The Age of Innocence

I re-read this book for research because my next book will be based in New York’s Gilded Age—around the turn of the last century. Edith Wharton’s style of writing is lyrical, descriptive, and beautiful. The characters are brilliantly drawn.

Newland Archer’s struggle between loyalty to his wife and traditional old New York society and his fascination with the deliciously foreign, forward-thinking Countess Olenska is perceptively drawn and compelling. Wharton brilliantly describes the changing landscape, how Old New York fought to hold onto its values while brash new money crashed onto the scene to change it forever.

I cried at the… show more.

It’s not easy to make me root for a fictional couple. I usually find them cloying and hope one of them falls down a flight of stairs. But when solid, dutiful Newland Archer has his bow tie set spinning by the unconventional Madame Olenska, I hoped with all my heart that it would work out.

A perfectly realized vision of upper-class New York in the late nineteenth century, a suffocating, pinched-up world where you might as well slit your own throat as pick up the wrong fork.

Before there were Daniel Day Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer, there was the book that brought them together (in the movie): Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Wharton’s lush, sepia-toned tale of the New York haut ton of the 1870s. Gilded Age society at its best; it won the 1921 Pulitzer for fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize. Read it first, then stream the movie. I loved its opulent portrayal of the well-heeled society of upper-class New York and its spot-on portrayal of moral hypocrisy. The battles that nineteenth-century women of all classes fought to live… show more.

Edith Wharton is probably one of my favourite authors. Her writing is uniquely beautiful, charming, witty, and emotionally powerful. Set at the turn of the last century it’s about upper-class New York society with its inflexible customs and rules. Handsome, noble Archer Newland is engaged to be married to sweet, innocent May. Then May’s scandalous cousin, the magnetic Countess Ellen Olenska, separated from her European husband, arrives on the scene to ruffle the feathers of this stuffy society – and threatens to steal the heart of Archer Newland. But May is stronger than she looks! 

Great fiction transports us to lost historical moments and helps us feel viscerally what it was to live through them. Among the boundless books that capture pre-twentieth-century New York, Wharton’s masterpiece stands out. In 1921, she won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for The Age of Innocence, making her the first woman to be so honored. Writing from personal experience and with a supreme command of the novel form, she distills class and gender relations among the wealthy tribes of 1870s New York—descendants of Dutch and English settlers, some with Vanderbiltian fortunes—into the story of a love affair that… show more.