THE HOUSE OF MIRTH – Romantic novel, by Edith Wharton

She was caught between her entitled taste for luxury and her yearning for true love. “She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.” Lily Bart, the beautiful and intelligent heroine of this novel, slowly slithers down the rungs of the New York society, until to a tragic end. Fashioned for a life of luxury, she conducts herself as if she is entitled to such an existence. After The house of mirth, Edith Wharton would later become the first women to receive the Pulitzer Prize for literature, showing us (exactly), how women like Lily could be smothered by the society, where individual tragedies are easily subsumed by the current of other people lives. http://www.amazon.com/House-Mirth-Edith-Wharton/dp/1491241810