Where to Start with Edith Wharton: A Reading Guide

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) is the finest American novelist of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era — a writer who knew the upper-class New York society she portrayed from the inside and who anatomised it with a precision and a cold intelligence that Henry James admired and that no other American writer of her period matched. Her central subject is the conflict between individual desire and social convention — between what her characters want and what their world permits — and she renders this conflict with unsentimental clarity and a dark comedy that has not dated. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Where to Start: The House of Mirth (1905)

The essential Wharton — and one of the most devastating novels in American literature. Lily Bart is twenty-nine, beautiful, intelligent, and running out of time to marry the wealthy man her position in 1890s New York society requires. She is simultaneously too morally fastidious to do what is necessary (accept the proposal of the rich but boring Percy Gryce; become the mistress of the married Gus Trenor) and too addicted to the luxury of her social world to give it up and live differently. Wharton traces Lily’s descent through the levels of New York society — as she loses ally after ally, makes enemy after enemy, and refuses compromise after compromise — with merciless precision.

The novel is not a tragedy of simple weakness: Lily’s failure is also, in a sense, her integrity. Wharton’s account of how the social system punishes women who are not sufficiently compliant is one of the most powerful in American fiction.

The Age of Innocence (1920)

Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize winner — set in the 1870s New York society she knew as a child, forty years before the novel was published. Newland Archer is engaged to May Welland, a lovely, conventional young woman who represents everything his world approves. When May’s cousin Ellen Olenska returns from Europe — separated from her husband, free in her behaviour and her conversation, intellectually alive — Newland is drawn to her with a force he cannot fully acknowledge. The novel traces his agonised inability to choose: to leave May for Ellen would be to destroy everything he has built; to stay is to live a life of polite deprivation.

The social machinery that enforces Newland’s conformity — which he does not even fully see until the novel’s devastating final pages — is Wharton’s most subtle achievement.

The Custom of the Country (1913)

Wharton’s most satirical novel — and her most modern in psychological analysis. Undine Spragg arrives in New York from the midwest with her parents’ money and her own extraordinary beauty, and proceeds to rise through New York society by discarding husbands with complete efficiency whenever a better opportunity presents itself. Where Lily Bart is destroyed by the social system she cannot wholly conform to, Undine succeeds by conforming to it absolutely — by wanting only what the system rewards. The novel is Wharton’s darkest comedy: Undine’s success is an indictment of everything the social system values.

Why The House of Mirth Is the Ideal First Book

For a reader new to Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth is the ideal first book because it is among her greatest novels and a perfect expression of her distinctive gifts, the elegant prose, the sharp social observation, and the unflinching tragedy of individuals trapped by the conventions of high society. The House of Mirth follows the beautiful, charming Lily Bart as she navigates, and is ultimately destroyed by, the rigid social world of old New York, in a powerful and tragic novel of society, money, and the position of women. As an entry point it is ideal, for it is one of her best-known works and a perfect example of her elegant, incisive, and emotionally powerful fiction. It welcomes the newcomer with its compelling heroine, its sharp social observation, and its tragic power, drawing the reader into her distinctive world. It is among her major works and a fine representation of her gifts, so the new reader encounters Wharton at her finest. For the newcomer, then, The House of Mirth is the natural and ideal starting point.

What to Expect as a New Reader

As a new reader, you can expect The House of Mirth to be an elegant, incisive, and tragic novel of high society. You can expect a compelling heroine, for the novel follows the beautiful, charming Lily Bart as she navigates the social world of old New York. You can expect sharp social observation, for Wharton dissects the manners, hypocrisies, and cruelties of high society with precision and irony. You can expect tragedy, for the novel charts Lily’s decline as she is trapped and destroyed by the conventions and pressures of her world. You can expect elegant prose, for Wharton writes with grace, control, and incisive intelligence. You can expect themes of money, marriage, social convention, and the constrained position of women. You can expect emotional power and a clear-eyed, unsparing vision. Expect, in short, an elegant, incisive, and tragic novel of high society, a superb introduction to Wharton’s gifts.

Going Deeper After Your First Book

Once The House of Mirth has introduced you to Wharton’s gifts, the reader who wishes to go deeper can explore her other novels and stories, which continue her elegant prose, her sharp social observation, and her unflinching engagement with society, convention, and the constrained lives of her characters. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of old New York is among her finest achievements, while her shorter, devastating novella of rural hardship and her other fiction reveal the range of her vision. Reading these after The House of Mirth deepens your appreciation of Wharton’s distinctive gifts, the elegant prose, the sharp social observation, and the tragic power. Her characteristic qualities run through her work. Building your reading journey through Wharton is a matter of following her fiction from The House of Mirth into her other novels and stories. The reader who begins here and continues will encounter one of the great American novelists of society, manners, and the inner life.

Reading Edith Wharton

Wharton’s particular quality is her combination of social precision and moral intelligence: she knows exactly how the system she describes works — who has power, who defers, what gets said and what gets left unsaid — and she makes that knowledge the vehicle for a sustained moral argument about what such systems do to people. Begin with The House of Mirth for her most emotionally devastating novel; with The Age of Innocence for her most formally controlled; with The Custom of the Country for her most satirical. All three repay rereading — what seems like social comedy on first reading reveals itself, on return, as something much darker.