House of Mirth

In the glittering world of Gilded Age New York, beauty is a currency and marriage is the only investment that pays. Lily Bart has both in abundance: the aristocratic features, the impeccable training, the air of effortless grace that opens every door. What she lacks is the one thing that matters, money. At twenty-nine, she stands on the precipice of irrelevance, watched by a society that worships youth and wealth in equal measure. The novel traces her season of reckoning as she maneuvers through a world of Dorsets and Van Alstynes, hoping for love but settling for arithmetic. Wharton, writing with the precision of a surgeon and the irony of a saint, dissects a society where women are currency and the cost of existence is constant performance. This is a tragedy of manners, a novel about what it costs to be beautiful, poor, and female in America.