![]() ![]() ![]() Bart kicks the bucket as well, leaving Lily, who “became the centre of a family council composed of the wealthy relatives whom she had been taught to despise for living like pigs. Bart held herself fiercely aloof from the frugal tea-tables of her companions in misfortune” (31). Bart criticized… and now vegetating in cheap continental refuges, where Mrs. Bart and Lily “wandered from place to place, now paying long visits to relations whose house-keeping Mrs. ![]() Bart spent a bit longer than average in Kübler-Ross’s first stage of grief – denial – insisting that Lily should continue to live like an heiress. In Lily’s case, her father came home one day, said, “I’m ruined,” and then commenced his “slow and difficult dying” (30). Our heroine is Lily Bart, who falls into the same general category as Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence and Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, which is to say that she has been raised wealthy and taught to live like a person of tremendous privilege but does not actually have any money herself. I really don’t want to write a review – what I want to do is quote entire passages (page-long paragraphs in some cases) and then say “Isn’t this just horrible? And yet so honest? And yet so hilarious?” I’m not ashamed to admit that the point-and-grunt school of literary criticism sometimes has its appeal. ![]() This may be the most irony-dense book I’ve ever read. ![]()
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