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This novel is in a way a parody of her own The House of Mirth; the theme of the beautiful but not quite rich enough girl hunting a rich and socially highly placed husband is the same, but rather than the protagonist being above the other characters in sensibility and intelligence, she is well below them, and rather than failing to make the matches through her occasional fastidiousness, she succeeds in ascending socially husband by husband. Undine is the most unlikeable "heroine" imaginable; a greedy, spoiled, self-centered person with absolutely no redeeming qualities, who destroys the lives of everyone who cares for her, from her parents, to her husbands, to her own son, and always manages to consider herself the aggrieved party. Rather than being presented with irony, she is treated as pure comedy; but while there are examples in literature of tragedies with comic subplots, this is the first book I have read where a comedy is accompanied by tragedies in all the secondary characters. It is probably the best technically of the early novels of Wharton, but also the hardest to like.