In what is considered Wharton's first major literary effort, she is credited for presenting a successful blending of social satire and criticism. Critic Louis Auchincloss wrote in 1961, the novel "marks her coming of age as a novelist. At last, and simultaneously, she had discovered both her medium and her subject matter. The first was the novel of manners and the latter the assault upon the old Knickerbocker society in which she had grown up of the new millionaires, the 'invaders' as she called them, who had been so fabulously enriched by the business growth following the Civil War. . . . Mrs. Wharton saw clearly enough that the invaders and defenders were bound ultimately to bury their hatchet in a noisy, stamping dance, but she saw also the rich possibilities for satire in the contrasts afforded by the battle line in its last stages and the pathos of the individuals who were fated to be trampled under the feet of those boisterous truce makers."
According to Auchincloss, Wharton "had a firm grasp of what 'society,' in the smaller sense of the word, was actually made up of. She understood that it was arbitrary, capricious, and inconsistent; she was aware that it did not hesitate to abolish its standards while most loudly proclaiming them. She knew money could open doors and when it couldn't, when lineage would serve and when it could be merely sneered at." Auchincloss continued: "She realized that the social game was without rules, and this realization made her one of the few novelists before Proust who could describe it with any profundity."
