The House of Mirth, like many Victorian novels, is about marrying well. Stay with me, here, because there are two differences between this and the reviews of several English novels I've read in the last two years. In the first place, it isn't English. It's a story of old New York, turn of the century. Of course, it is about the upper class, and they spend a great deal of time in Europe, but it is not English. Second and more importantly, it does not have a happy ending. Not even a happy ending for the main character tempered by, say, an unhappy marriage for her best friend. It is not Can You Forgive Her.

Lily Bart is a stunning beauty and an accomplished flirt, but, for whatever reason, keeps ruining her prospects for a good marriage. She's self destructive. She is also poor, and running with a wealthy crowd which exhausts her resources and puts her in debt. She has a number of unsavory business associations, which hurt her social prospects, and she finds her name connected, in rumor, to two different married men.

There are sympathetic characters in the story, like Gertie Farrish, but they are few and far between. Almost everyone in the book is unlikeable, including, for the most part, Lily. Still, by the end, I had come around to hoping things would go well with her, and I was a little disappointed when they did not, but I suppose that's part of what makes the novel fresh.