Recommendations from our site
“So this is Wharton’s second novel, and was extremely – really remarkably – successful on publication. It’s a novel about the culture of the Gilded Age and, as far as I’m aware, one of the first major novels about New York society at that time. It traces the extraordinary descent – literally and figuratively – of a woman, Lily Bart, in the social scene. One of the things I love about The House of Mirth is the way the entire novel is encoded in the form of the opening scene, in which Lily ascends and descends a flight of stairs, and in doing so accidentally sets in motion the accumulation of rumor and misfortune that will eventually destroy her. The novel is constantly moving through these accretive images of exquisite beauty and wealth, which themselves then also complicate or degrade Lily’s social standing in the moment of their perception.” Read more...
“Americans are always fascinated with the wealthy. It’s a bit of an illusion to imagine ours to be a classless society, as novelists like Wharton made brilliantly clear.” Read more...
Jay McInerney, Novelist
Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905) is another classic in this mode, but for the reasons above, I chose Chesnutt as my “cheat” twentieth-century pick. But I’ve been thinking a lot about Wharton’s approach to her upper-crust characters—how she described drawing out the “dramatic significance” of “a frivolous society”—while watching HBO’s Succession. (I’m obsessed.)
The Best 19th Century American Novels recommended by Nathan Wolff
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