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mafeladeira 's review for:
The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
”It was this moment of love, this fleeting victory over themselves, which had kept them from atrophy and extinction; which, in her, had reached out to him in every struggle against the influence of her surroundings, and in him, had kept alive the faith that now drew him penitent and reconciled to her side.”
It took me a while to get through this but man was this not a superb journey. Edith Wharton writes with the eloquence of someone to which language bows down, and the portrayal of the dark side of life in the high society of that time couldn’t have achieved a better form than the one which it assumed through her eyes and the character of Lily Bart. Considering that she was somewhat of an outsider who always managed to fit in with the rich and influential due to an extravagant taste and ambitious personality, it was all the more intense and involving to see how the trials of ladder-climbing and the judgement of other people managed, little by little, to take away from her happiness up to a point of no return. The dichotomy between solace and angst that represented her relationship with Selden was also a pretty strong aspect, and contained some of the best writing in the story as a whole. All in all, I don’t think that, before I picked this up, I’d seen such a bone-deep sad characterization of a female character from a classic novel in such a setting since Anna Karenina. Both are books you don’t easily forget.
It took me a while to get through this but man was this not a superb journey. Edith Wharton writes with the eloquence of someone to which language bows down, and the portrayal of the dark side of life in the high society of that time couldn’t have achieved a better form than the one which it assumed through her eyes and the character of Lily Bart. Considering that she was somewhat of an outsider who always managed to fit in with the rich and influential due to an extravagant taste and ambitious personality, it was all the more intense and involving to see how the trials of ladder-climbing and the judgement of other people managed, little by little, to take away from her happiness up to a point of no return. The dichotomy between solace and angst that represented her relationship with Selden was also a pretty strong aspect, and contained some of the best writing in the story as a whole. All in all, I don’t think that, before I picked this up, I’d seen such a bone-deep sad characterization of a female character from a classic novel in such a setting since Anna Karenina. Both are books you don’t easily forget.