More notes on the House of Mirth You can’t read the secondary literature on Edith Wharton without bumping into the ghost of Henry James. They both wrote about rich Americans, some of whom spent their time in Europe, so the critics have gathered around this obvious clue and have palpated it to death, rather like the rather dim police inspectors in Sherlock Holmes who fail to make subtle deductions from the more apparently trivial clues with which they are presented, while running off the track when big clues are, by malign design, thrown in their way.. I haven’t waded far enough into the secondary literature to see if anybody has connected Wharton to Oscar Wilde, but as I find traces of Wilde all over The House of Mirth, I think I’m going to take up the theme and give it a good shaking. Wharton does a rather neat trick in The House of Mirth – she manages to convincingly create a hybrid of social comedy and melodrama. The melodrama is the natural aesthetic correlate of the overwhel
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