The House of Mirth

Resumen del libro

An impoverished member of the privileged Old New York society, Lily Bart is beautiful and socially agreeable, yet she has almost reached the age of thirty - a dangerous threshold for a young woman - and is still unmarried. Now she is desperate to secure a wealthy husband to confirm her status in society, but her penchant for gambling at cards, her reduced circumstances, her determination to marry for love and the constant gossip she attracts from malevolent tongues through her heedless behaviour and her constant social faux pas make her prospects look bleak. As suitor after suitor appears and fades away, and she is drawn further and further down into a spiral of debt and unhappiness, she realizes that she is just one step away from losing everything she has.

Published in 1905 to immediate critical and commercial success, The House of Mirth is perhaps Edith Wharton's most popular work - a brilliant evocation of the economic and social changes wrought by the Gilded Age which transcends the novel of manners, as well as a universal satire on the constraints and follies of upper-crust conventions.

Biografía del autor

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) es una de las autoras fundamentales de la literatura estadounidense. Nacida en el seno de una familia de la clase alta neoyorquina, inmortalizó esos ambientes sociales en la que se considera de forma unánime su obra maestra, i La edad de la inocencia /i (1920), con la que se convirtió en la primera mujer en ganar el Premio Pulitzer. Fue extraordinariamente prolífica en su producción narrativa, pero cultivó todos los géneros: poesía, libros de viajes, crítica literaria, autobiografía e incluso una obra de teatro que permaneció inédita hasta más de cien años después de su muerte.