hypocrisy. Wharton throws light upon the discordance between their behaviour and their values. They are little more than jealous gossips, ready to temporarily forget their strict sense of propriety if it means to tarnish someone else's reputation. It's very much an every person for themselves type of world (or as I like to call it, a shark eat shark kind of world). Someone's ruin or misfortune might not result directly to your advantage but it's guaranteed to entertain (and possibly detract attention from your own ongoings).
This group of selfish and wealthy individuals make for a rather unhealthy environment. Yet, socialite Lily Bart, strives to belong to it. While this is a story that follow's a woman's unsuccessful attempts at social climbing to define it simply as such doesn't do it justice. Throughout the course of the narrative Wharton constructs and deconstructs Lily's character, making her into much more than a social climber. Lily's story provides a keenly observed social commentary, and Wharton does so without employing a heavily didactic or moralistic tone.
Throughout the course of her novel Wharton interrogates themes of gender and class. The narrative’s discourse of personal vs. social identity is epitomised by its main character, Lily Bart, and by her eventual downward path which tragically results in her death. Alongside her satire of New York's high society, with its oppressive customs and its pretence at niceties, Wharton criticises binary thinking. Unlike her characters, Wharton does not pass judgement on Lily's transgressions, rather she makes her protagonist's changing circumstances make her aware of the way in which her values have brought about her own ruin. Although Lily is not painted as the story's victim, the narrative informs readers of the limited options available to women in Lily's position.

Lily Bart is one of the many tragic heroines who is ruined by her own materialism and romanticism. These fictional women are often frivolous (Rosamond Vincy), selfish (Emma Bovary), inclined to transgress social norms (Sula Peace), mostly concerned with their own economic elevation (Becky Sharp), and often branded as evil or regarded unsympathetically. Yet, Lily's character subverts notions of good and bad, as Wharton does not seem to equate her protagonist's self-interest with vice. While other characters within this novel are quick to label and condemn Lily, we read of her various internal struggles (whom she wants to be vs. who others want her to be) and of her many ill-fated attempts at love and happiness.
Lily very much plays a role in many of her relationships, making herself into what others want her to be. Above all she is an actress, a performer. Yet, her self-fashioning aggravates the disconnect between who she is and who she pretends to be (and often results in problematic situations in which others expect her to do or act in a way that goes against her wishes).
Lily's solipsistic nature did not make her into an unlikable character. Even when she seems to exhibit the same hypocrisy as those she criticises, I still found her to be a beguiling individual. While her debts are certainly a consequence of her own materialistic desires, if not opulent impulses, we come to understand the significance that appearances (such as one's dresses) play in one's fortune and reputation. Lily can charm those in her circle as long as she continues to live a certain lifestyle, she has to keep up with their expensive tastes and habits.
Lily often falls prey to ennui, a boredom that is tied to a sense of sublime potential, one that makes her feel superior to her environment. Lily is frequently unsatisfied by those paths that are open to her: to Lily, marrying a dull man would inevitably result in a life of ‘mediocrity’ and, more important still, in a restriction of her freedom.
So Lily remains adamant in her certainty that she been cast into the wrong role (or life), believing instead that she deserves to live as freely as she pleases, possibly married a man who is both sophisticated and wealthy, and more importantly surrounded by riches. While she certainly longs to and works toward belonging to this upper crust, she finds them to be both petty and shallow, and is often repulsed by their bad tastes, appearance, and behaviour.
This sense of self-importance allows her to manipulate those around her. Lily is a schemer, prone to self-pitying, and not very emphatic. Yet it is her very cleverness and charm that make into a formidable figure.
The novel mostly focuses on Lily's attempts to find wealth (whether this is through a husband or fortune, she initially doesn't seem to mind), and the way in which her plans often backfire. As her reputation is shredded beyond all repair, Lily slowly begins to reconsider herself, her values, and her past actions. Her character's development is realised through extensive acts of introspection, and Wharton's narration lends itself beautifully to Lily's self-analysing.

What more can I say write? This story is populated by gamblers and gossips, who are eager to use and walk over Lily (and I hated them, how I hated them), but there are those who show compassion and love towards her. And yes, I am a sucker for a doomed romance (not sure if that makes me a romantic or a bit of masochist).
In spite of its satirical tone, this novel tells tragic story. After Lily is rejected by her circle, death seems a last attempt to get away from a reality that she cannot endure. Still, I hoped against hope that she could finally find some happiness with Lawrence Selden.

5 glowing stars.

It has been many years since I read a novel by Edith Wharton. As soon as I started this reread of The House of Mirth I was smiling with recognition. I basked in Wharton’s beautifully sculpted sentences and her characters which are wrought with such precision and psychological accuracy I felt that I knew them all ( for better or worse).

Edith Wharton grew up in upper class New York society so she was well-suited to write this satirically witty and tragic novel. The House of Mirth is one of Wharton’s best critiques of the people in the upper echelons of New York society in the late 19th Century and the narrow choices for and constraints on women. Throughout this novel we find, beneath the refined appearances and manners envy, and hypocrisy; people who valued money and social status over all else.

Wharton sets up a world in which people in society are amoral and everyone else is good. Before we even open the book the title suggests this. It comes from the Old Testament: “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth,” meaning wise people choose morality and freedom (mourning) over amorality and lack of freedom (mirth).

Within this either/or world Wharton sets her protagonist Lily Bart, who lives betwixt and between the world of wealthy society and the world in which people must work. Her father worked for a living, but Lily’s mother spent every dollar he made on luxuries for herself and for Lily. So Lily was raised to know only the finest of luxuries and to use her incredible beauty and charm to marry a wealthy man in society.

Lily Bart is 29 years old when the story opens. She has been an orphan for 10 years, has very little money and knowing only what she learned from her mother and from going out with society people, she is seemingly doing what she was taught to do, hunting for a wealthy man to marry. However, she is not so one-dimensional as that. She is, in fact, a study in contradictions and internal conflicts. She cannot fit herself into Wharton’s either/or world. She wants to marry into society but she unwittingly sabotages every prospect because she wants to also marry for love and she cannot tolerate the constraints of society’s conventions. She also has a moral compass and wants to do what is right nor does she like the people in society very much. But society is what she knows and was raised for. At the beginning of the novel she feels that marrying a rich man is her only option. By the end of the novel she learns otherwise, but it is tragically too late.

Lily, besides sabotaging every marriage prospect, also goes against the rules of the very society to which she wants to belong. She does this at the very beginning of the novel when, unattended, she enters the bachelor apartment of her friend Seldon. She takes the risk of visiting a single man's apartment alone, something that in the late 1800s respectable single women did not do. This is one of the most telling scenes in the novel because Lily speaks freely with Sheldon which she cannot do in society. She even asks Seldon, who is not in society, if they can speak openly and honestly. Doing so, Lily feels free, something she only experiences while in Seldon’s company. While with her society friends she is not free to speak the truth but must put on airs and pretenses. She also describes her envy at Seldon’s having his own apartment, wishing she could afford her own apartment to decorate as she would like and finishes by saying:

"What a miserable thing it is to be a woman!"

Selden reminds Lily that his cousin, Gerty Farish, owns a flat. “Yes, but Gerty wants to be good, I want to be happy.” Gerty Farish, is of a different class than Lily—she is a woman who has to work and not being beautiful like Lily, she cannot expect to marry wealth.

In noting the shabbiness of Seldon’s apartment and clothes, she wails:

“Ah, there’s the difference—a girl must, a man may if he chooses…. Your coat’s a little shabby—but who cares? It doesn’t keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like.”

Lily sees that, compared to Seldon her society friends are all empty and uninteresting. She smiles at this thought, “since her friends had seemed so admirable to her the night before.” She realizes that, however opulent their lives might be, they are also dull and empty, and she herself longs for an opportunity to escape the monotony of the life she has planned for herself.

However much she tries to convince herself that she desires money and luxury, she seems incapable of accepting the boredom and other realties they are tied to.

Seldon sees this and thinks to himself:

”She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”

She complains to Sheldon that she needs money, a lot of money in order to buy beautiful clothes to fit in society. Her mother hated anything “dingy” and Lily inherited this feeling.

“She knew that she hated dinginess as much as her mother had hated it, and to her last breath she meant to fight against it, dragging herself up again and again above its flood till she gained the bright pinnacles of success which presented such a slippery surface to her clutch.”

She reminds me of Sisyphus, forever having to roll the boulder uphill only for it to fall back down again once he gets close to the top of the mountain. It’s a struggle he never wins, Nor can Lily. But Lily’s struggle isn’t just against dinginess, it’s a struggle within herself and society’s expectations of her; she simply cannot marry a man just for his wealth nor make money through blackmail, an option she had but did not use. She is too moral for that.

Throughout the society gauntlet Lily runs in this novel we get to know her inner thoughts as compared to her, at times, manipulative and cagey behavior, talk and manners. Lily alternates between genuineness and calculation. It is pure genius how Wharton conveys Lily’s inner thoughts and feelings and the calculations which go on in her head. These are followed by streams of polished sentences which are always just the right words for any given situation. When she’s calculating and manipulative her words have no appearance of being so. Whether hunting quarry or fending off a suitor or a jealous rival she always knows exactly what to say.


Lily is so poor at one point and has lost her chance to be part of NY society that she moves into a boarding house and takes a job in a milliner's shop. She now finds herself officially divorced from society and a regular member of the working class. But Lily has no skill nor the ability to learn and is eventually fired from this job. Now she finds that she doesn't fit into either world.
.
Poor and jobless Lily's self-awareness grows but it is all too late to do her any good.

Lily Bart is the first and greatest of Edith Wharton's trapped women. Here's the trick Wharton pulls off with her: she's not great, and Wharton makes you wish she was worse.

Lily is beautiful; she looks, thinks her star-crossed friend Selden, as though "she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her." Maybe she looks a little like this painting she mimics for a tableau vivant, which is a shitty party game where people act out a painting because karaoke wasn't invented yet. It's halfway through the book and it's Lily's last triumph.


"Mrs. Lloyd" by Joshua Reynolds, 1775-1776

Pervy old guys are like "I can see her whole legs!!!"

But she's poor, orphaned by her elegant but broke parents. Her mother died of dinginess. "I am horribly poor - and very expensive," she laughs haha but not. "I must have a great deal of money." And the problem is what she'll have to sacrifice to marry it. Faced with a series of rich losers - supremely boring Percy Gryce; some old Italian Count; even, clutch your pearls, a Jew - she sabotages herself at every turn. Lily is inconsistent and unstable, but her real problem is that she must sacrifice either money or love, and she can't bring herself to make the choice.

Love is Selden, who lacks money - also possibly heterosexuality, according to some, but I don't see it. (Gerty Farish, on the other hand!) The aching, almost-there scene on a hill between Selden and Lily may not be bursting with boners, but it doesn't seem gay to me either.

Money is nearly everyone else, but I want to talk especially about Rosedale, because did I mention that he's a Jew? He's a Jew. And you know what Jews are like, or in case you don't, here's Edith Wharton to tell you:

- "His race's accuracy in the appraisal of values"
- "That mixture of artistic sensibility and business astuteness which characterizes his race"
- "The instincts of his race fitted him to suffer rebuffs and put up with delays"
- "Disciplined by the tradition of his blood to accept what was conceded, without undue haste to press for more"

I'm not a moral relativist, and not everyone in 1905 was anti-Semitic. Edith Wharton was, and it's a problem for this book. It sucks and it also muddles the book, because Rosedale actually is the right guy for Lily to marry. He sees her, as Selden does; both of them realize the trap she's in, both realize how anguished she is about all her escape options. And he honestly, truly wants to help. "If you'd only let me," he pleads, "I'd set you up over them all! – I'd put you where you could wipe your feet on 'em!" And you're like dude, that sounds great. Do that, you great flapping idiot!

She won't do it because he's a Jew, but also because there's this one little thing she has to do first. I'm going to outline some of the middle plot, so skip this paragraph if you want: she's in trouble at this point. She's accepted money from her friend Judy Trenor's husband; she thought he was managing her investments, but it turns out he thought he was paying her in advance for sex. (My initial reaction to this was, "That's ludicrous, nobody would think that!" to which the mighty El responded, "Spoken like someone who's never accepted a ride home in the rain from a dude.") So in order to get away from that mess, she goes on a cruise with the Dorsets, but it turns out Bertha Dorset is using her to distract her husband while she has an affair, and when Bertha gets herself in trouble about it she coldly sacrifices Lily, in a nasty little twist scene where she publicly accuses Lily of fucking Mr. Dorset. And the thing is that Lily has accidentally acquired proof of Bertha's infidelity; she can use it to destroy Bertha and regain her social stature.

That's all Rosedale needs - he needs her slightly less scandalous - but Lily won't do it. She refuses to sink to Bertha's level. That's her in a nutshell. Describing wonderful Gerty (who, again, is gay af for her) she says, "She likes being good, and I like being happy." But that's not really the truth. Over and over she's presented with the opportunity to be happy, at the minor cost of just an insignificant sliver of goodness, and she turns away.

So step by step Lily slips, and each time "she recovered her footing, and it was only afterward that she was aware of having recovered it each time on a slightly lower level." Each time she's dingier. Wharton makes us watch every slip, and it's terrible. So here we are, and here's the trick Edith Wharton has pulled off: she presents us with this essentially useless human, and by the time she's done, all we want is for her to be a little worse. Just sacrifice this tiny little piece of goodness, in order to get at least a little sliver of happiness.

The thing with Edith Wharton is that she made the decision Lily Bart can't. Wharton was elegant and broke and she married the money, spending 28 long years with a rich, cheating, unstable, possibly closeted husband before finally (and somewhat scandalously) divorcing him. She wrote House of Mirth, her first hit, in the middle of all this. (Custom of the Country, which explores divorce, came at the end.) So you can sense the ambivalence running throughout this book: Wharton is unhappy, and she both envies and condemns Lily. Lily allows her to live out her escapist fantasies, and to reassure herself that they wouldn't have worked. Although, I mean, it would have been fine if she had just gotten with Gerty in the first place.

Di gioia ce n’è ben poca

I really loved this - it was engaging and beautifully written, and the main character is fascinating. I absolutely recommend this - I think it'll stay with me for a long time.

"Once she's talked about she's done for." Lily Bart knew all of the rules of society, but she refused to follow them, out of pride, naiveness, stubbornness and integrity. This led to her downfall. This book demonstrated the snobbishness and hypocrisy of the society in which Lily lived, but she did not rebel against it, in fact she was raised to be a part of it and loved the glitter and comfort and wanted more of the same. However, she suffered from the problem of being a poor relation with expensive tastes. Opportunities for women were very limited and marriage was the only viable option for Lily to obtain the life she desired. Unfortunately, her miscalculations and missed opportunities made it impossible for her to achieve her goal. Lily's inability to climb her way out of her situation led to a very tragic story.

This book had all the bright, sparkling language and penetrating observations for which Wharton is known. The fact that Lily was not a totally sympathetic character made the story more realistic and more disturbing. Wharton has definitely become one of my favorite authors.

I listened to the audiobook and the narration by Wanda McCaddon was excellent.