The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence is the representative work of the American woman writer Edith Wharton. It was first published in 1920 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921, making Wharton the first woman to receive that award. The novel turns back the clock to upper-class New York society in the late 1870s and early 1880s—that "small pyramid" where Wharton spent her childhood and youth and which she both cherished and resented all her life. The story revolves around the young lawyer Newland Archer: born into a distinguished family, he knows every rule of old New York and is engaged to May Welland, a pure and demure woman of matching background; but May's cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, returns from Europe intending to divorce her loveless husband and is immediately regarded by high society as a dangerous figure. Newland is asked to persuade Ellen to give up the idea, yet in their dealings he is deeply drawn to her candor, independence, and vitality, and comes to realize that his supposedly respectable engagement is merely an assigned role. Between etiquette, family honor, and personal feeling, he hesitates and retreats again and again, ultimately choosing to stay on the established track. Many years later, after May's death, Newland travels to Paris with his eldest son; he reaches the foot of Ellen's building but ultimately does not go up. In a calm, restrained, and deeply ironic tone, the book portrays human nature disciplined and suppressed beneath the appearance of "innocence," and one man's long backward glance at the life he never chose.