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The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton

Penguin Publishing Group · Print & ebook · March 4, 2008

A Classics pick for readers exploring The Age of Innocence.

The ClassicsLiterary FictionGilded-Age Romancebook club
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Who it’s for
Wharton makes the rituals of Old New York feel as consequential as matters of the heart.
Themes
Love versus convention, Desire and destiny, Social ritual and loyalty
Genres
Gilded-Age Romance, The Classics, Literary Fiction

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About this book

Winner of the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a book written by a woman, The Age of Innocence is a suspenseful, deeply moving, and brilliantly accomplished novel of the struggle between desire and destiny. In the polished works of Edith Wharton, Old New York is a society at once infinitely sophisticated and ruthlessly primitive, in which adherence to ritual and loyalty to clan surpass all other values—and transgression is always punished.

Continue reading

The Age of Innocence is Wharton’s 1920 novel of love menaced by convention, played out against a gorgeously arrayed backdrop of opera houses, lavish dinner parties, country homes, and luxurious deathbeds. The young lawyer Newland Archer believes that he must make an impossible choice: domesticity with his docile and lovely fiancée, May Welland, or passion with her highly unsuitable but irresistible cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska. What Newland does not suspect—but will learn—is that the women also hold cards in this game...

Desire and Convention

Wharton makes the rituals of Old New York feel as consequential as matters of the heart.

Come here for

  • A love dilemma sharpened by social rules and family loyalty
  • The polished, punishing world of Old New York

Expect

  • A layered novel of desire constrained by convention
  • Opera houses, lavish dinners, and a society alert to transgression

Where it sits

Gilded-Age Romance52%
Literary Fiction33%
The Classics32%

Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.

Publisher categories

  • The Classics
  • Literary Fiction
  • Regency Romance
Authors
Edith Wharton
Publisher
Penguin Publishing Group
Published
March 4, 2008
Format
Print & ebook
Theme
Love versus convention · Desire and destiny · Social ritual and loyalty
Reading lane
The Classics