SOURCE: Clubbe, John. “Interiors and the Interior Life in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.” Studies in the Novel 28, no. 4 (winter 1996): 543-64.

In the following essay, Clubbe draws upon Wharton's interest in interior design to discuss her correlation in The House of Mirth between Lily's interior physical environments and the struggling development of her inner life.

No American author has written with more understanding and artistry about the interplay among character, social history, and domestic esthetics than has Edith Wharton. In 1897 she established herself as an authority on interiors with The Decoration of Houses, written with the noted Gilded Age designer Ogden Codman, Jr. From that time forward Wharton's fine-tuned readings of interior space became a signature aspect of her writings. Edmund Wilson once called her, rightly, “not only one of the great pioneers, but also the poet, of interior decoration.”¹ It is in The House of Mirth...