Wharton Wednesday: Book 2, Ch 4, 5, 6

Week 8: "For the first time in her life, she found herself utterly alone"

Today, we’re working through Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Book 2 of The House of Mirth.

• Get full read-a-long details here.

• View all previous chapter summaries and the reading schedule.

• For next week, keep going in Book 2. Read chapters 7-10.

Two weeks to go

For our final week, I’m cookin’ up something special and I can’t wait to celebrate the conclusion of our first read-a-long together! Is there something you’d like me to cover in our final discussions of the novel? Make your requests here.

Where we’ve been

Thus far in the novel, we’ve heard what Carrie Fisher and Lord Hubert and Grace Stepney and Julia Peniston and Lawrence Selden and Gus Trenor think about Lily’s indecision and persistent unmarried status.

We’ve witnessed Lily receive multiple marriage proposals and deny or vaguely defer them. We’ve now also witnessed Lily receive multiple business proposals from her two remaining viable suitors. George Dorset sees her as a fine rebound who can help him convince a court to cut-off Bertha from…