- Published: 31 October 2012
- ISBN: 9781446468722
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 368
The House of Mirth
- Published: 31 October 2012
- ISBN: 9781446468722
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 368
[Edith Wharton was] an ambitious, brilliant and industrious woman who created "her own personal and professional revolution"
Sunday Times
A cautionary tale of social disaster, told with wit and elan
Independent
Edith Wharton was a natural story-teller. As plots do in real life, hers flow directly from character. Her prose is so effortlessly elegant that you're rarely aware as they purl by that the sentences are so pretty...I was born after the heavy spade work of female emancipation was done. But 100 years ago, Edith Wharton's drive, independence, wilfulness and autodidactic mastery of the English language were extraordinary, and I bashfully claim her as a kindred spirit
Lionel Shriver, Guardian
Edith Wharton's 1905 novel gave literature one of its most complicated tragic heroines
Independent
In a world of massive tragedy, it may seem strange to find the decline and death of Lily Bart, Edith Wharton's doomed protagonist in The House of Mirth, so sad...what makes one weep for Lily Bart in the end is the way her basic moral rectitude is so cruelly betrayed
Anthony Beevor, Sunday Telegraph
Like Henry James, Wharton has a wonderful gift of revealing the inner life of her characters while also documenting the elegance and hypocrisy of high society...the accumulation of desolation in the final three chapters reduces me to tears
Jonathan Bate, Sunday Telegraph
No one has bettered Edith Wharton on the cash-sex nexus of the respectable, as well as the clashes of propriety and fashion. The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth are probably the best novels by this knowing, compassionate writer
Independent on Sunday
The supreme novel of New York in its last great belle époque...Wharton is at her magnificent, merciless best here...The novel witheringly shows the savage side of high society, an impeccably mannered world of bridge and betrayal that simply spits Bart out
Guardian