Wharton Wednesday: Book 2, Ch 7 - 10

Week 9: "How much longer that hope would last she dared not conjecture."

Today, we’re working through Chapters 7, 8, 9, and 10 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, finish the novel.

Just one more week

I can’t wait to celebrate the conclusion of our first read-a-long together! Is there anything specific you want to see in next week’s Wharton Wednesday? Get your final questions and requests in here.

Situation and character

Let’s start today with some wise words from Wharton, which she penned in 1933 (decades after writing Mirth and after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction):

“In the birth of fiction, it is sometimes the situation, the "case," which first presents itself to the mind, and sometimes the characters who first appear, asking to be fitted into a situation. I have often speculated on the conditions likely to give the priority to one or the other, but I doubt if fiction can be usefully divided into novels of situation and of character, since a n…