Wharton Wednesday: Welcome to Chapter 1

Week 1: "What was Miss Bart doing in town at that season?"

Welcome to Week 1 of our Edith Wharton
read-a-long!

Today, we’re working through Chapter 1 of The House of Mirth. Full read-a-long details are available here. If you have not read Chapter 1 yet, I suggest stopping here and doing so before you read any more of this post!

Today, all you need to have read so far is chapter 1. Wharton builds such a vast social world in such a short number of pages — and we deserve a bit of time to tease out what she’s setting up here at the start.

After all, as Wharton wrote in 1925:

“True economy consists in the drawing out of one’s subject of every drop of significance it can give, true expenditure in devoting time, meditation and patient labour.”
—Edith Wharton

Update! An note on paid subscription status

Substack doesn’t allow free subscribers to comment on newsletters that have *any* paywalled content in them. That doesn’t work for me! Because one of my goals with this read-a-long was to keep discussion spaces open to all subscribers, so I’ve decided to …