Product Description

The Age of Innocence marks the pinnacle of Edith Wharton’s career as one of the finest American novelists of her era. The narrative follows Newland Archer, of upper-crust 1870s New York, whose passion for the mysterious Countess Ellen Olenska, leads him to question the very foundations of his way of life. Written in the aftermath of World War I, the novel explores the psychological and cultural paradoxes of desire in a world undergoing unprecedented transformations.

This edition includes a critical introduction and a range of appendices that contextualize the novel in terms of its modernist themes and tensions.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1871714 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Amazon.com Review
Somewhere in this book, Wharton observes that clever liars always come up with good stories to back up their fabrications, but that really clever liars don't bother to explain anything at all. This is the kind of insight that makes The Age of Innocence so indispensable. Wharton's story of the upper classes of Old New York, and Newland Archer's impossible love for the disgraced Countess Olenska, is a perfectly wrought book about an era when upper-class culture in this country was still a mixture of American and European extracts, and when "society" had rules as rigid as any in history.

Review
Michael Nowlin's edition is an excellent resource... -- Shari Benstock, University of Miami

No one working on Wharton today places her so accurately as Nowlin... -- Linda Wagner-Martin, The University of North Carolina at Chapel-Hill

Review
"Is it--in this world--vulgar to ask for more? To entreat a little wildness, a dark place or two in the soul?"--Katherine Mansfield

"There is no woman in American literature as fascinating as the doomed Madame Olenska. . . . Traditionally, Henry James has always been placed slightly higher up the slope of Parnassus than Edith Wharton. But now that the prejudice against the female writer is on the wane, they look to be exactly what they are: giants, equals, the tutelary and benign gods of our American literature."--Gore Vidal

"Will writers ever recover that peculiar blend of security and alertness which characterizes Mrs. Wharton and her tradition?"--E. M. Forster

Customer Reviews

American Middlemarch?
This is a stunning masterpiece of American literature. Wharton reaches the heights achieved by England's George Eliot in Middlemarch. Age of Innnocence is considered one of the top 100 novels in the English language and I heartily agree. The novel is set in the Golden Age of New York high society in the 1870's. Like Middlemarch, manners and rigid conformity assure success. Love is an anomaly.

Newland Archer, rich and well-connected, is poised to marry May Welland. She is beautiful, suitable and pure. In fact she is compared to a Diana, goddess of the hunt. This is the virgin archetype, untouchable, pure and only desirable from a distance. Archer meets her scandalous cousin, the Countess Olenska. Olenska has committed the unforgivable and left her husband for another man. She is taboo. She is also older, wiser and sexual (more taboos.) Archer is irrestibly drawn to her and thus forms the conflict for the rest of the novel.

No one of her era writes of toxic marriages better than Wharton; she had her own tragic marriage to a man who used her fortune to set up a house for his mistress. And don't forget Wharton's equally famous novel Ethan Frome, about another toxic marriage that ends in grief.

Good news,by the way; Wharton's home in Lennox, MA, the Mount, is being restored. It's home to a resident theater that does some brilliant Shakespeare. If you have a chance to go, do so. It's a wonderful experience.

"An atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies."
Newland Archer, the protagonist of this ironically entitled novel set in the late nineteenth century, is a proper New York gentleman, and part of a society which adheres to strict social codes, subordinating all aspects of life to doing what is expected, which is synonymous with doing what it right. As the author remarks early in the novel, "Few things were more awful than an offense against Taste." Newland meets and marries May Welland, an unimaginative, shallow young woman whose upbringing has made her the perfect, inoffensive wife, one who knows how to behave and how to adhere to the "rules" of the society in which they live.

When Newland is reintroduced to May's cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, who has left her husband in Europe and now wants a divorce, he finds himself utterly captivated by her independence and her willingness to risk all, socially, by flouting convention. Both Ellen and Newland are products of their upbringing and their culture, however, and they resist their feelings because of their separate social obligations. Various meetings between them suggest that their feelings are far stronger than what is obvious on the surface, and the question of whether they will finally state the obvious or act on their feelings constitutes the plot.

Wharton creates an exceptionally realistic picture of New York in the post-Civil War era, a time in which aristocrats of inherited wealth found themselves competing socially with parvenus. Her ability to show the conflict between a person's need for social acceptance and the desire for personal freedom is striking. As the various characters make their peace with their decisions--either to challenge or yield to social dictates--the novel achieves an unusual dramatic tension, subtle because of its lack of direct confrontation and powerful in its effects on individual destinies. This is, in fact, less an "age of innocence" than it is an age of social manipulation.

Wharton herself manipulates the reader--some of her best dialogues and scenes are those the characters never actually have--conversations that they imagine, confrontations which they never allow themselves to have, and resolutions which happen through inaction rather than through decision-making. Filled with acute social observations, the novel shows individuals convincing themselves that obeying social dictates is the right thing to do. Though the novel sometimes seems claustrophobic due to its limitations on action, Age of Innocence brilliantly captures the age and attitudes of the era. Mary Whipple

A Stirring Social Commentary
I am a college student with a plethora of essays to write, tests to study for, and books to read (most of which I honestly don't have time to finish); but many a task were set aside and the fluorescent light in my dorm room burned late into the night as I was drawn into Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Age of Innocence. I was enticed by every one of Wharton's characters and the settings they so splendidly occupy. In the first scene, we are not only introduced to the central characters of the novel, but also to Wharton's keen insight on New York high society in the 1870's; they are a people who "dreaded scandal more than disease," and "want to get away from amusement ever more quickly than they want to get to it." We meet and are immediately attracted to the young and intelligent Newland Archer, who is admiring from afar his fiancé-to-be at the New York Opera. Both Archer and his love, May Welland, are of the highest class and make the most fitting couple (as is to be expected). But as Archer is studying May's purity and imagining their wedded bliss, he notices the entrance of a scandalously clad young woman into May's opera box. [Insert dramatic music] The appearance of Countess Olenska (May's cousin) triggers gasps and rumors from the observant, and introduces the central and ensuing conflicts of the novel: non-conformity versus docile submission, passionate love versus restraint and responsibility. In The Age of Innocence, Wharton presents a dichotomy of characters that we are compelled to identify with. She submits a moral dilemma that she purposefully neglects to resolve. My passionate, impulsive side yearned for Archer to forget any and all promises he had made, to forget the shame that he would bring upon his and May's family, and just escape with Countess Olenska from the stiff New York society forced upon him. But my reasonable, more stable side knew that this would only have tragic results for all involved. But should he endure a life of tedium just to keep up appearances? Was it in fact a life if tedium, or did it prove fruitful in the end? These are all quandaries left for Wharton's audience to sort through and decide for themselves. I love The Age of Innocence; Wharton paints a lucid portrait of a society I was unfamiliar with but now feel inexplicably linked to; of a people who were consciously blinded by a rigid stratum of etiquette and propriety. I am grateful to live in a much more liberated time, where my every word and action isn't scrutinized by an entire city. But I couldn't help but be enthralled and enchanted by the gas lit streets, the majestic ballrooms, and the other charming aspects of old New York. The Age of Innocence is one of the best social commentaries I have ever read, and I recommend it to all.