We sat in a hotel and worked on some scenes, and at the end, he said, 'Would you like to play my Lily Bart?'

Lily Bart, for all her other missteps, remains chaste to the end.

Ms. Sullivan says that her Lily Bart fall from network star to has-been was abrupt and painful.

Sykes's heroine has none of the severe stakes for which Lily Bart was once forced to play.

Hillary Clinton is no Lily Bart, but she has had her own rough education in the ways of the capital.

I regret Selden's inability to take a stand, a male version of Lily Bart's own vacillation.

The only chaste person in Wharton's novel is its heroine, Lily Bart.

And we're not about to see another walking, talking Lily Bart any time soon.

The answer, in short, was my heroine Lily Bart.

Beautiful Lily Bart (played here by Gillian Anderson) is 29, living on a very small inheritance and in need of a rich husband.