The depth and profound sadness of The House of Mirth

I picked up The House of Mirth, expecting to like Edith Wharton—her prose seemed good, and her style seemed to match my personal aesthetics. As it turns out, I’m starting to like her, and like to read her other works. 
Edith Wharton, probably influenced by Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Henry James, creates complex, multifaceted characters, and presents things as they are, with a cool detachment (even if there’s an underlying misanthropy in the tone). The House of Mirth doesn’t have an intrusive, moralising narrator as in the works of George Eliot, which is good. 
I’ve seen people compare her to Henry James (and see her as an inferior James). It’s easy to see why—both write about the American upper class; both are detached; The House of Mirth tells a single story and has a perfect form like the novels of James, i.e. isn’t a “loose baggy monster”; and he’s her mentor. In the previous post, I mentioned a similarity in the idea of victory—victory has nothing to do with happiness, but with self-respect and a sense of dignity. 
However, such comparison is unfair, as they’re different. I, for one, am glad that she doesn’t write Jamesian sentences. Wharton’s also more of a visual writer—I can’t imagine James writing about light as she does, for instance. 
Above all, The House of Mirth has such depth, and profound sadness. 
Take this line: 

“Society did not turn away from her, it simply drifted by, preoccupied and inattentive, letting her feel, to the full measure of her humbled pride, how completely she had been the creature of its favour.” (B.2, ch.8) 

Or these heart-breaking lines, from Lily Bart herself: 

“"I have tried hard—but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds that one only fits into one hole? One must get back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap—and you don't know what it's like in the rubbish heap!"” (B.2, ch.12) 

Lily’s love for Lawrence Selden is deeply sad and haunting. This is the scene when he comes to talk to her and convince her to leave Mrs Hatch: 

“Though she kept the even tone of light intercourse, the question was framed in a way to remind him that his good offices were unsought; and for a moment Selden was checked by it. The situation between them was one which could have been cleared up only by a sudden explosion of feeling; and their whole training and habit of mind were against the chances of such an explosion. Selden's calmness seemed rather to harden into resistance, and Miss Bart's into a surface of glittering irony, as they faced each other from the opposite corners of one of Mrs. Hatch's elephantine sofas.” (B.2, ch.9) 

The scene reminds me of the silences in Henry James—the moments where people leave things unsaid. 
Then:

“In spite of the moderation of his tone, each word he spoke had the effect of confirming Lily's resistance. The very apprehensions he aroused hardened her against him: she had been on the alert for the note of personal sympathy, for any sign of recovered power over him; and his attitude of sober impartiality, the absence of all response to her appeal, turned her hurt pride to blind resentment of his interference. The conviction that he had been sent by Gerty, and that, whatever straits he conceived her to be in, he would never voluntarily have come to her aid, strengthened her resolve not to admit him a hair's breadth farther into her confidence. However doubtful she might feel her situation to be, she would rather persist in darkness than owe her enlightenment to Selden.” (ibid.) 

It is a subtle scene. 
Later, at their last meeting: 

“Selden continued to stand near her, leaning against the mantelpiece. The tinge of constraint was beginning to be more distinctly perceptible under the friendly ease of his manner. Her self-absorption had not allowed her to perceive it at first; but now that her consciousness was once more putting forth its eager feelers, she saw that her presence was becoming an embarrassment to him. Such a situation can be saved only by an immediate outrush of feeling; and on Selden's side the determining impulse was still lacking.
The discovery did not disturb Lily as it might once have done. She had passed beyond the phase of well-bred reciprocity, in which every demonstration must be scrupulously proportioned to the emotion it elicits, and generosity of feeling is the only ostentation condemned. But the sense of loneliness returned with redoubled force as she saw herself forever shut out from Selden's inmost self. She had come to him with no definite purpose; the mere longing to see him had directed her; but the secret hope she had carried with her suddenly revealed itself in its death-pang.” (B.2, ch.12)  

Others might not call him worthless and despicable as I did, but he’s a coward who hides behind a light-hearted, joking tone and runs away in crucial moments. He pushes her away, and she is lonely. Gerty is kind and tender to Lily, but their values are so different that she can’t understand her. Lily is lonely. 

“It was no longer, however, from the vision of material poverty that she turned with the greatest shrinking. She had a sense of deeper empoverishment—of an inner destitution compared to which outward conditions dwindled into insignificance. It was indeed miserable to be poor—to look forward to a shabby, anxious middle-age, leading by dreary degrees of economy and self-denial to gradual absorption in the dingy communal existence of the boarding-house. But there was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years. That was the feeling which possessed her now—the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them. And as she looked back she saw that there had never been a time when she had had any real relation to life. Her parents too had been rootless, blown hither and thither on every wind of fashion, without any personal existence to shelter them from its shifting gusts.” (B.2, ch.13) 

That’s a wonderful passage. 
Throughout the novel, Edith Wharton has the same detachment, but in Book 2, mostly after Lily Bart’s disgrace, Lily becomes more likeable and admirable—she becomes more aware, and there’s a very slight, very subtle shift in the tone, particularly when her values start to change. 
I like that before letting her die, Wharton lets her see a woman from Gerty’s Girls’ Club. Lily has saved her by giving her money to go to the hospital, so now, before her death, she knows she has done some good.  
The meeting with her and the baby also makes Lily realise something she never knew before about life: 

“All the men and women she knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance: her first glimpse of the continuity of life had come to her that evening in Nettie Struther's kitchen.
The poor little working-girl who had found strength to gather up the fragments of her life, and build herself a shelter with them, seemed to Lily to have reached the central truth of existence. It was a meagre enough life, on the grim edge of poverty, with scant margin for possibilities of sickness or mischance, but it had the frail audacious permanence of a bird's nest built on the edge of a cliff—a mere wisp of leaves and straw, yet so put together that the lives entrusted to it may hang safely over the abyss.” (ibid.) 

The House of Mirth is a profound book. Wharton achieves something remarkable here: she creates a superficial, selfish, and frivolous character, and now and then seems to “make sure” that readers don’t sympathise with her, but gradually gives her depth and strength, and turns her into such a tragic, heroic figure. The final chapters are haunting.