Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.
The House of Mirth: Introduction
The House of Mirth: Plot Summary
The House of Mirth: Detailed Summary & Analysis
The House of Mirth: Themes
The House of Mirth: Quotes
The House of Mirth: Characters
The House of Mirth: Symbols
The House of Mirth: Literary Devices
The House of Mirth: Theme Wheel
Brief Biography of Edith Wharton
Historical Context of The House of Mirth
Other Books Related to The House of Mirth
- Full Title: The House of Mirth
- When Written: 1905
- Where Written: Lenox, Massachusetts
- When Published: October 14, 1905 (after serialized publication starting in October 1905)
- Literary Period: Naturalism
- Genre: Novel
- Setting: The high society in twentieth-century New York City
- Climax: Lily burns Bertha Dorset’s love letters to Selden
- Antagonist: Bertha Dorset
- Point of View: Third-person omniscient
Extra Credit for The House of Mirth
Designer and Architect. Despite her success as a writer, Edith Wharton considered her skills in design and architecture to be one of her most important gifts. At the age of twenty-five, she co-authored the non-fiction book The Decoration of Houses (1897), which became surprisingly successful. She later designed her own estate, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts, and, impressed by the result, concluded that she was “a better landscape gardener than novelist.”
Tidy Drawing Rooms. Edith Wharton had a strained relationship with her mother, who tried to stifle the young girl’s early efforts at literary composition, even prohibiting her from reading novels before marriage. At the age of eleven, Edith showed her mother a short story she had written, which began with a woman complaining about having to tidy the drawing-room for a guest. She later described her mother’s reaction: “Never shall I forget the sudden drop of my creative frenzy when [my mother] returned it with the icy comment: ‘Drawing rooms are always tidy.’”