'The House of Mirth' tells the story of Lily Bart, aged 29, beautiful, impoverished and in need of a rich husband to safeguard her place in the social elite, and to support her expensive habits - her clothes, her charities and her gambling. Unwilling to marry without both love and money, Lily becomes vulnerable to the kind of gossip and slander which attach to a girl who has been on the marriage market for too long. Wharton charts the course of Lily's life, providing, along the way, a wider picture of a society in transition, a rapidly changing New York where the old certainties of manners, morals and family have disappeared and the individual has become an expendable commodity. AUTHOR: Edith Wharton (1862 -1937) was an American writer, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, the first woman to do so. She was a popular novelist and short-story writer during her lifetime, although in the years following her death she came to be viewed as rather old-fashioned. Subsequent reappraisal of her work has established 'The House of Mirth', 'Ethan Frome' and 'The Age of Innocence' as classic American novels, and her excellent ghost stories have found a new audience.