The book of this week is “House of Mirth” by Edith Wharton.

Born into Old New York Society, Edith was raised across Europe and houses in Newport and Manhattan, developing a gift and appreciation for art and literature through her travels.

She published her first book of poems “Verses” aged 16 but would not make any more attempts at professional authorship until 1899, when she released a collection of short stories for Scribner’s. Her first novel “The Valley of Decision” was not published until in 1902.

Three years later, aged 43, she would release “The House of Mirth”, a book that would catapult her into the New York literary scene and establish her as the first woman writer to be taken seriously by the male literary establishment.

House of Mirth serves as a kind of prosecuting homage to the stifling and repressive society Edith grew up in, describing the coercive limitations on the women of her generation. The heroine Lily Bart, an Old Family socialite thrown into poverty, struggles with the desire to luxuriate in the pleasures of the wealthy, against her self-enforced inability to marry a wealthy man, the only escape from her family’s economic fall from grace. As she struggles to maintain her place among her high-class friends, Lily begins to allow more and more indiscretions to her own character, leading to a series of false scandals and ill intentions that lead to her own downfall. She has enough self-awareness to condemn the society she strives to be in but is incapable of bringing herself to break away.

Edith novel stands in defiance to the two main American principles: the ability to climb society to achieve social success and riches, and the ability to be self-sufficient. Instead, the book highlights the condemnation of her age on women like Lily Bart, who, succumbing to the forces of society, were plunged to the miseries of poverty, loneliness and death.