A black comedy of manners about great wealth and a woman who can only define herself through the perceptions of others. The beautiful Lily Bart lives among the nouveau riche of New York City, people whose millions were made in railroads, shipping, land speculation, and banking. In this morally and aesthetically bankrupt world, Lily, twenty-nine years old, searches for a husband who can satisfy her desire for endless admiration and all outward signs of wealth. Her search ends scandalously when she is accused of being the mistress of a wealthy man. Banished from her familiar world of artificial conventions, Lily finds life unbearable. Lily Bart embodies the woman as a passive creature, the ultimate "consumer item." In her introduction, Cynthia Griffin Wolff explains how this character arose from the circumstances of Edith Wharton's own life.