Product Description

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

The Age of Innocence, one of Edith Wharton’s most renowned novels and the first by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, exquisitely details the struggle between love and responsibility through the experiences of men and women in Gilded Age New York.

The novel follows Newland Archer, a young, aristocratic lawyer engaged to the cloistered, beautiful May Welland. When May’s disgraced cousin Ellen arrives from Europe, fleeing her marriage to a Polish Count, her worldly, independent nature intrigues Archer, who soon falls in love with her. Trapped by his passionless relationship with May and the social conventions that forbid a relationship with Ellen, Archer finds himself torn between possibility and duty.

Wharton’s profound understanding of her characters’ lives makes the triangle of Archer, May, and Ellen come to life with an irresistible urgency. A wry, incisive look at the ways in which love and emotion must negotiate the complex rules of high society, The Age of Innocence is one of Wharton's finest, most illuminative works.

With an introduction by Peter Washington

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #131908 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-05
• Released on: 2008-02-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Review
“Elegiac...a novel of cruelty, loss, and grief.” —Hermione Lee

“Flawlessly executed...distinguished....a sad and beautiful love story, a brilliant satirical study.” —The New York Times

“Wharton’s touch is the deftest, the surest, of all our American manipulators in the novel.” —The New Republic

About the Author
Edith Wharton was born into a privileged New York family in 1862 and died in France in 1937. In addition to her works as a novelist, most famously The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country, and Ethan Frome, she also was a renowned interior designer, and was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION

When The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, Edith Wharton was naturally pleased, though by no means overwhelmed. The first woman to be so honoured, she was then aged fifty-eight and at the height of her powers. Rich, famous and the author of several hugely successful best-sellers, she could reasonably regard the Pulitzer as no more than official recognition of her status as the leading American novelist of her day.

Pleasure soon gave way to distaste when Wharton discovered from the prize citation that she was being rewarded for writing 'the American novel which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood'. Nauseated by the priggishness of this twaddle and baffled by its grotesque inaptitude as a description of her book, she wrote ironically to friends about the absurd idea of uplifting American morals when she had done little but satirize them for more than thirty years. But her irony turned to fury when it was further revealed that the Pulitzer jury had originally selected Sinclair Lewis's Main Street for the prize, only to find the judgment overturned in favour of Wharton by the craven prize trustees, who were alarmed by the offence Lewis's satire on small-town life was causing among their wealthy benefactors. For Wharton this was the final insult: The Age of Innocence had been chosen, not for its quality, but because it was safe. What had started out as a coronation was becoming a fiasco.

Wharton was embarrassed on her own behalf and angry for Lewis, one of the few living American novelists she respected. She was also justifiably puzzled by the behaviour of the trustees, for her study of aristocratic manners is, in the end, a far more disturbing book than Lewis's amiable and often sentimental satire on Mid-Western prejudices, and she knew it. One can only miss this fact-and the ironic force of the book's title-if one reads the novel in one's own age of innocence. Though written in a grand manner far from the engaging colloquialism of Main Street, and set largely in the past, Wharton's novel paints a bleak portrait of contemporary marriage which might have shocked the keepers of the nation's moral conscience if only they had bothered to read it with any care.

Of course, one can see why the Columbia University grandees who spurned the prize committee preferred The Age of Innocence. A tale of the familiar conflict between domestic duty and sexual desire which manages to combine an apparently happy ending with the triumph of conventional morality is no mean feat. One can also see why they might have preferred Wharton to Lewis in general. Everything about her, from the upper-class New York background to the equally upper-class literary style, made her more acceptable to an American academy which was just as timorous and conformist then as it is now. She was also elderly, safely out of the way in Europe, and therefore unlikely to cause trouble: in a sense already a writer of the past. And although worryingly diverse, her novels could eventually be slotted into a variety of traditional moulds-always reassuring when one is setting up statues to living heroes.

Lewis, by contrast, was a raw provincial, and too close to home, too vulgar and too unpredictable to be turned into an instant monument of Great American Literature-or so it seemed in 1921. The women and the lower orders in his books are apt to get out of hand, and while Wharton apparently restricts her satire to the narrow world of the American aristocracy which was, on her own account, anyway moribund, Lewis attacks powerful contemporary targets with fierce relish. He was an especially trenchant critic of the incorrigible American tendency to Political Correctness, whether of Left or Right, and the substance of Main Street is an amusing and often deadly account of one young woman's struggle with the idols of the contemporary bourgeois tribe-in this case good housekeeping, male superiority, intellectual nullity and the Grand Old Republican Party.

Ironically, Lewis won his own Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith in 1923, the year after he published Babbitt, a ferocious attack on American business ethics (or lack of them) which might be thought to have disqualified him even further. But by then, of course, Main Street had made him rich and famous, selling more than half a million copies throughout the world, and Lewis himself was 'big business'. No doubt this made him acceptable to both the Columbia trustees and the university's benefactors. It must also have added savour to the moment when Lewis refused the 1923 prize.

Despite their differences, there are many points of resemblance between Main Street and The Age of Innocence. Both are dark comedies of manners which feature cultivated, charming and self-satisfied protagonists who see themselves as rebelling heroically against philistine environments. Both examine the pains of marriage and the extent to which the sexes should enjoy equal rights and pleasures. And one might even claim that Political Correctness is a theme in both. Lewis's Carol Kennicott struggles hopelessly with the well-meaning bigotry of small-town Minnesota, while in Edith Wharton's novel the hero and his would-be mistress are kept apart by the rigid code of conduct which governed every aspect of upper-class New York life in the 1870s.

Both dramas are also deeply and crucially rooted in local conditions. Even the treatment of the plot in The Age of Innocence draws attention to this point. Though based on the familiar wife/husband/mistress triangle, Wharton takes the greatest pains to show how it is distinguished by the peculiar character of old New York society. The outline of this plot is commonplace. Newland Archer, a rich, handsome and admittedly rather spoilt young patrician of no great distinction but immaculate manners and background, becomes engaged to May Welland, a rich, beautiful and rather spoilt young woman of equal perfection, while at the same time managing to fall in love with her exotic, beautiful and rather less perfect married cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, who returns Archer's passion, though already unhappily married to a foreign nobleman. The Countess considers divorce but is persuaded against it by Archer, on behalf of her family. May offers to renounce Archer to her cousin but he refuses the offer and marries his fiancée. Meeting Ellen after the wedding, he realizes that he was wrong to advise her against the divorce. He decides to elope with her after all and face the consequences, but nothing comes of the decision. Instead, he settles down with May to a conventional and reasonably happy existence in New York, the Countess goes away to live alone in Paris, and life goes on as before.

Such a bald summary emphasizes the similarities between The Age of Innocence and other novels. Only attentive reading brings out the differences. These begin with the tone: a cool, level voice which is very much Wharton's own. They continue with the choice of detail. As with so much of Wharton's best writing, this study of human bondage is a sharply and exquisitely observed picture of the life she knew so well from her own experience. She delighted in the quidditas of things and her novels draw energy from concrete instances: when she loosens her grasp on particulars the prose wobbles and the narrative sags. Though the scenery is always subordinate to a larger artistic purpose, we sense that Wharton enjoyed describing the clothes her characters wear, the rooms they lived in, the food they ate, for their own sake. She relished her sensuous pleasures in literature as in life. Always scrupulous about detail, for this novel she commissioned research into a period which was just within the scope of her own childhood memories. Like Zola, she wanted to give a true picture of the world, believing that the truth of the picture would provide its meaning; and everything from the decoration on dinner tables to the railway routes through New York is so precisely dated and documented that The Age of Innocence might well count as an historical novel of the 1870s.

A propos this precision, Wharton's most copious biographer, R. W. B. Lewis, records that her only serious factual error was to begin a wedding ceremony with the opening words of the burial service-a mistake she swiftly corrected in subsequent editions. But if Wharton's interest in realistic detail tells us a good deal about her artistic purpose, this error illuminates the intriguing relationship between her life and her works-an important matter in the case of a writer such as Wharton who draws so evidently, so publicly and so frequently on her own experience. For if ever there was a Freudian slip and an involuntary authorial signature, this is it.

*

Edith Wharton's own marriage was long since over when The Age of Innocence appeared. Born to patrician parents, whose relationship seems to have served as one of the models for Newland and May Archer's, Edith was the youngest of three children. She wrote stories and poems from her earliest years, and produced a romantic novel in her teens. This was no more unusual for the time than her social life, and there was nothing to suggest that she was any different to a thousand other dreamy and bookish girls of the type she often writes about-a well-heeled version of James's Isabel Archer. She was brought up and brought out in the conventional manner, married at twenty-three to a man of her own class, and for the next two decades lived the life of a minor socialite, with homes in New York and Newport, and extensive travels in Europe, where she had spent much of her childhood.

Though easy and privileged, her life with Teddy Wharton turned out to be boring, blank and frustrating. She knew at first hand the despair Newland Archer feels when he contemplates a lifetime alone with his wife. Teddy was kind and affectionate, but shared none of Edith's intellectual interests. He also seems to have ta...

Customer Reviews

Passion and the outsider
It was a glittering, sumptuous time when hypocrisy was expected, discreet infidelity tolerated, and unconventionality ostracized.

That is the Gilded Age, and nobody knew its hypocrises better than Edith Wharton.... and nobody portrayed them as well. "The Age of Innocence" is a trip back in time to the stuffy upper crust of "old New York," taking us through one respectable man's hopeless love affair with a beautiful woman -- and the life he isn't brave enough to have.

Newland Archer, of a wealthy old New York family, has become engaged to pretty, naive May Welland. But as he tries to get their wedding date moved up, he becomes acquainted with May's exotic cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, who has returned home after dumping her cheating husband. At first, the two are just friends, but Newland becomes more and more entranced by the Countess' easy, free-spirited European charm.

After Newland marries May, the attraction to the mysterious Countess and her free, unconventional life becomes even stronger. He starts to rebel in little ways, but he's still mired in a 100% conventional marriage, job and life. Will he become an outcast and go away with the beautiful countess, or will he stick with May and the safe, dull life that he has condemned in others?

There's nothing too scandalous about "Age of Innocence" in a time when starlets acquire and discard boyfriends and husbands like old pantyhose -- it probably wasn't in the 1920s when it was first published. But then, this isn't a book about sexiness and steam -- it's part bittersweet romance, part social satire, and a look at what happens when human beings lose all spontaneity and passion.

Part of this is due to Wharton's portrayal of New York in the 1870s -- opulent, cultured, pleasant, yet so tied up in tradition that few people in it are able to really open up and live. It's a haze of ballrooms, gardens, engagements, and careful social rituals that absolutely MUST be followed, even if they have no meaning. It's a place "where the real thing was never said or done or even thought."

And Wharton writes distant, slightly mocking prose that outlines this sheltered little society. Her writing opens as slowly and beautifully as a rosebud, letting subtle subplots and powerful, hidden emotions drive the story. So don't be discouraged by the endless conversations about flowers, ballrooms, gloves and old family scandals that don't really matter anymore.

In the middle of all this, Newland is a rather dull, intelligent young man who thinks he's unconventional. But he becomes more interesting as he struggles between his conscience and his longing for the Countess. And as "Age of Innocence" winds on, you gradually see that he doesn't truly love the Countess, but what she represents -- freedom from society and convention.

The other two angles of this love triangle are May and Ellen. May is (suitably) pallid and rather dull, though she shows some different sides in the last few chapters. And Ellen is a magnificent character -- alluring, mysterious, but also bewildered by New York's hostility to her ways. And she's even more interesting when you realize that she isn't trying to rebel, but simply being herself.

"Age of Innocence" is a subtle look at life in Gilded Age New York, telling the story of a man desperately in love with a way of life he hasn't got the courage to pursue. Exquisite in its details, painful in its beauty.

Love, Loneliness, and the Strictures of Society.
Imagine living in a world where life is governed by intricate rituals; a world "balanced so precariously that its harmony [can] be shattered by a whisper" (Wharton); a world ruled by self-declared experts on form, propriety and family history - read: scandal -; where everything is labeled and yet, people are not; where in order not to disturb society's smooth surface nothing is ever expressed or even thought of directly, and where communication occurs almost exclusively by way of symbols, which are unknown to the outsider and, like any secret code, by their very encryption guarantee his or her permanent exclusion.

Such, in faithful imitation of Victorian England, was the society of late 19th century upper class New York. Into this society returns, after having grown up and lived all her adult life in Europe, American-born Countess Ellen Olenska, after leaving a cruel and uncaring husband. She already causes scandal by the mere manner of her return; but not knowing the secret rituals of the society she has entered, she quickly brings herself further into disrepute by receiving an unmarried man, by being seen in the company of a man only tolerated by virtue of his financial success and his marriage to the daughter of one of this society's most respected families, by arriving late to a dinner in which she has expressly been included to rectify a prior general snub, by leaving a drawing room conversation to instead join a gentleman sitting by himself - and worst of all, by openly contemplating divorce, which will most certainly open up a whole Pandora's box of "oddities" and "unpleasantness:" the strongest terms ever used to express moral disapproval in this particular social context. Soon Ellen, who hasn't seen such façades even in her husband's household, finds herself isolated and, wondering whether noone is ever interested in the truth, complains bitterly that "[t]he real loneliness here is living among all these kind people who only ask you to pretend."

Ellen finds a kindred soul in attorney Newland Archer, her cousin May Welland's fiancé, who secretly toys with a more liberal stance, while outwardly endorsing the value system of the society he lives in. Newland and Ellen fall in love - although not before he has advised her, on his employer's and May and Ellen's family's mandate, not to pursue her plans of divorce. As a result, Ellen becomes unreachable to him, and he flees into accelerating his wedding plans with May, who before he met Ellen in his eyes stood for everything that was good and noble about their society, whereas now he begins to see her as a shell whose interior he is reluctant to explore for fear of finding merely a kind of serene emptiness there; a woman whose seemingly dull, passive innocence grinds down every bit of roughness he wants to maintain about himself and who, as he realizes even before marrying her, will likely bury him alive under his own future. Then his passion for Ellen is rekindled by a meeting a year and a half after his wedding, and an emotional conflict they could hardly bear when he was not yet married escalates even further. And only when it is too late for all three of them he finds out that his wife had far more insight (and almost ruthless cleverness) than he had ever credited her with.

Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize and the first work of fiction written by a woman to be awarded that distinction, "The Age of Innocence" is one of Edith Wharton's most enduringly popular novels; the crown jewel among her subtly satirical descriptions of New York upper class society. By far not as overtly condemning and cynical as the earlier "House of Mirth" (for which Wharton reportedly even saw this later work as a sort of apology), "The Age of Innocence" is a masterpiece of characterization and social study alike: an intricate canvas painted by a master storyteller who knew the society which she described inside out, and who, even though she had moved to France (where she would continue living for the rest of her life) almost a decade earlier, was able to delineate late 19th century New York society's every nuance in pitch-perfect detail, while at the same time - seemingly without any effort at all - also blending together all these minute details into an impeccably composed ensemble that will stay with the reader long after he has turned the last page.

Also recommended:
Wharton: Four Novels (Library of America College Editions)
Edith Wharton: Vol 1. Collected Stories:1891-1910 (Library of America)
Edith Wharton: Vol.2 Collected Stories 1911-1937 (Library of America)
Henry James : Novels 1881-1886: Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians (Library of America)
Henry James: Novels 1901-1902: The Sacred Fount / The Wings of the Dove (Library of America)
Ethan Frome
The House of Mirth
Washington Square
The Portrait of a Lady
The Wings of the Dove

A Battle Fought By The Maliciously Polite
Newland Archer is engaged to May-old New York's most desirable debutante. Then May's cousin, Countess Olenska, arrives in New York and May's charms seem contrived in comparison. Archer wants the Countess Olenska, but he lacks the courage to bring the relationship to fruition. Thus a whole lifetime of love is missed and mourned.

There is much to be admired in Wharton's story of an unhappy marriage in old New York. But I must have spent too long in New Zealand because I find myself agreeing whole heartedly with Kiwi Katherine Mansfield's Katherine Mansfield's Short Stories (Norton Critical Edition) 1920 Athenaeum review of this book-the characters in The Age of Innocence were "mere portraits" and I did not "grow warm in a gallery where the temperature is so sparkling cool". A whole book devoted to a few meager expressions of passion was stifling. And when I say meager, I mean meager. The peak-a wanton, uncontrolled, passion fueled expression of love between Archer and the Countess Olenska is always in dim view, but no one wants to dare make the trek to the summit and live with the consequences. Archer, May and the Countess Olenska live in a beautiful world, but it owns them. You keep hoping for inroads into these stifling characters, some human weakness, but they all refuse to drink the wine. It's refreshing to read a book where people are more than slaves to biological passions, but these characters still sell their souls for money, title, position and the respect of people they scant respect themselves. Ultimately this is a book about opportunities missed not because of circumstances, but because the players never had the courage to express their love. It's a good story, but Wharton's writing may be just as full of the "faint implications" and "spare delicacies" that she accuses her characters of having.

A good read, but not one of my favorites. I found the text a little spare.

The Scorsese film The Age of Innocence does an excellent job of bringing this story to the screen and is highly recommended.