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"Killed by the double standard" might be an alternative title for The House Of Mirth by Edith Wharton. Lily Bart was nothing if not a victim of the social conventions of her time, which punished innocent women on the basis of their reputation while allowing men total freedom.
The first essay in this collection, an introduction by University of Toronto Associate Professor Deborah Esch, reviews and summarizes the autobiographical, biographical, and critical literature on novelist Edith Wharton to place her in the context of fin de siecle New York society. It is important to know that The House Of Mirth, first published in 1905, was not only a critical success but also a popular one.
The second essay "The conspicuous wasting of Lily Bart," by Ruth Yeazell of Yale University, compares The House Of Mirth with Veblen's The Theory Of The Leisure Class and finds that the novel and the sociological treatise mirror each other in their views of class in America. She points out that one of the main ironies for women like Lily...