The Age of Innocence
"Contexts" constructs the historical foundation for this very historical novel. Many documents are included on the "New York Four Hundred," elite social gatherings, archery (the sport for upper-crust daughters), as well as Wharton's manuscript outlines, letters, and related writings.
"Criticism" collects eleven American and British contemporary reviews and nine major essays on The Age of Innocence, including a groundbreaking piece on the two film adaptations of the novel.
"A Chronology and Selected Bibliography" are also included.
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Community Reviews
Newland Archer to my mind is one of the wimpiest, most wishy washy characters I have ever read about. Also, the coincidence of the tutor of Mrs. Archer's English friends being Count Olenska's secretary is an awfully big one to swallow.
I read this in high school for a class and loved it. It was so outside of what I normally read I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed it.
I just re-read this novel, savoring every sentence and appreciating it even more than I did the first time around. Edith Wharton was a writer with true genius. In "The Age of Innocence," as she did in many other books, she zeroed in on the narrow and inflexible constraints of the upper-class society in which she herself was raised in the late 1800s-early 1900s, though this novel is set in the 1870s.
The novel's main character is Newland Archer, a young man of privilege about to marry May Welland, one of "his own" in terms of wealth and status. Archer's worldview about all that is "correct" in wealthy New York circles is soon turned on its head when May's cousin, Madame Olenska, arrives from Europe with a reputation for having a sullied, mysterious past as the wife of an abusive European count. In leaving her husband, possibly with the assistance of another man, she risks bringing disgrace on the entire Welland family.
Introducing Madame Olenska back into "good" society is part of Newland's job, but in doing so, he soon falls in love with his fiance's cousin. Newland's intellectual curiosity makes him feel the superior of the other "carefully brushed, white-waistcoated, buttonhole-flowered gentlemen who succeeded each other in the club box" where they view the opera, and as the novel progresses, he finds it harder to maintain his previous beliefs about what is "right" and acceptable, and suffers the agony of living according to the strictures of duty while the passions of his heart lie elsewhere.
Wharton's writing is so vivid and remarkable that anyone who savors language is missing out if they do not read her. Here is how Wharton introduces the character of Catherine Mingott, May Welland's feisty, wise and sometimes wise-cracking matriarch of the Welland clan:
"The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly turned food and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott, and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poied like gulls on the surface of the billows."
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921, The Age of Innocence deserves its place as a classic of American literature. The story line is compelling, the narrative unfurls at just the right pace, the main characters are compelling and memorable, and the writing is sublime.
The novel's main character is Newland Archer, a young man of privilege about to marry May Welland, one of "his own" in terms of wealth and status. Archer's worldview about all that is "correct" in wealthy New York circles is soon turned on its head when May's cousin, Madame Olenska, arrives from Europe with a reputation for having a sullied, mysterious past as the wife of an abusive European count. In leaving her husband, possibly with the assistance of another man, she risks bringing disgrace on the entire Welland family.
Introducing Madame Olenska back into "good" society is part of Newland's job, but in doing so, he soon falls in love with his fiance's cousin. Newland's intellectual curiosity makes him feel the superior of the other "carefully brushed, white-waistcoated, buttonhole-flowered gentlemen who succeeded each other in the club box" where they view the opera, and as the novel progresses, he finds it harder to maintain his previous beliefs about what is "right" and acceptable, and suffers the agony of living according to the strictures of duty while the passions of his heart lie elsewhere.
Wharton's writing is so vivid and remarkable that anyone who savors language is missing out if they do not read her. Here is how Wharton introduces the character of Catherine Mingott, May Welland's feisty, wise and sometimes wise-cracking matriarch of the Welland clan:
"The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly turned food and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott, and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poied like gulls on the surface of the billows."
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921, The Age of Innocence deserves its place as a classic of American literature. The story line is compelling, the narrative unfurls at just the right pace, the main characters are compelling and memorable, and the writing is sublime.
(Don't know why it took me so long to finally read this book, but totally different story than what I thought it was...)
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