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Content snapshot
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Violence
None
No violence
Language
None
No profanity; Edwardian period language
Sexual Content
Barely any
Adult romantic entanglements; nothing explicit; the politics of social and sexual expectation
Substance Use
Some
Chloral hydrate addiction in the final section; a fatal or semi-deliberate overdose
Emotional Intensity
Very heavy
The methodical cruelty of social destruction; the psychological cost of being made to feel worthless; an ending of extreme grief and irony
What this book is about
Lily Bart, brilliant and beautiful, is twenty-nine and still unmarried in Gilded Age New York—an age in which a woman's only currency is her social position and her marriage prospects. She keeps making choices that cost her: a loan from a married man, a night alone in a bachelor's room, a refusal to buy safety at the price of herself. Wharton's masterpiece traces Lily's social destruction with the precision of a surgeon and the compassion of a friend. The ending—Lily's overdose, Lawrence Selden's too-late arrival—is among the most heartbreaking in American literature.
Notes for sensitive readers
Reader-flagged moments and themes that may affect your experience.
An overdose death at the novel's end
The systematic social destruction of a brilliant woman
Extreme emotional devastation at the conclusion
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