SOURCE: Michelson, Bruce. “Edith Wharton's House Divided.” Studies in American Fiction 12, no. 2 (autumn 1984): 199-215.

In the following essay, Michelson observes the influence on The House of Mirth of the “well-made play.”

It happens that in the unfolding of Edith Wharton's career, she wrote The House of Mirth in the midst of several ventures into stagecraft. In 1902 Edith Wharton published a thoughtful, competent translation of a play called Es Lebe das Leben by the then-fashionable Ibsenite Herman Sudermann, a play now faulted for mixing pat naturalism with trite histrionics. While she spoke of this translation (which sold well for a number of years) as a mere exercise, the text itself reveals that she took pains to cater to an American audience, and she showed great interest in the mounting of the play for its brief, poorly received Broadway run.¹ In 1906, while The House of Mirth still held its own...