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Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club.

I'm the program's producer Andy Bowers, and today our club members are discussing a 20th century classic, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. Now here's your host, Megan O'Rourke.

Hi, I'm Megan O'Rourke, Slate's literary editor, and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club podcast. I'm here today with Stephen Metcalf, Slate's Critic at Large,

and Katie Roifey, a slate contributor and the author of the upcoming Uncommon Arrangements.

We're here today to talk about Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. And one reason we chose to talk

about this book is that there's a new biography of Wharton by Hermione Lee called Edith Wharton, and we'll be touching on that too.

But the main topic of our discussion is going to be the House of Mirth and the fabulous heroine at the heart of it, or anti-heroine, Lily Bart.

So let's start off by talking about the House of Mirth.

The House of Mirth is a novel that has the common 19th century theme of a woman looking for a husband. That woman is Lily Bart. There is an added twist, which is that Lily Bart is 29 and beginning to worry about the fine wrinkles in her face. And she is not well off. She has been orphaned and left with very little money. And she's dependent on the graces of her aunt, one, Mrs. Peniston, to kind of enable her to make her way through New York society. But Mrs. Peniston doesn't really understand the kind of refined nature of Lily Bart's tastes. And Lily Bard herself is a festidious dresser and with a hatred of what she calls dinginess, which is really an expression

of her fear of poverty. And the novel is really about her making her way, trying to make her

way firmly into old New York society at a moment when its customs are incredibly entrenched,

but also somewhat in flux, which is a great Whartonian theme that I'm hoping we'll get into.

But before we start talking, I'll just read the first sentence of a review from the Independent under the headline,

Mrs. Wharton's latest novel, to give you a taste of the contemporary reception of it.

And it says, Mrs. Wharton's new novel is a story of society life.

It's refined ferocities, its sensual

extravagances, its delicate immoralities, and above all, the tragedies which underlie its outward

appearance of mirth and prosperity. So let's just start talking. Lily Bart is a kind of vexed

heroine. Some people love her other critics along the way. It found her too thin, too

impossible to care about. What did you guys think of the novel? Well, maybe before we talk about

...