Modern Library Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century
Perhaps the most impressive thing about this book is that it was a serial,
published in Scribner's Magazine in 11 installments. This practice, which
was common in the 1800's when Dickens produced books this way, is enormously
difficult, as Norman Mailer found out when he tried to do it for American
Dream and failed mierably. It's nearly forgotten already that Tom Wolfe
wrote Bonfire of the Vanities this way, which makes that work even
more remarkable.
House of Mirth tells the story of Lily Bart. Her father has died
and left the family in reduced straits. She moves on the fringes of genteel
New York society as she seeks a suitable husband. Attracted to the too
poor Lawrence Selden, repelled by the wealthy Jew Sim Rosedale, she woos
and dumps the
extremely wealthy, but boring, Percy Gryce. Thus, when she finds
herself burdened by debt and is tainted by a slight whiff of scandal, concerning
her too friendly relations with married men, she has noone to fall back
on and ends up working as a seamstress. Fortuitously, she comes into
an inheritance just as she is about to settle on an unsatisfactory husband.
But that night, intentionally or no, she takes a little too much sleeping
draught and dies.
The book does not measure up to her excellent Age of Innocence and is
not worthy of the top 100, but it is a pleasant enough look at the restricted
lives and restrictive manners of the turn of the century New York high and mighty.
(Reviewed:)
Grade: (C+)
Websites:
Book-related and General Links:
-The
Edith Wharton Society Home Page
-Edith Wharton
Restoration
-Edith
Wharton's World (National Portrait Gallery)
-Edith
Wharton: an Overview with Biocritical Resources
-Domestic
Goddess: Edith Wharton
-PAL:
Edith Wharton (1862-1937)(PAL: Perspectives in American Literature:
A Research and Reference Guide)
-The
San Antonio College LitWeb Edith Wharton Page
-Edith
Wharton (Kutztown)
-Wharton,
Edith: Ethan Frome (Medical Humanities)
-Literary
Research Guide: Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937)
-ETEXTS:
by Edith Wharton
The
House of Mirth (1905)
Ethan
Frome By Edith Wharton (1911)
-ETEXTS:
of Contemporary Reviews of Wharton's Works from the University of Virginia
E-Text Center
-WEBRARY
: 1995 Book Discussions: The House of Mirth
-TEACHING
GUIDE: Edith Wharton (1862-1937) Contributing Editor: Elizabeth
Ammons
-ESSAY:
Edith Wharton's World: Portraits of People and Places (Stephen May,
The Bee)
-ESSAY:
The New York That Wharton Turned Into Art (MICHAEL FRANK, NY Times)
-ESSAY:
In Search of Edith Wharton (BARBARA SHOUP, NY Times)
-ESSAY:
Summers in an Age of Innocence: In France With Edith Wharton
(Leon Edel, NY Times Book Review)
-ESSAY:
Streetscapes: Edith Wharton; In 'The Age of Innocence,' Fiction Was Not
Truth (CHRISTOPHER GRAY, NY Times)
-ESSAY:
Wharton and the House of Scribner: The Novelist as a Pain in the Neck
(Marc Aronson, NY Times)
-ESSAY:
Filming Edith Wharton's World: You Were How You Ate (JIM KOCH, NY Times)
-REVIEW:
Elizabeth Hardwick: Mrs. Wharton in New York, NY Review of Books
WORKS BY AND ABOUT EDITH
WHARTON DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
Edith Wharton: Novels (The
House of Mirth, The Reef, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence)
The Mother's Recompense
by Edith Wharton
Old New York: False Dawn
(The 'Forties), The Old Maid (The 'Fifties), The Spark (The 'Sixties),
New Year's Day (The 'Seventies) by Edith Wharton
"Bunner Sisters" in Madame
de Treymes and Others by Edith Wharton
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton: A Biography
by R.W.B. Lewis
Portrait of Edith Wharton
by Percy Lubbock
-REVIEW:
of THE HOUSE OF MIRTH THE REEF THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
By Edith Wharton (Janet Malcolm, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
Gabriele Annan: A Night at the Opera, NY Review of Books
'Fast and Loose' and 'The
Buccaneers' by Edith Wharton
The Buccaneers by Edith
Wharton and completed by Marion Mainwaring
The Age of Innocence directed
by Martin Scorsese, screenplay by Jay Cocks, and Martin Scorsese
The Age of Innocence: A
Portrait of the Film Based on the Novel by Edith Wharton by Martin Scorsese
and Jay Cocks
The Age of Innocence by
Edith Wharton and introduction by R.W.B. Lewis
-REVIEW:
of THE BUCCANEERS By Edith Wharton. Completed by Marion Mainwaring
(Wendy Steiner, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
of A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton by Cynthia Griffin
Wolff Edith Wharton's Secret (Karl Miller, NY Review of Books)
-REVIEW:
Irvin Ehrenpreis: The Rescue of Edith Wharton, NY Review of Books
Edith Wharton: A Biography
by R.W.B. Lewis
-REVIEW:
Eleanor Clark: "Angel of Devastation", NY Review of Books
The Two Lives of Edith Wharton
by Grace Kellogg
Edith Wharton and Henry
James: The Story of Their Friendship by Millicent Bell
Edith Wharton 1862-1937
by Olivia Coolidge
The Edith Wharton Reader
selected with an Introduction by Louis Auchincloss
The Reef by Edith Wharton
and Introduction by Louis Auchincloss
-REVIEW:
Marius Bewley: Mrs. Wharton's Mask, NY Review of Books
A Blackward Glance: The
Autobiography of Edith Wharton Introduction by Louis Auchincloss
Summer by Edith Wharton
Old New York by Edith Wharton
-REVIEW:
of THE MOTHER'S RECOMPENSE. By Edith Wharton (MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NY
Times)
-REVIEW:
of The Stories of Edith Wharton Selected and Introduced by Anita
Brookner (Michiko Kakutani , NY Times)
-REVIEW:
of The Letters of Edith Wharton Edited by R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy
Lewis (Michiko Kakutani , NY Times)
-REVIEW:
of NO GIFTS FROM CHANCE A Biography of Edith Wharton. By Shari Benstock
(Greg Johnson, NY times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
of EDITH WHARTON An Extraordinary Life. By Eleanor Dwight (Angeline
Goreau, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
of HENRY JAMES AND EDITH WHARTON Letters: 1900-1915. Edited by Lyall
H. Powers (Maggie Paley, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
of HENRY JAMES AND EDITH WHARTON Letters: 1900-1915. Edited by Lyall
H. Powers (Michiko Kakutani , NY Times)
FILM:
-REVIEW:
of Ethan Frome (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times)
-REVIEW:
of Ethan Frome (Rita Kempley, Washington Post Staff Writer)
-REVIEW:
of Ethan Frome (A Film Review by James Berardinelli)
GENERAL:
-REVIEW:
Helen Vendler: Feminism and Literature, NY Review of Books
Beyond Feminist Aesthetics:
Feminist Literature and Social Change by Rita Felski
Women, Class, and the Feminist
Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader edited by Karen V. Hansen and
Ilene J. Philipson
Feminism/Postmodernism edited
and with an introduction by Linda J. Nicholson
Women Writers of the Seventeenth
Century edited by Katharina M. Wilson and Frank J. Warnke
Eighteenth-Century Women
Poets: An Oxford Anthology edited by Roger Lonsdale
Hamlet's Mother and Other
Women by Carolyn G. Heilbrun
No Man's Land: The Place
of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century Vol. I, The War of the Words
Vol. II,
Sexchanges by Sandra Gilbert
and Susan Gubar
Sexual Personae: Art and
Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia
-ESSAY:
Listening for the Scratch of a Pen (SUZANNE BERNE, NY Times)
If you liked House of Mirth, try:
Marquand, John P.
-The Late George Apley
Tarkington, Booth
-The
Magnificent Ambersons
Comments:
Orrin welcomes reader comments on his reviews.
Add yours here.
Thanks, I've been forgetting to fix that for two years.
- oj
- Jan-27-2003, 13:52
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"hoi polloi" does not refer to rich people but the opposite
-
- Jan-27-2003, 08:33
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