The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton, 1905 CE.

In The House of Mirth, pride, indecision, and the desire for personal freedom causes wealthy socialite Lily Bart to descend from the heights of New York’s Victorian upper crust to a tragic and fatal working class poverty.  The novel tackles themes such display, courtship, adaptation, and social determinism in explicitly Darwinian language, as Bart’s inability to either fulfill her assigned role or adapt to a new one raises questions about the ‘naturalness’ of the domestic feminine role that Darwin himself had assumed.  The novel also wrestles with the implications of the ‘nature or nurture’ problem for individual moral responsibility, as when Bart, unable to explain her predicament, muses, "Why, the beginning was in my cradle, I suppose – in the way I was brought up, and the things I was taught to care for. Or no – I won't blame anybody for my faults: I'll say it was in my blood, that I got it from some wicked pleasure-loving ancestress."