The House of Mirth Edith Wharton, 1905, Social Criticism

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• This is what Billie Eilish talks about when she’s not promoting ‘Barbie, Barbie, Barbie’
• Watch the Petersen Museum's massive renovation in this time-lapse video
• Setting
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• Norman Jewison, prolific director of films including ‘In the Heat of the Night’ and ‘Moonstruck,’ dies at 97
• At USC, arrests. At UCLA, hands off. Why pro-Palestinian protests have not blown up on UC campuses
• Time Out with musician and architecture blogger Moby

Gus becomes enamored with Lily, a frequent guest at his wife's weekend social events. He uses his financial investment skills and a large sum of his own money in a risky investment for Lily which she agrees to. The proceeds from this speculation will help her pay her gambling debts and other expenses necessary to keep up appearances. The investment pays off for Lily financially, as Gus intends that it should, but the friendship turns sour when Lily is unwilling to exchange romantic attention for money the way Gus believes she tacitly agrees to do. Judy Trenor (Mrs. Gus Trenor)—Lily's best friend and confidante— is the stereotypical high-society matron, married to Gus Trenor, a successful business man.

This is what Billie Eilish talks about when she’s not promoting ‘Barbie, Barbie, Barbie’

Having corrected the irregularity, she seated herself on one of theglossy purple arm-chairs; Mrs. Peniston always sat on a chair, never init. It was clear that theyoung lady was badly frightened, and Mrs. Haffen was the woman to makethe most of such fears. Anticipating an easier victory than she hadforeseen, she named an exorbitant sum.

Watch the Petersen Museum's massive renovation in this time-lapse video

The Dorset place was in the immediateneighbourhood of the Gormers’ newly-acquired estate, and in hermotor-flights thither with Mrs. Gormer, Lily had caught one or twopassing glimpses of the couple; but they moved in so different an orbitthat she had not considered the possibility of a direct encounter. The dinner had been protracted over Mr. Bry’s exceptional cigars and abewildering array of liqueurs, and many of the other tables were empty;but a sufficient number of diners still lingered to give relief to theleave-taking of Mrs. Bry’s distinguished guests. This ceremony was drawnout and complicated by the fact that it involved, on the part of theDuchess and Lady Skiddaw, definite farewells, and pledges of speedyreunion in Paris, where they were to pause and replenish their wardrobeson the way to England. The quality of Mrs. Bry’s hospitality, and of thetips her husband had presumably imparted, lent to the manner of theEnglish ladies a general effusiveness which shed the rosiest light overtheir hostess’s future. In its glow Mrs. Dorset and the Stepneys werealso visibly included, and the whole scene had touches of intimacy worththeir weight in gold to the watchful pen of Mr. Dabham. The New York winter had presented an interminable perspective ofsnow-burdened days, reaching toward a spring of raw sunshine and furiousair, when the ugliness of things rasped the eye as the gritty wind groundinto the skin.

Setting

Though he has shown Lily consistent friendship, he abandons her when she becomes the victim of appearances that put her virtue, as an unmarried woman, in question. Selden laid the book aside, and sank into the chair beside the desk. The bitter watersof life surged high about him, their sterile taste was on his lips.

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The woman, without answering, pushed her pail aside, and continued tostare as Miss Bart swept by with a murmur of silken linings. Could onenever do the simplest, the most harmless thing, without subjecting one’sself to some odious conjecture? Half way down the next flight, she smiledto think that a char-woman’s stare should so perturb her.

All her resentment of his fancied coldness was swept away in thisoverwhelming rush of recollection. Twice he had been ready to helpher—to help her by loving her, as he had said—and if, the third time,he had seemed to fail her, whom but herself could she accuse? But the sudden longing to see him remained; it grew tohunger as she paused on the pavement opposite his door. She had a vision of his quiet room, ofthe bookshelves, and the fire on the hearth.

Review: The House of Mirth - slantmagazine

Review: The House of Mirth.

Posted: Fri, 01 Aug 2003 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Norman Jewison, prolific director of films including ‘In the Heat of the Night’ and ‘Moonstruck,’ dies at 97

She had no umbrella and the moisturequickly penetrated her thin spring dress. She was still half a mile fromher destination, and she decided to walk across to Madison Avenue andtake the electric car. As she turned into the side street, a vague memorystirred in her.

At USC, arrests. At UCLA, hands off. Why pro-Palestinian protests have not blown up on UC campuses

To his impatience it seemedimmeasurably long to wait, and half-ashamed of the impulse, he leaned toMrs. Fisher to ask, as the music ceased, if Miss Bart had not dined withher. The words beat on Gerty’s brain like the sound of a language which hasseemed familiar at a distance, but on approaching is found to beunintelligible.

Even on her way up the stairs,she had not thought of preparing a pretext for her visit, but she nowfelt an intense longing to dispel the cloud of misunderstanding that hungbetween them. Reading his dismissal in her eyes, he held out his hand with a gesturewhich conveyed something of this inarticulate conflict. “I don’t know whyI should regard myself as an exception——” she began. Lily sat down on one of the plush and rosewood sofas, and he depositedhimself in a rocking-chair draped with a starched antimacassar whichscraped unpleasantly against the pink fold of skin above his collar.

She puts the check in an envelope she addresses to her bank, and writes another for Gus Trenor, resolving her massive debt, and then takes a fatal dose of the laudanum, drifting off to oblivion in her darkened room. Finding the partially-burnt letters in his fireplace and sensing her intentions, Selden rushes to her boarding room. There, at her deathbed, holding her hand, he weeps, declaring his love for her.

Near the bed stood a table holding her breakfast tray,with its harmonious porcelain and silver, a handful of violets in aslender glass, and the morning paper folded beneath her letters. Therewas nothing new to Lily in these tokens of a studied luxury; but, thoughthey formed a part of her atmosphere, she never lost her sensitiveness totheir charm. Mere display left her with a sense of superior distinction;but she felt an affinity to all the subtler manifestations of wealth. The room was full of women and girls, all too much engaged in the rapidabsorption of tea and pie to remark her entrance.

The Emily Dickinson of “A Quiet Passion” both exasperates and is exasperated by her tightly cloistered family, but the love and respect that courses among them is never in doubt. The Sassoon of “Benediction” finds community — fleeting and fickle, but precious nonetheless — in a sphere of gay artists whose work earned them a degree of renown and refuge. And during a flashback to the Blitz in “The Deep Blue Sea,” the camera pans along a train platform where Hester and hundreds of other Londoners have taken refuge, raising their voices in an impromptu “Molly Malone” sing-along. It’s among the most gorgeous moments ever crafted by a filmmaker who excelled at turning his memories into cinema, and whose cinema deserves to be long remembered. Part of what distinguishes Davies’ stories has always been the unfashionable stateliness of their telling, their quality of contemplation. For the uninitiated, the precision of his compositions, the graceful drift of his camera movements and the fastidiousness of his musical choices can seem restrained to the point of stiffness.

She returns briefly to Bellomont only to find that her peers now look at her with derision and disgust. Lily learns that Selden and the vindictive heiress Bertha Dorset were once lovers. She also confides her money problems to Gus Trenor, a stockbroker and the husband of her childhood friend Judy, receiving from him a check for $5,000 and an investment of $4,000 in her name.

In “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” a melancholy choral performance of “In the Bleak Midwinter” marks the passage of several family Christmas celebrations. In the opening scenes of “The Long Day Closes,” Nat King Cole croons out at us from the depths of a rain-drenched Liverpool alley, his radio-filtered voice practically drawing us backward, along with the steady glide of the camera, into the past. That film also pays tribute to the formative influence of Davies’ movie love, exalted in overheard snippets from classic films like “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” “The Magnificent Ambersons” and “Great Expectations” — the beginnings of a love affair with cinema that would sustain and transform him. Lily almost confronts Bertha Dorset with the letters written to Mr. Selden, but finding that the Dorsets have left town, she goes to Lawrence Selden, telling him she knows she lost his love. When Lawrence is not looking, she throws the letters in his lit fireplace. Lily goes home and finds her inheritance has at last been delivered.

She looked puzzled at the redoubled laughter which hailed her words, butit might have consoled her to know how deeply they had sunk into thebreast of one of her hearers. She settled herself at the desk, and Mrs. Trenor accepted her resumptionof the morning’s task with a sigh which implied that, after all, she hadproved herself unfit for higher uses. ” She leaned back,sighing, in the morning abandon of lace and muslin, turning anindifferent shoulder to the heaped-up importunities of her desk, whileshe considered, with the eye of a physician who has given up the case,the erect exterior of the patient confronting her. Suddenly they heard a remote sound, like the hum of a giant insect, andfollowing the high-road, which wound whiter through the surroundingtwilight, a black object rushed across their vision.