The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
Summary
Newland Archer is a young lawyer of old New York in the 1870s, newly engaged to May Welland, who is lovely, correct and exactly what his world intends him to have. Into the season comes May's cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, who has done the unforgivable: she has left her brutal Polish husband and come home, trailing Europe, scandal and the possibility of a divorce the family is determined to prevent.
Archer is assigned to talk her out of it, and falls in love instead, not only with Ellen but with what she stands for, a life in which people say what they mean. The novel is the machinery of his world closing around that love. Nothing is ever stated; there are no confrontations, no scenes. Invitations, seating plans and silences do all the work, and Wharton's triumph is May herself, who appears to notice nothing and, in one of the great quiet reversals in American fiction, turns out to have orchestrated everything, announcing her pregnancy to Ellen at precisely the fatal moment.
Ellen returns to Europe, Archer stays, and the last chapter, decades later, is the most argued over in Wharton. A widower now, brought to Paris by his grown son, Archer sits on a bench below Ellen's apartment and decides not to go up, keeping the memory instead of the woman.
Around three hundred and fifty pages, composed, ironic and completely controlled.
Best for readers who want the great American novel of renunciation, in which the villain is a whole society being perfectly polite.
Historical Context & Significance
The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1921, making Edith Wharton the first woman to win it, and the circumstances carry an irony she relished bitterly: the jury had chosen Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, and the board overturned the pick on political and moral grounds. Wharton, no admirer of the terms on which she had won, wrote to Lewis about it and the two became friends; he dedicated Babbitt to her.
She wrote the novel in France in 1919 and 1920, after the war and after the New York of her childhood had entirely vanished, and it was serialised in the Pictorial Review before book publication in October 1920. The distance is the point: it is an anthropology of a dead tribe by its most gifted survivor, affectionate and merciless at once.
Martin Scorsese filmed it in 1993 with Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer, and the novel has never needed rescuing: it sits with The House of Mirth at the centre of Wharton's claim on the American canon.