Born into a wealthy and socially prominent New York family, Edith Newbold Jones married the Boston banker Edward Wharton when she was in her twenties. Although she had written stories from her girlhood, it was not until she was in her late thirties that she began to publish her work. For the next 40 years she produced fiction in a range of styles, from grim tragedies set in rural New England (Ethan Frome, for example) to atmospheric ghost stories, but her greatest books examine, with a cool but jaundiced eye, the social conventions of the upper-class New York society with which she was most familiar. The House of Mirth, perhaps the finest instance of her most characteristic work, follows the social decline of its heroine, Lily Bart, who begins the book as the house guest of wealthy relatives and, by the end, is forced to the desperate expedient of taking a job as a milliner. In the interim she has had opportunities to marry and secure her future but she has, for a variety of reasons, either lost them or turned them down. One potential husband, the pious heir to a large fortune, is dismayed when she refuses to spend her Sunday in church. Another fails to win her because Lily considers him insufficiently well off. Her actions come back to haunt her as she falls further and further down the social scale. Eventually a woman who was once beautiful and elegant is reduced, through a combination of her own bad decisions and the malevolent gossip of others, to impoverished gentility and the realization that her life has been a failure. Wharton is remorselessly clear-sighted both about the values of the society in which Lily lives and about the marriage market which ultimately decides her fate.

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