The Age of Innocence
by:
Edith Wharton (author)
Edith Wharton’s masterpiece brings to life the grandeur and hypocrisy of a gilded age. Set among the very rich in 1870s New York, it tells the story of Newland Archer, a young lawyer engaged to marry virginal socialite May Welland, when he meets her cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, a woman unbound...
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Edith Wharton’s masterpiece brings to life the grandeur and hypocrisy of a gilded age. Set among the very rich in 1870s New York, it tells the story of Newland Archer, a young lawyer engaged to marry virginal socialite May Welland, when he meets her cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, a woman unbound by convention and surrounded by scandal. As all three are drawn into a love triangle filled with sensuality, subtlety, and betrayal, Archer faces a harrowing choice between happiness and the social code that has ruled his life. The resulting tale of thwarted love is filled with irony and surprise, struggle and acceptance. Recipient of the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction ever awarded to a woman, this great novel paints a timeless portrait of “society” still unmatched in American literature—an arbitrary, capricious social elite that professes inviolable standards but readily abandons them for greed and desire.
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Format: mass market paperback
ISBN:
0553214500
Publish date: 07-2006
Publisher: Bantam Classics
Pages no: 300
Edition language: English
In the course of reading "The Age of Innocence", I sometimes just forgot that it plays in the late 19th century, because its plot and main characters somehow seem to fit contemporary views just like they would 19th-century morals. I truly enjoyed Edith Wharton's novel and ironic style of writing.
I knew this book was a classic, but not that it was a romance. I went in not knowing what to expect and came out liking the book in general; however, it was difficult for me at times. First, I had no idea how snooty and shallow New York society was at the turn of the 20th century. I can understand...
The Age of Innocence is the third book in Wharton's loosely-linked cycle focused on upper class New York of the 1870's (the other two books are The House of Mirth, published in 1905, and The Custom of the Country, published in 1913). She's writing from a distance, looking backward between 30 and 50 ...
Newland Archer was a quiet and self-controlled young man. Conformity to the discipline of a small society had become almost his second nature. Until the arrival of Countess Olenska. The novel takes place in the late nineteenth century where the American gilded age was developing in the New York...
Scorsese's version of this book is, in my opinion, one of his very best films and on the short list of films I would recommend to anyone wanting to understand good direction. This despite Michelle Pfeiffer's supposedly miscast as the female lead. Perhaps my love for the film version is what made me ...
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