An impoverished member of the privileged high society of old New York,
Lily Bart is beautiful and socially agreeable, but she is almost thirty
and still unmarried. Now she is keen to secure a wealthy husband to
confirm her status, but the debts she contracts at the card table, her
reduced circumstances and the constant gossip she attracts from
malevolent tongues through her heedless behaviour and faux pas make her
prospects look bleak. As suitor after suitor appears and fades away, and
she is drawn further and further down a spiral of loneliness and
unhappiness, she realizes that she is just one step away from losing
everything she has.