Nabokov pulled it off in spectacular fashion in Lolita; Edith Wharton is rather less successful with her 1928 study of the infatuation of a fortysomething bachelor for a 15-year-old girl, possibly because she avoids the nasty brutish bits, surrounding her soppy central pair with meaningful Alpine peaks and mindbogglingly irritating secondary characters (the "children" of the title). The House of Mirth - her first novel, though it wasn't published until Wharton was forty-three - is an angrier affair altogether, and all the better for it; indeed, Wharton's powerful portrayal of the decline and fall of the spirited Lily Bart, a woman who can't, or won't, settle for the coveted prize of a wealthy husband and an empty marriage, is described by Nina Bawden in her introduction to this volume as Wharton's "greatest novel". Having devoured it in a single mesmerised gulp, I won't disagree.
