two little lines about the mouth

Narrative threads of anxiety, luck, and age in Edith Wharton's 1905 The House of Mirth

Today’s scene comes from Edith Wharton.

In Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth, the 29-year-old socialite Lily Bart frets with diverse but relatable anxieties: she longs for a different, better existence, but also feels elegantly trapped in her life:

“She was beginning to have fits of angry rebellion against fate, when she longed to drop out of …