Edith Wharton is still topical. A recent humongous biography has caused me to go back and investigate this early 20th-century female novelist who quite carefully skewered fashionable New York society, and I found her still pertinent today.

Hermione Lee has written a mammoth tome, over 800 pages, titled “Edith Wharton,” and it is quite obvious that the biography is not only thorough but perceptive. Lee has obviously memorized every subtle event of Wharton’s novels and has then looked for their relevance to Wharton’s own life.

Wharton was born in New York City in 1862, a time during the Civil War that seems far, far away. Her parents were of the Jones family. Remember “keeping up with the Joneses?” That Jones family.

Due to financial problems the Wharton family lived in Europe from when Edith was 4, and they came back to New York City when she was 10. Wharton always felt like “an exile in New York,” which makes her literary achievement even more amazing.

She dissected New York City society as with a scalpel, peeling away the surface tension so we can see the anxiety underneath. Such society was rigidly stratified. One must know his or her place, and trying to change it caused catastrophe.

Lily Bart in Wharton’s first major novel, “The House of Mirth,” is lovely, intelligent, sensible and doomed. She is poor and addicted to the pleasures of the moneyed world around her. There is no outlet for her talents that will not debase her. If she takes money as a loan, she is a pauper. If she gives herself up to continue in high society, she is a mistress. She is not high enough in society for a moneyed man to marry her.

She does accept money to continue in the world she loves, but it destroys her. Too late does Seldon realize he loves her; too late to rescue her from the society she craves.

What I came to realize in reading the story of Lily Bart is that her story is still true. Society that values place, decorum and a certain set of manners and dress is remorseless and unmerciful to those who aspire, say, “above their station.”

Wharton’s harsh criticism of rich society is not out of place today. Even in the Coos Bay area one must “belong” to the right civic clubs, be invited to the correct parties, and associate with people of similar economic wealth. If people aspire higher than is considered proper, they are treated like Malvolio in “Twelfth Night” or like Lily Bart.

Wharton recognized this early and late in her stories and novels. “The Age of Innocence,” published in 1920, won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for a novel, the first ever given to a woman author. In it Wharton has softened her harsh criticism of New York society described in “The House of Mirth.”

Still, the story is of Newland Archer, rich, about to be married to a sheltered and beautiful woman of proper standing, and he is tempted from his marriage by a lovely, exotic woman from Europe. Whom should Archer choose?

Today such a choice would be shrugged at, but not for Archer. Set before World War I, his society would not forgive him if he left his bride for a worldly woman from Europe. So he marries, settles down, and propagates a family. After all, it is the thing to do. But that is not the end of the story.

Twenty-five years later, Archer, a widower, has a chance in Paris to meet the woman of his dreams again. After reflection he walks away, willing to live with his memories than to face reality. Wharton herself could have been Archer’s love. She was an expatriate who spent most of her adult life in Europe. For her relief work in France during the First World War she receive the Cross of the Legion of Honor. Her life, however, was far more intricate than the surface appearances.

Hermione Lee makes very clear that Wharton did not like her mother at all, thought her father somewhat insipid, and used them and others of fashionable late 19th-century New York City society in her novels. Twain called the time the Gilded Age, and underneath the sheen Wharton reveals the dross.

But it is high class dross and Wharton novels have become fashionable lately as movies. Michelle Pfeiffer was lovely as Ellen, Archer’s focus in “The Age of Innocence,” but Archer’s love for her was still unrequited.

Wharton is an ironist of first rank. That rich society has a gloss is a given, but she revealed the falsity under the glittering society of her time. The fact that Wharton’s novels have become fashionable again only shows that the society she described still exists and that her basic premises are true.

Ralph Mohr taught English and Latin at Marshfield High School for 31 years. He welcomes comments and suggestions regarding the column at rmohr1565@charter.net.