The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton's book "The Age of Innocence" expresses a moment in time: New York in the 1870s. It vividly details a tragic struggle between responsibility and love in the Gilded Age, a time when people “feared scandal more than diseases.”

In this novel released in 1920, a young advocate called Newland Archer falls in love with his fiancee's cousin who is separated from her husband. Torn between passion and duty, Archer struggles to choose a path that will either courageously define his life or damage it. Newland's impending marriage to his fiancee, May Welland, will bring together two of New York’s oldest families. However, from the book’s opening pages, Newland is smitten by Countess Ellen Olenska's mysterious Old World eccentricity and passionate intensity.

This classic Wharton tale of elusive love is a profoundly moving and exuberantly comic take on the desires of the human heart and a literary accomplishment of the highest order. Today, it stands as a brutal indictment of a community separated from reality and in desperate need of a European sensibility.

The Age of Innocence was first serialized by the Pictorial Review magazine before being released by D. Appleton and Company as a novel in London and New York. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, the first awarded to a woman for fiction.