Registration has concluded. A Newberry Library adult education class. Summer 2025. Tuesdays 2:00-4:00pm (CT) by Zoom, June 17-July 8. Registration information here.
Explore literary technique and style by studying Edith Wharton’s searing parable of the Gilded Age.
This class offers a deep dive into Edith Wharton’s intricate and beautifully crafted novel, The House of Mirth. As we explore the various fortunes of the novel’s main character, Lily Bart, we will also investigate the building blocks of literary fiction itself, with weekly comparative excerpts drawn from the work of Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, Zora Neale Hurston, and Virginia Woolf. Four sessions.
Materials List
Wharton, The House of Mirth. New York: Oxford World’s Classics. ISBN: 978-0199538102
Shorter texts, film clips, and works of visual art will also be made available online and brought to the class sessions.
For the first session, please read Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (pdf) as well as chapters 1-3 (pages 5-40) of The House of Mirth. Please do not read the introduction to the novel.
Class Description
This class offers participants both a short serial reading and a weekly in-depth look at how narrative fiction works. The center of the course is Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), a novel that explores, with biting satire and genuine compassion, the emotional and social brutality of America’s Gilded Age. And as our class considers the challenging issues of what the novelist Jennifer Egan has called “a masterpiece that remains electrifying and relevant in our 21st century,” our specific emphasis will be on how the story is told.
The House of Mirth follows the circumstances of Lily Bart, born to the leisure class in New York, yet without a fortune of her own, and at twenty-nine, seemingly in need of marrying well in order to continue circulating with the international elite. The novel explores how individual lives—Lily’s and others—are integrated into social conventions, limitations, and hypocrisies, and it traces the difficult struggle to create new paths. The novel explores the tensions between public show and private longing, between surface appearances and interior lives, and, crucially, between seeing and being seen in society.
As our class will discover, “seeing and being seen” is not only a central theme in the novel, but a fundamental aspect of Edith Wharton’s narrative technique. Wharton’s fictional art, influenced by the Victorians, in turn influenced generations of writers. As we read The House of Mirth in four parts, our class will turn to four modernist writers for informative comparisons of narrative style and technique. These comparative examples will be thematically relevant to the novel installments at hand, and they will also help demonstrate key aspects of reading and literary art.
For the first week, we will read Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” to accompany the first three chapters of Wharton’s novel. For the second week, we will read an excerpt from Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. The third week features an excerpt from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as a complementary text, while the final week includes an excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.
In this way of reading The House of Mirth, our class will develop an increasingly comprehensive appreciation of the significant features of literary fiction, including narrative point of view, dialogue, plot, and characterization. The class will also feature weekly study guides with suggested points for discussion, quotations from the novel, and critical views, past and present. We will also see and discuss images of the Newberry Library’s copies of the novels we consider, as well as the original issues of Scribner’s Magazine, in which both The House of Mirth and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” first appeared.
No AI technology will be used in the development or presentation of lectures and class materials.
Schedule
Session One: The House of Mirth, chapters 1.1-1.3. Hemingway excerpt.
Session Two: The House of Mirth, chapters 1.4-1.12. James excerpt.
Session Three: The House of Mirth, chapters 1.13-2.5. Hurston excerpt.
Session Four: The House of Mirth, chapters 2.6-2.14. Woolf excerpt.
Image: Mrs. Richard Bennet Lloyd (detail), by Joshua Reynolds (c. 1775)
