The House of Mirth

Lily Bart stands so still in her borrowed white gown that a drawing room full of New York's finest goes silent, certain for one moment that a Reynolds portrait has stepped out of its frame. She is twenty-nine, unmarried, brilliant, expensive to dress and impossible to employ, and she has spent a decade calculating exactly how much beauty a good marriage requires. Edith Wharton follows her through the small refusals and smaller compromises: a card debt covered by the wrong man, a letter she cannot bring herself to use, a chance at safety declined because some scrap of honesty in her refuses the price. New York closes every door behind her without raising its voice. Nobody in this novel behaves cruelly. That is the horror of it, a woman destroyed entirely by people who are only ever polite. Lily falls not because she is weak but because she is too honest for the one trade she was ever taught, and by the last page you will want to reach into it and stop her before the final door swings shut.