The House of Mirth
was written while Edith Wharton was still living in New York in 1905—or partly living in New York when not at the new house in Lenox or in Newport or abroad. The tragic force of this ambitious early novel—early in her career at least—has to do with the broadness of conception, the immediacy of the strokes and scenes, rather than, as was so often later the case, a concentration upon the details of manners, such as divorce for a woman. (It is interesting that in this novel the one woman who seems to be invited everywhere has been divorced twice.)
- Elizabeth Hardwick, “Mrs. Wharton in New York,” in American Fictions
Hardwick writes also that:
There is a tradesman’s shrewdness in Edith Wharton’s work. She knows how to order the stock and dispose the goods in the window. […] In The House of Mirth, her triumph, she is not always clear what the moral might be and thereby creates a stunning tragedy in which the best and richest society of New York reveals an inner coarseness like pimps cruising in Cadillacs.
The chill of The House of Mirth’s ending was on me for days afterward.
