The Age of Innocence
- Written By Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence
- Edith Wharton
Freedom had a price. Only one woman was ready to pay it.
Newland Archer, a young lawyer engaged to the lovely, conventional May Welland, moves confidently through the lofty, insulated world of 1870s New York high society. His life follows a script written by generations before him. When May’s cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, returns from Europe having fled a disastrous marriage, the polished surface of Newland’s world begins to crack. Ellen is unconventional, worldly, and, by the standards of the drawing rooms that raised Newland, dangerously improper.
As Newland’s engagement to May proceeds, his firm tasks him with managing the discreet business of Ellen’s scandalous separation. The more time he spends with Ellen, the more clearly he sees his world’s cruelty, disguised as civility — and the more he wants out. But New York’s old families know how to close ranks around their own, and every path toward Ellen finds itself quietly, politely, blocked.
Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is a tragedy of manners, where the sharpest weapons include an invitation withheld, a seat left empty, and a silence that carries the force of law. Wharton spent her own childhood inside this world before turning her clear, unsparing eye on it, and the result is both a requiem for old New York and an indictment of it. Published in 1920, the novel won Wharton the Pulitzer Prize the following year, the first ever awarded to a woman for fiction.
“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”
About the Author
- Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was born Edith Newbold Jones in New York City, into a wealthy, socially prominent family and privately educated. In 1885, she married Edward “Teddy,” whom she divorced about 28 years later, on grounds of adultery and mental instability.
She began publishing fiction in earnest in her late 30s, mentored in part by her friend Henry James, whose psychological precision shaped her own. Novels like The House of Mirth (1905) and Ethan Frome (1911) established her as one of America’s sharpest observers of social constraint, before The Age of Innocence, written from the vantage of an already vanished New York, secured her greatest critical triumph.
Wharton spent much of her later life in France, where she organized relief efforts for refugees and war workers during the First World War and was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor) in recognition. She died in France in 1937, having published more than forty books. The Age of Innocence remains her most celebrated novel, a precise and quietly devastating portrait of the world that made her.
