The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece. It was her twelfth novel, initially serialized in four parts in the Pictorial Review magazine in 1920, and later released by D. Appleton and Company as a book in New York and in London. At the heart of the story are three people whose entangled lives are deeply affected by the tyrannical and rigid requirements of high society. Newland Archer, a restrained young attorney, is engaged to the lovely May Welland but falls in love with May‘s beautiful and unconventional cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska. Despite his fear of a dull marriage to May, Archer goes through with the ceremony-persuaded by his own sense of honor, family, and societal pressures. He continues to see Ellen after the marriage, but his dreams of living a passionate life ultimately cease. ‘The Age of Innocence‘ is Edith Wharton‘s masterful portrait of desire and betrayal during the sumptuous Golden Age of Old New York, a time when society "dreaded scandal more than disease."