The House of Mirth

Lilly Bart is twenty-nine, beautiful and charming. She has expensive tastes, loves to gamble and socialises with the immensely wealthy upper-class families of New York. But her meagre finances are dwindling.
Given the restrictions imposed by society, her only hope of financial security is to find a suitable husband. However, Lilly has an independence of spirit which stands in the way of her committing to the suitors available to her. As her options diminish, her friends become her enemies and her situation grows increasing perilous.

Through the prism of Lilly’s life, Edith Wharton has written a witty and piercingly insightful dark satire about the over privileged and morally dubious society of early twentieth-century New York.

This Macmillan Collector's Library edition has a new introduction by author Danuta Reah.

Designed to appeal to the booklover, Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound hardback gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

Edith Wharton was born in 1862 to a prominent and wealthy New York family. In 1885 she married a Boston socialite; the couple travelled frequently and settled in France in 1907, but the marriage was unhappy and they divorced in 1913. On her trips to Europe Wharton became a close friend of the novelist Henry James. Her first major novel was The House of Mirth (1905); many short stories, travel books, memoirs and novels followed, including Ethan Frome (1911), The Reef (1912) and The Age of Innocence (1920). Wharton was decorated for her humanitarian work during the First World War. She died in France in 1937.

Danuta Reah is a novelist and an academic who works in the field of English language and linguistics.