Amazon.com description: Product Description: The House of Mirth (1905), a novel by Edith Wharton (1862–1937), tells the story of Lily Bart, a well-born but impoverished woman belonging to New York City’s high society around the turn of the last century. Wharton creates a portrait of a ravishing beauty who, though raised and educated to marry well both socially and economically, is reaching her 29th year, an age when her marital prospects are becoming ever more limited. The House of Mirth traces Lily’s slow two-year social descent from privilege to a tragically lonely existence on the margins of society.