Edith Wharton frequently likens Lily Bart, the heroine of The House of Mirth (1905), to a flower. Her name is ‘Lily’; when she kisses Lawrence Selden ‘her face turned to him with the soft motion of a flower’ in her privileged station in life she is an ‘orchid basking in its artificially created atmosphere’; and, in sum, she is‘ the fine flower and complete expression ’ of the ideals of beauty and social grace held by the old New York aristocracy. Most significant, however, is Mrs Wharton's use of rose imagery when describing Lily. For example, when Lily came to her friend Gerty Farish after having narrowly escaped the unwelcome advances of Gus Trenor, Gerty reflected that everything about Lily was ‘warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose’. Indeed, the entire society of which Lily is ‘the fine flower’ diffuses a ‘rosy glow’. Those who stroll these ‘rosy shores of pleasure’, such as Judy Trenor, have complexions of ‘rosy blondness’. The fastest rising star in the economic and social firmament is Simon Rosedale, ‘a plump, rosy man of the blond Jewish type …’