House of Mirth was one of those books I’d always heard of without ever really knowing what it was about. I knew vaguely that it was a “classic”, and that it was set around the turn of the 20th century. I probably saw stills from a movie of it at some point, and it lived in my head in a sort of ominous period corner, with lots of starched lace and censorious looks.

As it turns out, I wasn’t wrong about any of that, but there’s a lot more going on than I had expected, and I enjoyed it quite a lot! Spoilers (if such a thing can be said to apply to a book more than a century old) below.

Our protagonist is a beautiful but somewhat impoverished young woman, Lily Bart, who is struggling through dint of her own charm to marry well and live in security. Her mother was a beautiful flibbertigibbet and her father a ne’er do well, and now she lives on the begrudging charity of an aunt who she likes not at all, and her only escape is to parlay her looks and charm into catching a wealthy husband, the sooner the better. There are three main problems with this – first, she really doesn’t like most of the men in her set and thus is appalled at the idea of marrying them; second (and possibly relatedly), she is unwilling to commit to one option because she, with a gambler’s taste, worries that if she does, she’s cutting herself off from a potential better option; and finally, staying in the set of people she moves in requires money, more and more of it, and she is running out of it.

It was pretty clear early on that this was another “moral” tale in the line of many, if not most, novels of this period, but interestingly I really wasn’t sure which way it was going to play out — it seemed like there were a couple of possibilities, and until we got right to the end, I wasn’t sure which way the author was going to play it.

On the one hand, we have an extremely wealthy suitor who is very interested in her, but he is New Money and Also Jewish (cue pearl clutching here; the text wasn’t clear which of these was worse), and so there was the possibility of the story ending by her marrying him either to get her revenge on everyone who penny pinched her, or possibly because she had exhausted all other options. This could have been a “greed and desperation triumphs over good judgment if you are not Sensible” moral, or possibly a “sometimes the least desirable choice works out for the best if you aren’t too shallow to spurn it” moral. On the other hand, we have our other protagonist of sorts, Lawrence Selden — Lawrence and Lily spend the entirety of the book dancing around each other in a ‘will-they-won’t-they’ sort of romance of last resort for both of them. Lawrence doesn’t really respect Lily, or maybe even really like her; Lily doesn’t trust Lawrence, and also he’s too poor. Nevertheless, they’re drawn to each other, and I really did rather think it was going to end with them realizing that they’ve both been too superficial and they could be happy together if they learn to ignore the rest of society, leading to a sort of “you didn’t see the happiness right in front of you” moral.

Alas, in the end Lawrence comes to his senses too late, and we end up with a classic “Poor Girl Ruined By Society And Also Her Own Weak Character” story of warning and tragedy. Lily dies alone and destitute, addicted to sleeping tonics on which she overdoses in what’s ambiguously an accident or a suicide.

It was a really nice read, for the most part — it’s lovely prose, and there’s a sense of inevitability to the whole thing which really pulls at the heartstrings. As they say about tragedies, it all could have been fine if the characters had made any other choices, but through the vagaries of fate and their own personalities, it was impossible that they would ever choose differently than they did, and thus they are doomed. Society and social pressure play a huge role in this story, both in forcing Lily to make certain choices as she tries to market her only useful asset (herself) and in how those around her are forced to ultimately fail her across the board. We live in an ostensibly less rigidly classist society these days, but I think a lot of these pressures still play out in similar ways, but now we just lack the clarity of seeing them and calling them out, which is honestly probably to our detriment.

There’re no heroes and no happy ending to this one, but it’s worth a read anyway. Alternatively, watch the movie from 2000, because Gillian Anderson in period costume is not to be missed.