The House of Mirth | Critical Overview
The House of Mirth, Wharton’s second novel, was published in 1905 to immediate critical and popular acclaim. Her editor at Scribners noted that it enjoyed the publishing house’s quickest sales of the time. In comparing the novel to Wharton’s earlier works, many critics found its complexity, characterization, and emotional resonance to show her important advances as a writer. The New York Times Book Review praises Wharton as the “most scholarly and distinctive writer of fiction of the day,” while the Saturday Review notes that it is “one of the few novels...
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