Mrs. Wharton deprecated in her memoirs the tendency, not infrequent in novelists of manners, notably Balzac, Thackeray, and Proust, to be dazzled by contact with the very society they satirize, but she conceded that this seeming inconsistency might, in some, be “a deep necessity in the creator’s imagination.” It was a tendency that she escaped herself, for she was certainly not dazzled by her New York fashionable world, but it may be a pity that her exemption was quite so complete. Society in The House of Mirth is a bit too harshly drawn. It cannot believe that some member of Lily’s family would not have come forward to help her in the end or that she would not have found a man to love her instead of a prosey prig.

  Poor Mr. Selden, it is not really his fault. He is a victim of the plot requirements. He has to keep stating to Lily the values of spiritual independence, and he can do so only where he can find her—in the social world. Consequently he strikes the reader as a man who cannot pass up a party, a sort of Ward McAllister posing as a Thoreau. The only way that Mrs. Wharton could have saved him would have been to represent him as a man who hated society and frequented it only to see Lily. But such a man might have won Lily away from it, so Selden must be made a tepid lover as well as a seeming hypocrite.

  Fifteen years after the publication of The House of Mirth, when she had lived through the breakup of her marriage and a world war, Mrs. Wharton, then an expatriate, decided that she had underrated society, at least as it had existed in the New York of her own girlhood, that sober, placid brownstone town that had not yet been corrupted by the tide of new fortunes. Out of this sense of apology came The Age of Innocence, where Ellen Olenska, unlike Lily, has the courage to be independent and where Newland Archer, unlike Selden, is man enough to champion her cause. But Mrs. Wharton never softened about Lily Bart’s New York. Indeed, her rancor sharpened as the years went by, and in book after book she struck at what she deemed to be its successors. Unfortunately, as she had moved abroad, she no longer saw it directly, and her shots went increasingly astray. But The House of Mirth is evidence of her deadly aim in 1905.

  —Louis Auchincloss New York City

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  OTHER WORKS BY EDITH WHARTON

  Ethan Frome, 1911 (Signet Classic)

  The Reef, New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1912

  The Custom of the Country, New York: C. Scribner’s sons, 1913

  Summer, 1917 (Signet Classic)

  The Age of Innocence, 1920 (Signet Classic)

  The Glimpses of the Moon, 1922 (Signet Classic)

  A Backward Glance, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1934

  The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton, ed. R.W.B. Lewis, New York: Scribners, 1968

  The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, New York: Scribners, 1988

  BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM

  Ammons, Elizabeth. Edith Wharton’s Argument with America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980.

  Auchincloss, Louis. Edith Wharton: A Woman of Her Time. New York: Viking, 1971.

  Bell, Millicent. Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of Their Friendship. New York: Braziller. 1965.

  Bendixen, Alfred and Annette Zilversmit, eds. Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays. New York: Garland, 1992.

  Benstock, Shari. No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. New York: Scribners, 1994.

  Bloom, Harold, ed. Edith Wharton. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.

  Dwight, Eleanor. Edith Wharton, An Extraordinary Life. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994.

  Gimbel, Wendy. Edith Wharton: Orphancy and Survival. New York: Praeger, 1984.

  Howe, Irving, ed. Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962.

  Lawson, Richard H. Edith Wharton. New York: Ungar, 1977.

  Lewis, R.W.B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

  Lindberg, Gary H. Edith Wharton and the Novel of Manners. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975.

  Lubbock, Percy. Portrait of Edith Wharton. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1947.

  Lyde, Marilyn J. Edith Wharton: Convention and Morality in the Work of a Novelist. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959.

  McDowell, Margaret B. Edith Wharton. Rev. Ed. Twayne Series. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991.

  Nevins, Blake. Edith Wharton: A Study of Her Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953.

  Singley, Carol J. Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

  Vitz-Finzi, Penelope. Edith Wharton and the Art of Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990.

  Walton, Geoffrey. Edith Wharton: A Critical Interpretation. Rutherford, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970.

  Wershoven, Carol. The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton. Rutherford, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982.

  Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

 

 

  Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

 

 

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