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The Age of Innocence Paperback – May 8, 2022

by Edith Wharton (Author)

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It was Madame Nilsson's first appearance that winter, and what the daily press had already learned to describe as "an exceptionally brilliant audience" had gathered to hear her, transported through the slippery, snowy streets in private broughams, in the spacious family landau, or in the humbler but more convenient "Brown coupe." To come to the Opera in a Brown coupe was almost as honourable a way of arriving as in one's own carriage; and departure by the same means had the immense advantage of enabling one (with a playful allusion to democratic principles) to scramble into the first Brown conveyance in the line, instead of waiting till the cold-and-gin congested nose of one's own coachman gleamed under the portico of the Academy. It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

Print length

174 pages
Language

English
Publication date

May 8, 2022
Dimensions

7 x 0.44 x 10 inches
ISBN-13

979-8818817279
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Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09ZSZV1WK
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Independently published (May 8, 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 174 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8818817279
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 0.44 x 10 inches

Customer Reviews:
2,239 ratings

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Edith Wharton
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George Eliot
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Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 - 22 December 1880; alternatively "Mary Anne" or "Marian"), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871-72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.
She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. She also wished to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as an editor and critic. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 years.
Her 1872 work Middlemarch has been described by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Swiss artist Alexandre-Louis-François d'Albert-Durade (1804-86) [Public Domain], via English Wikipedia.
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Carrie Hogle

Beautiful edition

Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2022

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The moral or concept of the idea is important. I love the binding and presentation of the "word cloud classics" This particular story is not my preferred writing style but most certainly worth keeping.

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Jeffrey Swystun

"Is New York such a labyrinth?"

Reviewed in the United States on November 13, 2013

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Wharton won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Age of Innocence making it the first novel written by a woman to do so. It is set in upper class New York City in the 1870s. That set was relatively small in number at the time, "The New York of Newland Archer's day was a small and slippery pyramid, in which, as yet, hardly a fissure had been made or a foothold gained."

Newland is the lead character, a man torn between the old and new, the conservative and the progressive. These are represented in the two women in his life. He marries May as society and family expects. All the while he pines for Countess Ellen Olenska, May's exotic cousin. Newland soon finds that his beautiful wife lacks imagination and adventure. She becomes tedious to Newland to the point that he fears "his tendency to dwell on the things he disliked in her."

Yet, he stays faithful and tries to communicate with May as to his needs and wants. She humors his dreams and he pushes back, "But why should they be only descriptions? Why shouldn't we make them real?" In the end, May cannot see a life or way of life outside of the circle she is most comfortable.

This makes Ellen even more desirable to Newland. She is unconventional and alluring seemingly born a generation before her time. He continuously warns Ellen of how complex New York society is and she retorts, "Is New York such a labyrinth?" Ellen believes it is quite predictable likening the upper crust to the city's street grid system.

Wharton provides great observations of human behavior that resonate today. Early in the novel she says that livery drivers recognized "that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it." She was referring to opera but if you have seen fans leaving a National Hockey League game you know of what she writes.

The author possesses a biting sense of humor that is best exhibited in the descriptions of life in New York. The novel is set when it "was peculiar to live above Thirty-Fourth Street" and when attending a party "hot canvas-back ducks and vintage wines" were preferred over "tepid Veuve Clicquot without a year and warmed-up croquettes from Philadelphia." Descriptions of people's homes along Madison Avenue are incredible. One possesses a ballroom used just one day a year.

Wharton ends the novel beautifully by fast-forwarding through the years. Newland observes how liberal society has become for his grown children. He has lived long enough to see innovations including long-distance telephone calls, electric light and five-day voyages across the Atlantic. He too has been born a generation too early and upon reflection laments, "The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else."

6 people found this helpful

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Glenn Miller

Holds up well

Reviewed in the United States on June 3, 2022

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One hundred+ years after publication, the book holds up well and merits reading. Though the writing style might be considered heavy and melodramatic in comparison to today’s style, the themes Wharton explores remain contemporary. Society’s expectations and constrictions vs. individual expression and happiness, as well as the impact of art — and what it represents —upon the human soul are critical themes in much of Wharton’s writing, deftly explored within this novel.

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Lola

Wharton hater >>> Wharton devotee

Reviewed in the United States on February 1, 2015

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For a long time, I was puzzled that The Age of Innocence had won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1921, because Edith Wharton sucked.

When I was an undergrad I had to read a different, more obscure Edith Wharton novel (I won't say which one), and it was horrid. I looooathed it. The plot was feeble and uninteresting, the female protagonist vapid, the male supporting characters even more repulsive. In fiction, I read primarily for human drama and interaction, and if I don't feel that the characters are well-developed and have verisimilitude, I don't feel like reading on. I don't have to like a character or want them as a neighbor, but they have to be interesting. Well, Ms. Wharton's characters in that other, weaker novel were neither likable nor interesting. I was required to finish that novel, but then I was done with Edith Wharton forever.

Since then, otherwise literate people have suggested that I read The Age of Innocence. I always declined. Recently, though, a writer friend hounded me enough that I accepted the loaner copy she pushed into my hands and promised I would at least try it. Thirty pages or so, I promised.

Less than ten pages in, I was hooked. Remember what I said up there about the character-driven novel? Here it is, in spades. If you aren't familiar with the story (no spoilers, I promise), it takes place in New York in the 1870s and centers on a young upper-class attorney, Newland Archer. Though narrated in third person, the reader is privy to Newland's thoughts, ideas, emotions, conflicts. He is engaged to a reputable young woman, but becomes infatuated with her cousin, who is not so reputable. This unfortunate triad (can you feel the tension?) exists in the social minefield of high society, scandal is avoided at all costs, appearances are everything and therefore hypocrisy is the norm. Newland detests his social matrix, but he also benefits from it and it's where he's generally comfortable, so he plays the game. May (his fiancée) and Ellen (her exotic cousin) each have a complicated relationship with society, as well. Their relationships, their choices (or failures to choose) and the consequences drive the action of the novel, and that was all well and good, but I kept reading because Newland and May and Ellen were so very, very real. They were complex, and the choices presented to them were not black and white (hey, just like real life). Newland's interior conflicts constitute the bulk of this luscious reading; however, without getting right into their heads, Wharton portrays both May and Ellen so sympathetically that we, the readers, pick up the cues that Newland misses in order to understand what they're experiencing, too.

This novel is often cited as a masterful portrait of the high society of that time and place, most notably of its shortcomings. Yes, it is that, and yes, it's so well written that you feel yourself needing to step out for air because you're suffocating in that byzantine system of propriety. More than that, though, this novel is about human beings and how they behave when they have to make difficult choices. All the great novels are.

5 people found this helpful

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Caroline Benard

Great

Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2022

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Great book

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Jenny T

I’m not old fashioned

Reviewed in the United States on March 23, 2022

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So many rules and constraints. I had a difficult time breathing in some parts of the novel. The fear of doing or saying something wrong, and yet the subtle, nuanced conversations were perfectly honed. In addition to that, the insightful descriptions of each setting make it impossible not to highlight paragraph after paragraph. But the biggest effect from this book is realizing how today we stripped down conventions and behaviors, so much that its also an inarticulate, pointless world. Whoa! Back at you.

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Molly H

SCAM EDiTiON - Not the original text

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 23, 2019

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This edition is a terrible scam. It should not be on Kindle. It is NOT the wonderful book written by Edith Wharton, but some colloquial re-writing of the same book with terrible grammar and language. I had to purchase another copy, because I could not read the text of this version. I was outraged. Never came across this type of scam before, but next time I will be much more careful with what version I am purchasing.
There is no indication in the description, whatsoever that it may be some re-worked version of the original.

30 people found this helpful

Book Bonkers

A Window Into A Gilded Age...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 10, 2018

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Wharton wrote this novel in the wake of the Great War looking back across half a century to what Mark Twain called 'The Gilded Age' in U.S. history. Among her characters are the harpies of New York, with their heron-feathered millinery and ancestral bling, who live in 'a kind of hieroglyphic world' where 'arbitrary signs' are the staple of easy communication. Against the backdrop of a world where the 'green mould of the perfunctory spreads perceptibly', Newland Archer is in love with May Welland, 'sincerely and placidly in love', and that 'placidly' is placed to perfection, undercutting the sincerity with something suggesting total indifference. Beautifully gauged lexical treasures like that are in store on every page in this novel. Lurking and laughing gently beneath the surface of the city's factitious (Wharton enjoys the word) mannerisms is the voice of Wharton herself embracing the era with mingled attitudes of pity and repugnance. M. Rivière, the French tutor and the Count's emissary, refers to New York's lack of any sense of Parisian 'quant à soi', the moral freedom of Europeans, though Olenski's own shameful treatment of Ellen suggests how two-edged that sword can be.

The 'innocence' of the title, similarly, has its underbelly exposed in some finely ironic masterstrokes, where 'human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile'. Young women like May Welland are 'carefully trained NOT to possess freedom of judgment' and, like Mrs Van de Luyden, 'are preserved in the atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a rosy life-in-death.' Though Wharton keeps her finely-ground opera-glasses trained on the circle of ladies who lived 'in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies', it is in the minutely-observed details of the Archer / Olenska affair that the novel sparkles with brilliant narrative energy. The carefully controlled distances and sudden impulses of intimacy between them belong in a class of their own, not least in the moment of exquisite self-restraint where Newland Archer fails, but only just, to make it into the 'new land' of that encounter in the pagoda with his beloved. His land of visions, with its 'tragic and moving possibilities', contrasts with the cold-blooded complacency and ugly condescension of New York 'Society' and the 'elaborate futility' of his life. That polarity pervades his evolution as a character and makes the ending, when you come to it, both powerful and utterly convincing. Remember to draw down the shutters when you finish. Those draughts can kill.

21 people found this helpful

Joe Edge T

Not Edith Wharton and Impossible to Read. DO NOT BUY.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 22, 2019

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This has never happened to me before. The Kindle version that I received is appalling. The sentences do not make sense and are not as Edith Wharton wrote. An example:-"Newland Archer, leaning against the wall behind the membership container, became his eyes from the level and scanned the opposite side of the house". Edith Wharton never wrote such rubbish. Most of the sentences are much longer than this and give you the feeling, as you read them, that you are losing your mind. Who has produced this bilge and why does Amazon sell it?

16 people found this helpful

LizzieB

Garbled translation on Kindle

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 6, 2019

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Unfortunately, as many other reviewers have commented, the conversion/translation into the Kindle edition has left ridiculously garbled text that makes an otherwise excellent book unreadable. It was so awful I had to buy the Audible version so I could be ready for my book club. If I'd started reading the Kindle version within seven days I could have had a refund, but, alas, I did not so there's no comeback. Come on Amazon, sort this out. The Audible version is perfect, the Kindle version is unreadable.

12 people found this helpful

SusannahB

A Beautifully Written and Perceptively Observed Story

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 27, 2017

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In Edith Wharton's twelfth novel 'The Age of Innocence', we meet Archer Newland, a young lawyer living in New York in the 1870s, who has been looking forward to his marriage to the naive and lovely May Welland, a society beauty whose sheltered upbringing and training has turned her into a young woman destined to become the perfect wife and mother. However, despite Archer's appreciation of May's quiet charms, he soon begins to find her strict adherence to society's rules and conventions and her unadventurous spirit rather frustrating and limiting - especially when he meets her cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, an exotic and intriguing woman, who has scandalously left her husband in Europe and whose independent outlook on life forces Archer to question the narrow confines of his. Before long, Archer has fallen in love with Ellen, but nevertheless goes ahead with the wedding; however each time he meets the Countess Olenska, he finds it difficult to control his feelings, especially as Ellen shows that she is attracted to him as much as he is to her. Does Archer manage to suppress his deep desire for Ellen and dutifully stand by his marriage vows, or does he decide to disregard the rules of society and leave his conventional life behind him? Obviously I must leave that for those who have yet to read the book to learn for themselves.

In this novel, which was first published in 1920 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, Edith Wharton deftly paints a convincing portrait of upper-class New York society of the 1870s with its rigid code of conduct and its many hypocrisies, and the narrative is littered with Ms Wharton's perceptive observations of the society in which she grew up. Her characters are believable creations whose personalities develop through the course of the story and although, at the outset of the novel we might find ourselves sympathizing with May in her innocence, we soon begin to see that she is not as innocent or guileless as she initially seems and that when she needs to be she can be designing and manipulative - whilst conversely, we see the apparently less moralistic Ellen Olenska behaving in more admirable manner than her detractors might suppose she would - but I cannot explain further without revealing spoilers. All in all, I found this a beautifully written and very engaging read and, like the author's ' The House of Mirth ', is one that I would be happy to revisit in the future.

5 Stars.

9 people found this helpful

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