A simple text-book, which the author has written “in a gossipy style, using very few technical terms and explaining every seemingly difficult passage, just as though he were giving oral instruction.” (N. Y. Times.) There are photographic reproductions of windows in English churches, and many diagrams.
| N. Y. Times. 10: 474. Jl. 15, ‘05. 390w. | ||
| + + — | Pub. Opin. 39: 352. S. 9, ‘05. 200w. |
Wharton, Edith Newbold (Jones). [House of mirth.] [†]$1.50. Scribner.
A society novel, cruel in its reality. Lily Bart, beautiful and twenty-nine, the orphaned child of a New York merchant, feels her whole being calling for the stamp of permanent possession upon the luxury which she has always enjoyed at the hands of her friends. Relentlessly the author enmeshes her in the toils of debt incurred at bridge; in scandal, the price of a trip upon a friend’s yacht; and, almost in a loveless marriage,—only the wealthy Rosedale himself recoils from it when society no longer smiles upon Miss Bart. She is dropped from stage to stage of society, the unhappy victim of circumstance and environment, but holding the reader’s full sympathy thru an innate nobility which is submerged but never eliminated. The end is hard—but could it all have ended otherwise?
“Mrs. Wharton has done many good things—she has never done anything better than this. Her dialogue is clever, fresh and sparkling; she has a fine discrimination—a natural, unstudied discrimination—in the use of words; and her style is graceful and fluent.”
| + + + | Acad. 68: 1155. N. 4, ‘05. 330w. |
[*] “It is a pitiful story, told with restraint and insight and not a little subtlety.”
| + | Ath. 1905, 2: 718. N. 25. 160w. |
[*] “As a piece of artistic creation, it falls short of supreme excellence.” Olivia Howard Dunbar.
| + + | Critic. 47: 509. D. ‘05. 580w. |