SOURCE: Waid, Candace. “Building The House of Mirth.” In Biographies of Books: The Compositional Histories of Notable American Writings, edited by James Barbour and Tom Quirk, pp. 160-86. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Waid traces the publication history of The House of Mirth from its origin as a serial in Scribner's magazine.]

In 1902, after reading The Valley of Decision, Edith Wharton's two-volume novel set in eighteenth-century Italy, Henry James advised the beginning novelist to devote herself to “the American subject.” He insisted: “Don't pass it by—the immediate, the real, the only, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for. Do New York!” In his letter to her sister-in-law, Mary Cadwalader Jones, James warned, “she must be tethered in native pastures even if it means confining her to a backyard in New York.” As James confessed his desire “to get hold of the little lady and pump the pure essence of my wisdom and experience into her,”¹ Wharton already was at work on a novel set in New York City and the rural estates of Long Island, but this early work, entitled “Disintegration,” would remain unfinished. Like her unpublished autobiography, “Life and I,” and in some ways like her highly autobiographical unfinished novel, Literature, “Disintegration” depicts a lonely child who finds solace in the world of books and the lyrical comforts of language. Although not specifically autobiographical, “Disintegration” may have been left unfinished because it offered too painful a portrait of Wharton's own childhood. In 1925, Wharton would recast the story in The Mother's Recompense (1925), presenting it from the perspective of the mother rather than the isolated child. In addition, there are strong presentiments in “Disintegration” of The Custom of the Country (1913), Wharton's second major novel about New York society. This early fragment also contains a striking image that would find its way into The House of Mirth, the breakthrough novel about New York society that Wharton would publish in 1905. Mr. Clephane of “Disintegration” tells a sympathetic male friend: “I tell you what it is, if a woman throws you over for a man, you're a man yourself and can face it; but if she throws you over for an income you're no more than an empty purse in the gutter.” Like the discarded husband in “Disintegration,” Gus Trenor, the sexual predator who tries to entrap the naive heroine of The House of Mirth, links female sexual interests to money as he complains that he has been “chuck[ed] in the gutter like an empty purse.”² This detail is the only trace of “Disintegration” that survives in The House of Mirth.

Although some of the names of the characters in the novel began to appear in her notebooks as early as the turn of the century, Wharton actually began to write The House of Mirth in 1904. This novel would not only be set in New York; it would, in James's phrase, “do New York.” Wharton described her subject, “the immediate, the real,” as “fashionable New York”³ and the novel would be marketed as an insider's critique of New York society. Wharton promised The House of Mirth to Scribner's before it was completed. With no date set for its publication in either serial or book form, Wharton found herself drifting “between [her] critical dissatisfaction with the work, and the distractions of a busy and hospitable life, full of friends and travel, reading and gardening” (BG [A Backward Glance], 207). Late in 1904, however, Wharton's publisher asked her if her new novel could replace another work which was not yet ready; and overcoming her initial hesitation, she agreed to begin its publication in monthly installments. When The House of Mirth began appearing in Scribner's magazine in January of 1905, Wharton had completed fewer than 50,000 words of the novel. With her first chapter appearing as she continued to write the novel, Wharton was encouraged by the response of an eager reading public and she had what was for her the unusual experience of having readers respond to a work which was still in her hands. Wharton also discovered that in writing for an immutable deadline, a schedule which had been set with the appearance of the first chapters, she gained “what I most lacked—self-confidence.” “[B]ent … to the discipline of the daily task,” Wharton discovered “that inscrutable ‘inspiration of the writing table’ which Baudelaire, most untrammeled and nerve-racked of geniuses, proclaimed as insistently as Trollope.” “It was good,” she would write in A Backward Glance, “to be turned from a drifting amateur into a professional; but that was nothing compared to the effect on my imagination of systematic daily effort. I was like Saul the son of Kish, who went out to find an ass, and came back with a kingdom: the kingdom of mastery over my tools” (BG, 208-9).

By the time The House of Mirth reached bookstores in October 1905, it was already a cultural and, in many ways, a social event. Wharton's New York, “real” and “immediate,” was for most readers a distant phenomenon; and part of its attraction was the promise proclaimed on the dust jacket (in what Wharton considered to be lurid prose) that “for the first time the veil has been lifted from New York society.” Writing to the publisher, Wharton protested forcefully: “I thought that, in the House of Scribner, The House of Mirth was safe from all such Harperesque methods of réclame.” In response to her plea to them to “do all you can to stop the spread of that pestilent paragraph, and to efface it from the paper cover of future printings,” Scribner's oversaw the immediate removal of the paragraph which made the novel's author “sick at the recollection of it!”⁴ Although Wharton disapproved of the selling of her book as an exposé, a marketing strategy which seemed to place her in the popular province of muckrakers and other writers of sensational fiction, in at least one letter responding to comments from an admiring reader she acknowledged that in writing the novel she had indeed lifted a concealing “garment” to expose a formerly hidden aspect of New York life. After thanking her reader for his kind words about the novel, Wharton insisted, “I must protest, & emphatically, against the suggestion that I have ‘stripped’ New York society. New York society is still amply clad, & the little corner of its garment that I lifted was meant to show only that little atrophied organ—the group of idle and dull people—that exists in any big & wealthy social body.”⁵

A best-seller, the first printing was sold out immediately and subsequent printings had difficulty keeping up with the orders. One advertising circular, underlined and saved by Wharton herself, claimed that printers were working day and night to satisfy the demand. The House of Mirth sold thirty thousand copies in the first six weeks. In a small pocket diary begun in 1905 and continued through 1906, amidst occasional notations about the weather, Wharton often recorded her sales, apparently pleased by the continued and surprising success of her novel. Writing to Charles Scribner less than a month after the novel's publication in book form, Wharton expressed her delight: “It is a very beautiful thought to me that 80,000 people should want to read The House of Mirth, & if the number should ascend to 100,000 I fear my pleasure would exceed the bounds of decency.” Commenting on a publicity photograph, Wharton seems conscious of her new notoriety as she describes her calculated pose, “with my eyes looking down, trying to look modest?!” The popular success of Wharton's novel (which was not expected to sell a great deal because it was not a love story) put at least one skeptical editor in the position of re-evaluating his view of the tastes of the American reading public. Less than two months after the novel's appearance in book form, she wrote to Edward Burlingame of Scribner's, using the same biblical allusion she would use nearly thirty years later to describe her experience of learning to be a writer, “I am especially glad to find that you think [The House of Mirth's] large circulation a sign of awakening taste in our fellowcountrymen—at least in 100,000 of them. I was afraid that, reversing the experience of Saul and the son of Kish, I had gone out to seek a kingdom and found all the asses!”⁶

Wharton's novel remained at the top of the best-seller list for four months in a year which saw the publication of such works as Upton Sinclair's masterpiece of muckraking, The Jungle, and Thomas Dixon's popular, race-baiting novel, The Clansman.⁷ As Millicent Bell has shown, even before The House of Mirth had become the best and most rapidly selling book in the history of what Wharton herself had begun calling the “House of Scribner,” the ambitious author had begun to negotiate new terms, probably based on her hopes that the strong initial response to the serial would be translated into sales of the book. After only three installments had appeared, she confidently wrote her publishers that after “the Enormous Sales of The House of Mirth which I predict for next November you will see my prices leap up!”⁸ Later, after her optimistic predictions had been realized, Wharton demonstrated that she was conscious of the market value of a sought-after professional writer. Negotiating the contract for another novel in May of 1905, four months before The House of Mirth would appear in book form, she asked for an ＄8,000 advance and proposed an increase in royalties from 15 percent to 20 percent “if the sale of the [proposed] volume exceeded 10,000.” In a humorous swipe at those who were disappointed by the weakness of Lawrence Selden, Wharton promised a hero with new muscle in her next novel, The Fruit of the Tree. She warned that her new character would be a manly figure who would insist on higher royalties: “he is going to be a very strong man; so strong that I believe he will break all records. Perhaps in consideration of his strength you will think it not unreasonable to start with a 20٪ royalty? If you were to refuse, he is so violent that I don't know whether I can answer for the consequences!”⁹

Wharton's first story had appeared in Scribner's in 1891 and her first volume of fiction, The Greater Inclination, appeared eight years later, in 1899. She would later claim that the appearance of this first volume of fiction “broke the chains which had held me so long in a kind of torpor” (BG, 122). This work, which includes a series of stories written after her nervous breakdown, marks the point at which she came to acknowledge her life as a writer as the greater inclination, an inclination which took precedence over her exhausting and enervating duties as a young society matron. From the outset, Wharton had received a number of positive notices about her fiction, but none had equaled the moment when she went into a British bookstore and was offered The Greater Inclination, what she described as her “own firstborn,” as “the book of the day!” (BG, 124). Viewed for the most part as a writer of stories, Wharton brought out two other collections, Crucial Instances (1901) and The Descent of Man (1904). Whereas her stories were often ironic and revealed an effort to expose sentimental constructions, her early novellas—The Touchstone (1900) and Sanctuary (1903)—were carried by elaborate emotional plotting which depended heavily on the traditions of melodrama. In contrast, Wharton's two-volume novel, The Valley of Decision (1902), seemed more coldly intellectual, its characters almost overwhelmed by the novel's attention to background and setting. The Valley of Decision displayed its author's meticulous research into the history of the cultural life and the powerful intellectual, social, and religious forces shaping eighteenth-century Italy (including such details as the proper dress for nuns going to illicit assignations).¹⁰ In addition to suggesting her deep interest in Italian culture, an interest which continued in such works of nonfiction as Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904) and her less technical and more impressionistic Italian Backgrounds (1905), The Valley of Decision recalls Wharton's first foray into book writing, her 1897 coauthored treatise on interior decoration entitled The Decoration of Houses.

As she looked back on the process of writing The House of Mirth in A Backward Glance, Wharton would recall that despite the critical and popular success of the novel, she felt that she still did not “yet know how to write a novel; but I know how to find out how to.” Continuing her efforts to teach herself how to write a novel, Wharton felt that she wrote the next novels “without the feeling that I had made much progress” and that it was only in the composition of Ethan Frome (1911) that she “suddenly felt the artisan's full control of his implements” (BG, 209). In a letter to the novelist Robert Grant written in 1907, responding to his comments on The Fruit of the Tree (the flawed novel which immediately followed her triumph in The House of Mirth), Wharton offered a gendered explanation of what she saw as her problems as a writer:

I am very much pleased that you like the construction of the book, & more than agree with you that I haven't been able to keep the characters from being, so to speak, mere building-material. The fact is that I am beginning to see exactly where my weakest point is.—I conceive my subjects like a man—that is, rather more architectonically & dramatically than most women—& then execute them like a woman; or rather, I sacrifice, to my desire for construction & breadth, the small incidental effects that women have always excelled in, the episodical characterization, I mean. The worst of it is that the fault is congenital & not from the ambition to do big things.

Wharton goes on to ascribe gender to the practice of genres:

As soon as I look at a subject from the novel-angle I see it in its relation to a larger whole, in all its remotest connections; & I can't help trying to take them all in, at the cost of the smaller realism that I arrive at, I think, better in my short stories. This is the reason why I have always obscurely felt that I didn't know how to write a novel. I feel it more clearly after each attempt, because it is in such contrast to the sense of authority with which I take hold of a short story.¹¹

Henry James criticized The House of Mirth by calling it “two books and too confused”¹² and he was particularly troubled by what Wharton might have called the “episodical” structure of the second book of the novel. However, this half of the novel (which follows the erratic course of Lily Bart's descent through the layers of society in the final year of her life) in many ways accomplishes the marriage of the short story and the novel as Wharton describes them in her letter to Grant. As Wharton plotted The House of Mirth, Lily Bart's story unfolds through “episodical characterization[s].” Indeed, although The House of Mirth was planned as a novel, its appearance in monthly installments in Scribner's magazine underlined its affinity with short fiction and may have led Wharton to think of the individual chapters if not as self-contained entities at least as related episodes of a novel which were destined to appear in segments. While there are only a few of the cliffhangers that are characteristic of serially published gothic thrillers, such as James's own Turn of the Screw, the anticipation of breaks in the narrative no doubt forced her as she was completing the novel to think about the cohesion within the monthly segments, and this, in turn, may have influenced her in the pacing of the book. The plotting of The House of Mirth is in many ways dramatic; Wharton, who was translating a play by Suderman at around the same time, was no doubt influenced by the theatrical productions she was attending as she staged the scenes of her novel.¹³

As she prepared the manuscript of The House of Mirth for publication, Wharton reread the installments of her novel. With her passion for order, her near worship of classical symmetry, and her admittedly “exorbitant” “theory of what the novel ought to be,” she worried about the vagaries of her plot. Beset by great doubts and even greater insecurity about the merit of the work, she rejoiced in a letter from one of her editors at Scribner's, William Crary Brownell, complimenting her on the architecture of the work. “[S]urprised & pleased, & altogether taken aback,” Wharton describes herself as unable “decently [to] compose my countenance. … I was pleased with bits, myself; but as I go over the proofs the whole thing strikes me as so loosely built, with so many dangling threads, & cul-de-sacs, & long dusty stretches, that I had reached the point of wondering how I had ever tried my hand at a long thing—So your seeing a certain amount of architecture in it rejoices me above everything.”¹⁴

If James and others were disappointed by Wharton's plotting of the second half of the novel, they recognized the central and unifying appeal of Lily Bart. James announced with admiration that Lily Bart was “big and true—and very difficult to have kept big and true.”¹⁵ Part of the balance which Wharton achieves in The House of Mirth comes from her powerful sense of her subject. Recalling her fears that New York society and the rich and thoughtless figures who occupy its “house[s] of mirth” might offer too shallow a ground for her novel, she found herself turning her attention to the potential devastation which was part of the legacy of these “irresponsible pleasure-seekers.” Answering her own question about whether a topic might be too trivial to merit the detailed scrutiny of a novel, Wharton concluded that “a frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implication lies in its power of debasing of people and ideals. The answer, in short, was my heroine, Lily Bart” (BG, 207). Writing the year before The House of Mirth appeared, W. L. Courtney in The Feminine Note in Fiction praised Wharton's work as an interesting example of the psychological novels associated with Henry James but noted that “no one could describe her as a great novelist.”¹⁶ This view changed with the appearance of The House of Mirth. In her new novel, Wharton seemed freed from the wooden characters and the morass of detail and furniture of the past which had taken over her earlier novel, The Valley of Decision. She achieved an aesthetic breakthrough and even the few critics who persisted in minimizing her talent as a novelist acknowledged that she had become a major figure on the American literary scene. The House of Mirth was in many ways the book in which Edith Wharton began to write like Edith Wharton. Aspects of her capacity for sharp wit and social satire had been glimpsed in her short stories, but the incisive prose and sustained analysis in this work established her place not only as one of the best writers in America but also as an important cultural critic.

Whatever Wharton's doubts about her abilities as a writer of fiction, her preservation of the manuscript versions of her novels, stories, and other works through her several changes of permanent residence, including her move from the United States to France, suggests that she valued the documents which tell the story of her development as a writer. It is impossible to say at which point she began to understand that the pages of her manuscripts and other caches of less classifiable yet intriguing scraps and shards would be of interest to posterity—at which point she came to the realization that she would be recognized and remembered for her literary work. As one looks at the care with which she prepared her manuscripts, one can only begin to appreciate the private value they must have held for her. Among these fastidiously kept records of her life as a writer, she preserved her first effort at writing a longer work of fiction, the novella Fast and Loose, which was begun when she was fourteen and completed early in her fifteenth year. The preservation of this manuscript through the years suggests the importance of writing in Wharton's conception of her life, as well as her lifelong investment in the process and materials of writing.

The manuscripts of The House of Mirth, the handwritten original and two typewritten versions, are housed in the Wharton Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. R. W. B. Lewis has given the most concise description of the manuscript of The House of Mirth, which he describes as having “passed through at least seven stages before it appeared in print”:

There was (1) the original handwritten version, which was itself (2) revised by hand, so extensively that the new handwritten version had to be pasted over the original. There followed (3) a typescript, and this in turn was emended by hand (4), again sometimes so thoroughly that a paste-over was required. … Next there was a second typescript (5), this also corrected with obvious care by hand (6). But since the published text varies on page after page from the second typescript (though in most cases only slightly), we can posit (7) a certain re-working in the galley proofs.¹⁷

Although some sections are missing, most of the manuscript has been carefully preserved.

The manuscript itself seems to reveal aspects of the story of the writing of The House of Mirth which Wharton tells in her autobiography. The early chapters of The House of Mirth, written in her small, careful hand with many words packed onto the page, seem in their very density to bear the legible trace of her anxiety. This part of the manuscript has spidery markings and carefully inscribed revisions; here, instead of two typescripts of each page, there are occasionally three versions. According to Wharton's later account, the initial anxiety she felt in composing The House of Mirth was allayed by the demands of the writing itself, which brought with it increasing confidence and a new awareness of the daily work of her chosen profession. As Wharton began to respond to the pressures of her publisher's schedule, she developed a more efficient method of writing, anticipating and facilitating her practice of extensive revision. Writing in a large hand, Wharton began to compose her prose with only a few words to the line, giving herself space for revision on each page. This method also allowed her to cut out and replace lines in the form of strips with selvage; these strips (with revisions and/or additions) were then pasted in with their edges secured under the severed manuscript. (Part of her method is revealed on the back of a page of the manuscript which shows a single line written over three times in an unsuccessful effort to prepare one of these strips.) The neatly mended manuscript is heavy with the paste and extra paper from this form of rewriting; sometimes a page comprises as many as eight strips and often pages that are too long to conform to the size of the original paper are folded inward.

Although even the uncut pages tend to have some words or phrases marked, the manuscript as a whole appears as a carefully constructed and reconstructed object. The amount of cutting makes it impossible to know the extent and character of all of Wharton's revisions, many of which, as the carefully spliced manuscript suggests, ended up on the cutting room floor: most of the rejected writing does not even appear in the manuscript, even in its deleted form. Looking on the backs of pieces of pasted-in manuscript, one can see evidence of an unimaginative Lily who, without her characteristic, ladylike indirection, tells Trenor what she thinks: “‘Ah,’ she burst out, ‘You're ignoble!’” Such a line does not appear in chapter 13, where Wharton creates an ominous tone by constructing a complex tissue of allusions which join the threat of sexuality to the scene's ruling specters, poverty and death. The prosaic Lily Bart who would utter such a statement has been consigned (in a fate Lily fears for herself at the end of the novel) to the “refuse-heap” (HM [The House of Mirth], 307).

It is obvious that Wharton reviewed each word of the text several times and that while her revisions become less extensive as the process of publication becomes more fixed and formal, words change between the final typed manuscript and the serial publication in Scribner's, just as a few words change and errors are corrected between these installments and the novel's appearance in book form. These changes are consistent with the attention to detail which, as her letters to her publishers suggest, she brought to every phase of the production and marketing of her books, from typesetting to advertising copy. For instance, from time to time, she reminded her publishers that she felt that printer's ornaments were needed in her novels to mark important headings. As she approached books, Wharton was aware of their physical presence, in particular the effects of the typeface and the spacing of margins. Wharton had a strong sense of the visual aesthetic of books, an awareness that apparently antedated her ability to read. As a child she held books in her hands as she declaimed stories of her own invention in the narrative ritual she called “making up”; and, even in this early period, she demonstrated a powerful preference for certain kinds of books. According to A Backward Glance, her favorite inspirational work to be used in this childhood ritual was Washington Irving's Alhambra: “shaggy volumes, printed in close black characters on rough-edged yellowish pages. … There was richness and mystery in the thick black type, a hint of bursting overflowing material in the serried lines and scant margin. To this day I am bored by the sight of widely spaced type, and a little islet of text in a sailless sea of white paper” (BG, 34).

Wharton's strong sense of the visual, tactile, and material aspects of her texts, evidenced in the care with which she constructed her manuscripts as well as in her interest in the design of the final published product, may have itself influenced the composition of the novel's plot. Viewed in the context of Wharton's method of composition, one of the most fascinating parts of the novel is the account of the charwoman, Mrs. Haffen, who pieces together the parts of Bertha Dorset's letters after they have been torn into pieces and discarded by Lawrence Selden. In the first version, Wharton continues to paste strips into the manuscript, using the edges of the strips as selvage, but in the typed revision of this passage, she seems to have tried Mrs. Haffen's method of mending letters in The House of Mirth, where “the letters had been pieced together with strips of thin paper. Some were in small fragments, the others merely torn in half” (HM, 103). Like Mrs. Haffen, who has pasted together the rended letters by placing the parts on thin white strips, Wharton here uses extra blank strips which function like tape to hold together the parts of the typescript from the back.

This method, joining typed lines where there is little selvage, may document Wharton's devotion to the realism of her fiction as well as providing yet another clue that she associated these illicit letters, written by a woman, with her own enterprise as a writer.¹⁸ As she wrote about a character employing a method so similar to the one that she was using in constructing her own severed manuscript, it seems as if she could not resist trying out the technique for mending letters which she has Mrs. Haffen practice in her fiction—as if character and author are influencing each other in their textual reconstruction. It is hardly a coincidence that Wharton appears to have used this particular method for what may have been the first time as she revised the section of typescript which describes this very process. However, this practice of using extra strips for backing was also quite practical for accomplishing the task at hand—the seaming together of typescripts which lacked the selvage she purposefully included between the lines of the handwritten manuscript. The joining of typescript to typescript is relatively rare in this manuscript where extensive revisions to the typed texts continue to take the form of handwritten additions, strips or paragraphs pasted into the clean copy by Wharton herself.

Wharton first called the manuscript that would become The House of Mirth “A Moment's Ornament,” taking her title from Wordsworth's poem “She Was a Phantom of Delight.” The phantom of Wordsworth's lyric offered a compelling version of the ideal of womanhood which nineteenth-century girls and women aspired to, and, as such, it was frequently copied by young women into the moral scrapbooks of religious and social advice which they called commonplace books. Indeed, it is possible and even likely that Wharton would have first read “She Was a Phantom of Delight” in her mother's youthful hand; Wordsworth's poem held a prominent place among the quotations in Lucretia Jones's own commonplace book.¹⁹ This emphasis on the collection of prescriptive quotations is a familiar practice in the world of Lily Bart, who, early in the novel, appeals to Lawrence Selden for moral guidance after disparaging her aunt's faith in “copy-book axioms” (HM, 7). Wordsworth's poem, which concludes by describing “A perfect Woman, nobly planned, / To warn, to comfort, and command; / And yet a Spirit still, and bright / With something of angelic light,” begins by introducing the temporal fate of female beauty: “She was a Phantom of delight / When first she gleamed upon my sight; / A lovely Apparition, sent / To be a moment's ornament.”

Wharton's investment in alluding to Wordsworth's poem provides a useful example of her aesthetic of revision. Her dedication to clean and precise modern prose is perhaps expressed best near the conclusion of her first book, the nonfiction work The Decoration of Houses: “Tout ce qui n'est pas necessaire est nuisible. There is a sense in which works of art may be said to endure by virtue of that which is left out of them, and it is this ‘tact of omission’ which characterizes the master hand.”²⁰ Writing in her autobiography about her acts of revision, Wharton recalled that she and her friend Walter Berry would go on “adjective hunts” across her manuscripts, coming back with “such heavy bags” (BG, 116). The opening paragraph of the first version of The House of Mirth offers a case in point. In its original form it reads: “Hensley stood still, surprised. In the afternoon rush of Grand Central his eyes had been refreshed by the apparition of a tall & truly tailored figure, with bright hair under a feathered hat.” Of course, the name “Hensley” is marked out and replaced by the more allusive Selden, but the most characteristic and sweeping change takes place as adjectives and adverbs are cleaned away and the detailed description of how this striking woman appears to the eye is replaced by a simple phrase that announces “the apparition of Miss Lily Hurst.” Wharton's first draft often seems to be spun out with strands of alliteration encumbered by adjectives and adverbs, as in the phrase “tall & truly tailored.” These felicitous phrases which appear to come to Wharton as she is composing her first draft are scrutinized and kept only if they meet Wharton's standards for clarity and precision.

The phantom of Wordsworth's poem, what he calls “the lovely apparition,” remains in the revised opening of the first typescript, which is still called “A Moment's Ornament”: “Selden stood still surprised. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the apparition of Miss Lily Bart.” Obviously we can see here an important change from “Hurst” to “Bart,” a more resonant name for the heroine who will be haunted by the temptation both to be art and to have her beauty bartered in the marriage market. (Wharton's original name for Lily was Juliet, which may have been inspired by Shakespeare's heroine, who takes a sleeping potion and kills herself after a late letter causes her lover to arrive too late.)²¹ The second typescript (originally entitled “The Year of the Rose” with the final title The House of Mirth added in ink) includes two other significant changes. The opening sentence is streamlined and made more direct, and in the following sentence the word apparition is crossed out and replaced by the word sight. Identical with the passage in the final typescript, the opening of The House of Mirth reads “Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart.” The allusion to Wordsworth's poem is visible only if one knows the prehistory of the passage; like the idealized woman of Wordsworth's poem, Lily might be said to “gleam[…] upon [her admirer's] sight.” By replacing apparition with sight, Wharton emphasizes the fact that a striking woman is being beheld by a man from a particular point of view. From the outset, Miss Lily Bart is a figure who is seen by Selden; and indeed, part of her downfall in the novel results from her status as a figure who attracts attention and who seems destined both to be seen and to inspire speculation (in the various senses of the word).²² The opening sentences in both the manuscript and the typescript of the novel bear the traces of Wharton's early interest in the language and ideas of Wordsworth's poem, but at the same time the clean lines of the altered opening reveal the aesthetic criteria of Wharton's extensive revisions.

Although Wharton changed the title “A Moment's Ornament,” which appears as the heading of the first typescript, its motif still can be detected throughout the manuscript; the word moment is important throughout the book, and Wharton pays special attention to it, sometimes writing it in and sometimes crossing it out. For a brief period, in the heading of the second typescript, “A Moment's Ornament” became “The Year of the Rose,” before it in turn was replaced by Wharton's inscription of the words The House of Mirth. In the initial title change, the “moment” has become a “year,” and the “ornament,” with its intimation of objectification, has become a flower, an emblem of the natural as well as the beautiful. Both titles convey important aspects of the novel's concern with the association between female beauty and the temporal. Yet, like the first title, the second title still encompasses only one aspect of the story of Lily Bart as she makes her social descent into death during the final year and a half of her life. Unlike Undine of The Custom of the Country, whose allegiance seems clear as she converts the natural into the artificial, Lily Bart is caught between the desire for an art based on artifice and a calling, echoed in her name, to be part of the natural world: to be, in biblical terms, a lily of the field. Although the floral allusion proved inadequate as a description of the work as a whole, the idea behind it is crucial to the unfolding of the novel. The House of Mirth tells the story of the efflorescence of a beautiful woman of twenty-nine as she begins to glimpse her own fading, and it concludes with her being cut off just past her moment of full bloom, preserved through what Cynthia Griffin Wolff has characterized as “the beautiful death.”²³

Under the title “The Year of the Rose,” characterized further as “A Novel,” Wharton included an epigraph from Richard II: “A brittle glory shineth in this face—/ As brittle as the glory is the face.” She deleted this passage when she replaced the title alluding to the physical qualities of Lily Bart with a title referring to the society which would destroy her fragile heroine. When writing under the title “The Year of the Rose,” Wharton also experimented with naming the books which in the final version are designated with roman numerals simply as I and II. Book I was promisingly called “The Flower,” but she never entered a name for the plucked or perhaps the unplucked and fading rose or Lily of Book II. As Lewis and others have pointed out, both of these titles are inadequate because Wharton's novel was really about the tension between the ornament and the rose. In The House of Mirth, the living beauty of nature is transformed into the dead and objectified beauty of an ornament. This tension between the natural and the ornamental is a crucial force in the structuring of the novel. While both elements are evident near the end of Book I, as Lily performs in a tableau vivant, by the close of Book II Lily no longer performs as a painting. When she is still what might be called “a phantom of delight,” Lily stands in the place of a painted figure “banishing the phantom of [its] dead beauty by the beams of her living grace” (HM, 131). In the scene which parallels her previous role as Sir Joshua Reynolds's “Mrs. Lloyd,” Lily has become an emblem of stilled life, the central figure in a scene of nature morte; laid out on the sheets of her deathbed, she has gone beyond nature to become an object, but even this ornamental status is by definition temporal and temporary.²⁴

The title The House of Mirth is taken from Ecclesiastes 7:4: “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” Although the novel tells the story of the fools, the destructive denizens of New York society, it concludes with a focus on the sacrifice and death of Lily Bart, which leaves the reader (along with Selden and his cousin, Gerty Farish) in “the house of mourning.” Wharton claimed that she was always aware of her endings when she first began to write. This was not true for The Age of Innocence,²⁵ but it seems to be at least partially accurate for The House of Mirth. At the moment that she affixed this final title to the text and perhaps even earlier in the titles that evoke the temporal and temporary qualities of female beauty, Wharton was aware that her heroine was progressing toward death at the end of the novel. As the book manuscript went to press, Wharton was horrified to discover that without consulting her the publisher had decided to use the passage from Ecclesiastes as an epigraph. She wrote to William Crary Brownell at Scribner's: “Even when I sank to the depth of letting the illustrations be put in the book—&, oh, I wish I hadn't now!—I never contemplated a text on the title-page. It was all very well for The Valley, where the verse simply ‘constated’ a fact, but in this case, where it inculcates a moral, I might be suspected of plagiarizing from Mrs. Margaret Sangster's beautiful volume, ‘Five Days With God.’”²⁶ In addition to emphasizing her distance from a popular female poet who was concerned with religious themes, Wharton concluded, “I think the title explains itself amply as the tale progresses, & I have taken the liberty of drawing an inexorable blue line through the text.”²⁷

Unwilling to label her story with a moral, Wharton may also have been opposed to including any epigraph which would limit the resonance of her title. Certainly Wharton's title The House of Mirth underlines other important aspects of the text besides those evoked by the religious allusion. Characteristically, in both Wharton's work and her worldview, the description of houses, often the interiors as well as the exteriors of houses, conveys the personalities of her characters. From the publication of her first book, The Decoration of Houses, a work coauthored with the architect Ogden Codman in which she intended to rescue interior design from the province of dressmakers and restore it to the realm of architectural forms, Wharton presented houses not only as extensions of the people who lived in them but also as edifices which display the values of the societies which produced them. Even those unaware of the title's biblical source, then, would still understand that Lily Bart passes through a series of houses of mirth, inhabited by fools, on her way to the lower-class boardinghouse that smells of fried food and shows a blistered and dilapidated front to those who pass by on the street. This is the house where Lily dies and Selden gains some measure of final, if still deeply flawed, wisdom. The wisdom which comes from Selden's altering confrontation with Lily's death suggests the terms of the biblical “house of mourning.”

Although Wharton chose to excise the epigraph rather than to have it shouted from the title page, the biblical allusion to the wise who dwell in “the house of mourning” is among the unspoken words which shape the language of the ending of the novel. As Selden approaches the bleak boardinghouse, he associates Lily with the single sign of beauty, the window with a flowerpot, rather than the window with a closed shade. Selden comes bearing a “word” for Lily, the mysterious word, never audibly spoken, which in the final line of the novel is described as “the word” that “passed between them … which made all clear” (HM, 323). In the manuscript version, as he thinks about his reason for not having come the evening before, Selden looks at the outside of Lily's building and full of promise reminds himself, “It was a word for sunrise, not for twilight.” The revision of this sentence makes it one of the most powerful lines in the novel as Wharton finds poetry in a shifting of terms. By crossing out and replacing three words and casting the first phrase as a negative statement, Wharton infuses her sentence with profound resonance and narrative power: “It was not a word for twilight, but for the morning.” The mention of twilight recalls and turns away from Wordsworth's “phantom of delight,” who is said to have the hair and eyes of twilight, yet the most important change alludes to the novel's final title. Instead of saying that Selden's word is “for the sunrise,” Wharton reminds her wise readers, the ones who do not have to be reminded by an epigraph, that this word is both “for the morning” and “for the mourning.”²⁸ Aside from its prominent place in the title, “the house of mirth” is never actually mentioned in Wharton's novel. While some readers would be aware of the specific terms of the allusion, others would benefit from the fruitful tension between title and text—a type of narrative provocation employed later by both Joyce and Faulkner.

Wharton's allusion to Ecclesiastes in her title might also signal another part of the foundation of The House of Mirth, a link between Wharton's representation of Lily's death and the famous death of one of the most resolutely virtuous heroines in the history of the novel, Richardson's Clarissa. In a lengthy postscript to Clarissa, Richardson quotes extensively from one of Addison's essays in the Spectator on the relative merits of happy and unhappy endings in tragedy. Defending works with unhappy endings, Richardson recalls that historically “those which ended unhappily had always pleased the people, and carried away the prize, in the public disputes of the Stage, from those that ended happily,” and he adds: “It can not be supposed, that the Athenians, in this their highest age of taste and politeness, were less humane, less tender-hearted, than we of the present. But they were not afraid of being moved, nor ashamed of shewing themselves to be so, at the distress they saw well painted and represented. In short, they were of the opinion, with the wisest of men, That it was better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of mirth; and had fortitude enough to trust themselves with their own generous grief, because they found their hearts mended by it.”²⁹

When The House of Mirth was dramatized by Clyde Fitch, Wharton attended the New York opening with William Dean Howells, who explained the audience's unfavorable response to the play by remarking, “[W]hat the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending” (BG, 147). Just as readers pleaded with Richardson to save his heroine and give his novel a happy ending, Wharton's first readers held out hopes for Lily. (Her fate was anxiously anticipated; one distraught reader sent a telegram to a friend announcing: “Lily Bart is dead.”) Wharton's novel, like Clarissa, evoked letters asking why there could not have been a romantic resolution which would have allowed its compelling heroine to live. Clarissa, repeatedly referred to in extravagant terms as “the ornament and glory of her Sex” and the “[f]lower of the world,”³⁰ draws on the same female iconography which inspired Wharton's original titles. Clarissa also designs an elaborate lily (indeed a broken lily) for the coffin that also serves as a writing desk in her final days; like Lily, she spends time writing and settling accounts before she dies. As Wharton imagined the ending of her novel and the death of Lily Bart, she most likely thought of other novels which conclude with the deaths of beautiful and virtuous heroines. Perhaps anticipating her own readers' responses in those recorded by Richardson, Wharton may have found in Richardson's defense of his tragic ending that “it was better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of mirth” a title for her novel about female sacrifice which, like Richardson's, finally focuses on the body of a dead heroine.³¹

The ambiguity surrounding the death of Lily Bart has caused some controversy among critics. In particular, like readers of Clarissa, critics have been concerned about whether Lily committed suicide rather than died of an overdose of her sleeping draught or of the weltschmerz to which heroines are so susceptible. Wharton's careful manuscript revisions of Lily's thoughts about the future in these scenes show that Wharton consciously constructed this ambiguity through a series of subtle alterations. The parts of Lily's life which are destined not to take place because of her death tend to be referred to as certainties, while the phrases which suggest her actual fate are framed as possibilities. Revisions in this section of the manuscript reveal Wharton's efforts to sharpen the ambiguity and to maintain a clearly articulated vagueness. As Lily, like the dying Clarissa, puts her accounts in order, the manuscript version suggests the possibility that she might not use her recently acquired money to settle her odious debt to Gus Trenor: “There was the cheque in her desk, for instance—she meant to send it to Trenor the next morning; but when the morning came she might put off doing so, might slip into gradual acquiescence in her debt.” In the revised version, the possibility becomes a certainty: “when the morning came she would put off doing so, would slip into gradual tolerance of her debt.”³²

Imagining her “fall,” Lily feels “the countless hands of habit dragging her back into some fresh compromise with fate” (HM, 315).³³ This fantasy of the inevitability of her sinking moral courage causes her to desire a conclusion (“If only life could end now—end on this tragic yet sweet vision of lost possibilities” [HM, 315]) and at the same time anticipates her desire to take the medication and submerge herself in sleep. Again, as she considers the dangers of going beyond the maximum dosage of her sleeping elixir, the possibility suggested in the word might is exchanged for the greater certainty found in the word would. Lily is clearly gambling as she raises the dosage, seeing her death as a remote possibility: “But, after all that was but one chance in a hundred, the action of the drug was incalculable, & the addition of a few drops to the regular dose might merely procure her the rest she so desperately needed.” Instead of “might merely,” her awareness of the dangers seems attenuated in the revised manuscript, which reads: “the addition of a few drops to the regular dose would probably do no more than procure her the rest she so desperately needed.”³⁴ Only a few lines later in the manuscript, a sentence which begins “She must escape” is broken off and replaced by the assertion “Her mind shrank from the glare of thought …, darkness was what she must have at any cost.” Lily “escape[s]” finally by shrinking from the “glare of thought”; and through these subtle revisions, as Wharton exchanges the word might for the more affirmative word would, Lily's role in her own death is left shrouded in a carefully and increasingly crafted obscurity.

Although much of the critical response to The House of Mirth was highly complimentary, at least one reviewer was not entirely pleased with the social consciousness which he felt pervaded the novel. In a newspaper article saved by Wharton headlined “Books of the Day: Mrs. Wharton's Latest Novel,” the unnamed critic argues that “The House of Mirth would be more of a novel if it were less of a sociological pamphlet.” Comparing it to “the report of some committee of one hundred delegated to discover and disclose the cause of our rapidly increasing degeneration,” he describes Wharton as “preach[ing] a sermon that relentlessly exposes the depth of degradation into which modern American society has fallen.”³⁵ While the social consciousness of the novel seems rather subtle when compared to the explicitness of some of the politically and sociologically motivated novels of the era, The House of Mirth does seem to be reaching toward a more sophisticated analysis of society than is present in Wharton's earlier works. The manuscripts and revisions of the novel reveal that in writing The House of Mirth Wharton consciously sought to interweave some of these issues into the fabric of the plot. For example, in scenes which become more obvious as the novel draws to a close, Wharton brings Lily Bart's social ambitions and struggle for survival into focus by associating her both with the working girls (to whom she once played the role of the kind and charitable lady) and with the socially ambitious (yet finally sympathetic) Jew, Simon Rosedale.

Until the concluding chapters of the novel, the working girls of Lily Bart's New York seem to be an unnamed mass, whether as the members of Gerty Farish's club or as the hostile and anonymous workers who surround Lily in the sweatshop where in order to survive she works sewing spangles on hats. Rosedale becomes a more sympathetic figure as Lily's fortunes fall in the second book of the novel; despite his financial success and social gains, he feels compassion for the socially destitute and impoverished Lily. Near the conclusion of the novel, Wharton also introduces the figure of a fallen working girl, Nettie Struther, who has raised herself from the “refuse-heap” (HM, 307) and who, like Rosedale, represents the possibility of personal struggle and self-preservation despite seemingly insurmountable forces of social condemnation and adversity. These parts of a social dialectic which overshadow the lives of Rosedale and Nettie Struther—the anti-Semitism of what Wharton elsewhere calls “Old New York” and the poverty that leaves a class of working girls vulnerable to sexual predators—offer clear parallels to Lily Bart's life and question the inevitability of her fate. These forces, introduced during Wharton's complex process of revision, offer important glimpses into her efforts to build powerful social tensions into the structure of The House of Mirth.

Early in the novel, during her second visit to Trenor's country home, Bellomont, Lily finds her hostess's manner “unchanged,” yet she recognizes “a faint coldness in that of the other ladies.” This coldness, an “occasional caustic reference to ‘your friends the Wellington Brys,’ or to ‘the little Jew who has bought the Greiner house—someone told us you knew him Miss Bart,’” shows Lily “that she was in disfavour with that portion of society which, while contributing least to its amusement, has assumed the right to determine what forms that amusement shall take” (HM, 127). Initially, the phrase in the manuscript version refers to Rosedale only as the “new man”; this phrase is then crossed out and replaced by a pointedly anti-Semitic reference to “the little Jew.” In constructing the foundation for her complex social dialectic, Wharton replaces the “new man”—often a positive characterization in American literature—with a stereotypic epithet. The other outsiders, the Wellington Brys, the nouveau riche couple called the “Welly Brys,” are labeled as intrinsically ridiculous in the manuscript on the basis of their name alone. Initially called “the Hamilton Eggles,” the correspondingly familiar name “the Ham Eggles” would have recalled their relation to crude acts of consumption.

Rosedale (whose name may link him to women and art by recalling the name of Mrs. Ambrose Dale from “Copy,” one of Wharton's rare depictions of a woman novelist) is described in words which echo his name as “a plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type” (HM, 12). While Rosedale's coloring may suggest something about his hopes for blending in, his potential for assimilation, his floral name (which links him with Lily) for a brief period in the composition of the novel drew him even closer to the heroine as it echoed “The Year of the Rose.” Both the Welly Brys and Rosedale suffer from newness in this old society; their attack on Old New York is made possible by new money. However, Rosedale is not just “new,” as Wharton has her social arbiters point out; he is also a Jew. This implication of anti-Semitism is also legible in Lily Bart's early and visceral distaste for the attentions of Rosedale. The reference to “the little Jew” which Wharton introduces into the discourse of the novel is part of the prejudice of a society which already has begun to recognize the unmarried Lily's affinities as a jeune fille à marier at the considerable age of twenty-nine with these threateningly “new” or “foreign” outsiders.

Later, as Gerty Farish talks to her cousin Lawrence Selden before the curtain rises on the tableaux vivants at the Welly Brys, Wharton incorporates an extensive addition in script which she pastes onto the typescript. In this late revision, Wharton introduces the plight of the working girls; and however vague and ill defined, the fact that both Lily and Rosedale contribute to this cause suggests their deeper affinities and prefigures Lily's surprising fate. This addition sounds the same prejudicial note audible in the contempt for Lily's “friends” voiced earlier by the society ladies at Bellomont. As Gerty Farish chatters to Selden about Lily's support of a charity to help working girls, she asks: “Did I tell you Lily gave us three hundred dollars? Wasn't it splendid of her? And then she collected a lot of money from her friends—Mrs. Bry gave us five hundred, and Mr. Rosedale gave us a thousand. I do wish Lily were not so nice to Mr. Rosedale, but she says it's no use being rude to him, because he doesn't see the difference” (HM, 129). Gerty goes on in this passage to argue that the people who say that Lily is “cold and conceited” have not seen her laughing and talking with the working-class women who are part of Gerty's “Girls' Club.” Speaking in the Brys' ballroom, Gerty Farish does not complain about the Welly Brys' new money, but she does underline her allegiance to an older prejudice, the unspoken anti-Semitism which places Rosedale in a different category. Her prejudice is not softened by Rosedale's charitable contribution to the welfare of the working girls—another oppressed group—nor is it diminished by the obvious contrast that Wharton sets up between a gift from a generous figure such as Rosedale and the cost of one of Bertha Dorset's pearls, which according to Gerty would pay for the activities of the “Girls' Club” for an entire year.

By incorporating this extensive passage, which juxtaposes Lily's attitude toward Rosedale with her sympathy for the girls who are less fortunate than herself, Wharton prepares for the conclusion of the novel. Lily never becomes a Jew or even, despite her offer at one point, the wife of a Jew, but she does become a working girl. After Lily has become a wage laborer in a millinery sweatshop and later when she is unemployed, only Rosedale understands her plight and tries to help her; he alone recognizes her life as an act of noble sacrifice. He knows that Lily has not used the social capital that has fallen into her hands in the form of Berea's illicit letters; he knows that she has “the power in [her] hands” (HM, 257) to change the ending of her life and the ending of the novel which she inhabits. Just as Rosedale becomes a sympathetic presence as Lily falls down the social ladder, a working girl whom Lily has helped earlier befriends her and brings her home after finding her on a bench in the park. This figure, Nettie Struther, who has married and found a new life after being seduced and abandoned by a man at her work (first designated in the manuscript as a “regular society man”³⁶ and then in the novel as merely a man who has “seen a great deal of society” [HM, 309]), represents the potential for Lily herself to rise from the ruins of her reputation as a fallen woman. Lily's associations with this woman are also ominous, however, since Lily has used the money she gained from the transaction with Gus Trenor, money which has sullied both her reputation and her sense of her own virtue, to send Nettie to the country when she became ill after being abandoned by her unfaithful and unscrupulous lover.

In gratitude for Lily's kindness, Nettie Struther has named her child after a regal character played by an actress who reminded her of Lily. The queen is initially called “Mary Adelia” in the manuscript; but Wharton changes this detail so that the name of the character played by the actress becomes that of the ill-fated and notoriously uncharitable “Mary Anto'nette” (HM, 309). In a moment of bitter and intentional wit, Wharton inserts an extra “r” into the baby's name, turning it into “Marry Anto'nette,” which might be read as a warning for Lily to marry too, like the fallen Nettie. As Lily Bart imagines herself holding the baby who is named for a stage queen who loses her head, the dying Lily seems fated to cling to a vulnerable identity which is bodied forth in the fantasy of a female infant. Lily, as she imagines holding the female baby, has passed beyond the symbolism of birth into the actuality of death. Like the historical Marie Antoinette, Lily is divided from her conscious mind and left on stage to be viewed as a “stilled” body.

From as early as chapter 13 in Book I, when (in the manuscript version) Lily enters Gus Trenor's “shrouded” house, which “look[s] as if it were waiting for the corpse to be brought down,” and the word corpse is marked out and replaced with the word body,³⁷ Lily Bart is drawn toward an embodiment which focuses on her sexuality but also leads to death. In this scene of what has been called Gus Trenor's attempt at rape, Lily is vulnerable not only because she lacks a male protector (whether father, brother, or husband), but also because of a related reason—her poverty. Initially in the manuscript version, Trenor tells the entering Lily, “you look a little cold yourself.” Underlining the significance of her floral name, which has long been associated with purity, the word cold from Trenor's perspective may allude to her sexual temperament, but in Wharton's revision this word is replaced by the word pinched, a term which alludes more pointedly to her financial state. Trenor's description of Lily as “pinched” becomes part of the series of allusions which will eventually link Lily's poverty to forebodings of her death: to Trenor's calculating eye, Lily looks “dead-beat.”³⁸ While the earlier shift to the word body from the more mortuarial and specific word corpse clearly underlines the sexual forces at work in this scene, as the passage progresses, Wharton's carefully shaded revisions seem to acknowledge the shadows of poverty and death. In building and revising The House of Mirth, Wharton links the prejudice against Jews with the sexual vulnerability and sacrifice of impoverished women and places both among the destructive social forces that she critiques in her novel. Throughout the versions of the manuscript, by changing words and sometimes phrases, Wharton constructs a novel rich in nuance and subtle in its drive toward increasingly complex narrative connections.

The manuscript of The House of Mirth reveals a great deal about Wharton's development as a writer, in particular the ways in which she shaped her drafts into the prose that is characteristic of her best work. The House of Mirth is much more than a well-written novel; it is, as the revised manuscript and typescripts reveal, a carefully crafted work of art. Some of the changes in the manuscript of The House of Mirth are motivated by Wharton's desire to articulate thematic associations and social commentary. Many of the alterations are what (for want of a better word) might be called tonal. These carefully calibrated shifts in language, which result in Wharton's characteristic clarity of tone, provide the record of a writer with a fine ear. In the early versions of the manuscript, the text is sometimes almost overwhelmed by Wharton's pleasure in alliteration and complex assonance, a tendency which reveals her susceptibility to the lyric qualities of language, but these sonorous sentences are not always preserved. What becomes obvious to a reader of Wharton's manuscripts is that her search for precision of meaning in the individual words often seems to curtail her flights into poetry. This is not to say that Wharton's writing is not lyrical or driven by a sense of poetry, but rather to suggest that sharpness of phrase and clarity were paramount to her in her prose compositions. As we have seen, even in her revisions of the novel's title Wharton worked with an acute sense of what was at stake in her choice of words as she constructed the patterns of meaning that structure the novel.

Although she had published four collections of short stories, two nonfiction volumes about Italy, a book on house decoration, a novella, and a two-volume historical novel, Wharton still referred to herself as a “drifting amateur” as she took up her pen and began to write The House of Mirth. The House of Mirth was an important book for Edith Wharton. It was not only her first best-selling book, but also the work which she would later claim taught her how to write a novel. With the publication of The House of Mirth, Wharton gained a wide audience and became one of the most respected writers of American literature and one of her native country's most forceful and insightful cultural critics. She also began her most productive period as a writer of serious fiction.

Notes

1. Cited in R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 126, from a letter James wrote to Mary Cadwalader Jones in August 1902. As part of his efforts, James tells her he is sending Wharton his Wings of the Dove, which he confesses is “rather long winded.”

2. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, ed. R. W. B. Lewis (New York: New York University Press, 1977), 142. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as HM. See typescript of the unfinished novel “Disintegration,” p. 22, Wharton Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Permission to quote from the manuscripts in the Wharton Collection in this essay is gratefully acknowledged.

3. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985), 206. Hereafter cited parenthetically as BG.

4. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, 151.

5. Wharton continues: “If it seems more conspicuous in New York than in an old civilization, it is because the whole social organization with us is so much smaller & less elaborate—& if, as I believe, it is more harmful in its influence, it is because fewer responsibilities attach to money with us than in other societies” (Wharton to William Roscoe Thayer, The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988], November 11, 1905, pp. 96-97).

6. Letters, November 11, 1905, p. 95; November 23, 1905, p. 98.

7. Lewis lists these novels in Edith Wharton: A Biography, 151. Dixon's Clansman rose to even greater prominence as the novel that D. W. Griffith used as the basis for his racist epic, The Birth of a Nation.

8. Millicent Bell, “Lady into Author: Edith Wharton and the House of Scribner,” American Quarterly 9 (1957): 298-300.

9. Cited by Bell from a letter written by Wharton to her publishers on November 22, 1905.

10. I am grateful to R. W. B. Lewis for his discussions about Wharton's research and the extent of her attention to historical detail.

11. Letters, November 9, 1907, p. 124.

12. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, 153. Lewis quotes a letter written by James to Mary Cadwaller Jones in which James refers to The House of Mirth as “Mrs. Wharton's pleasantly palpable hit.”

13. See Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “Lily Bart and the Drama of Femininity,” American Literary History 6 (1994): 71-87.

14. Quoting Alphonse Daudet's comment on his own sense of inadequacy as a novelist, the woman whom Henry James would later describe as an eagle lamented: “Je rêve d'un aigle, j'accouche d'un colibri [I dream of an eagle, and I give birth to a hummingbird],” Letters, August 5, 1905, pp. 94-95.

15. Cited by Lewis in Edith Wharton: A Biography, 153.

16. W. L. Courtney, The Feminine Note in Fiction (London: Chapman and Hall, 1904), xxxiii. For a more detailed discussion of Wharton's place in relation to American literature, see Candace Waid, Edith Wharton's Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

17. R. W. B. Lewis, introduction to The House of Mirth (New York: New York University Press, 1977), 330.

18. For an extensive discussion of both Bertha and Lily as figures for the woman writer, see Waid, Wharton's Letters from the Underworld, 15-50.

19. Janet Goodwyn, Edith Wharton: Traveller in the Land of Letters (London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1990), 57.

20. Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman Jr., The Decoration of Houses (New York: Scribner's, 1897), 198.

21. See Waid, Wharton's Letters from the Underworld, 39.

22. For a discussion of the financial speculation surrounding Lily, see Wai-Chee Dimock, “Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth,” PMLA 100 (1985): 783-92; and Wayne W. Westbrook, “Lily—Bartering on the New York Social Exchange in The House of Mirth,” Ball State University Forum 20 (1979): 59-64.

23. See Lewis, introduction to The House of Mirth, for an important discussion of the relationship between Wharton's working titles; Elizabeth Ammons notes the importance of biblical allusions here in Edith Wharton's Argument with America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980). See Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “Lily Bart and the Beautiful Death,” American Literature 46 (1976): 16-40.

24. For a discussion of these terms and scenes, see Waid, Wharton's Letters from the Underworld.

25. In one of the outlines for The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer marries the Countess Ellen Olenska rather than the paragon of purity, May Welland. This is, of course, reversed in the final version of novel.

26. Wharton refers to her first novel, The Valley of Decision, published three years earlier, in 1902.

27. Letters, August 5, 1905, pp. 94-95. See also the note describing Margaret Sangster and her poetry.

28. Manuscript of The House of Mirth, 178, Wharton Collection.

29. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa. Or, The History of a Young Lady, 8 vols. (3d ed., London, 1751; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1990), 8:285.

30. Clarissa, 8:34, 74.

31. Clarissa leaves detailed instructions for the handling of her body and the viewing of her corpse. Whereas the dead Lily is exposed for anyone to see, Clarissa, allowing only a few exceptions, has planned ahead to keep her coffin closed to the curious.

32. Manuscript, 164 (my emphasis).

33. Lily is described in the manuscript as feeling “the hundred tentacles of habit tugging” (164) her toward the same conclusion.

34. Manuscript, 169 (my emphasis).

35. “Books of the Day: Mrs. Wharton's Latest Novel,” Contemporary Reviews of The House of Mirth, Wharton Collection.

36. Manuscript, 145.

37. Manuscript, 137.

38. Manuscript, 276-79. Although I have been discussing chapter 13, the final sentence of chapter 12 suggests something of what is to come in the language of the following chapter as Trenor announces: “My wife was dead right to stay away: she says life's too short to spend it in breaking in new people” (p. 135). The sexual nuance in Wharton's use of the idiom “breaking in” is made explicit by her use of the same concept in The Buccaneers. In Wharton's final novel, the former Conchita Closson, now a worldly and experienced woman, apologizes for her suggestive speech, telling her American friends: “I forgot you little Puritans weren't broken in yet” (Edith Wharton, The Buccaneers, ed. Candace Waid [London: Everyman, J. M. Dent, 1993], 356).