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Books Like The Age of Innocence
What to read after The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920) is one of the most elegant social novels in American literature — Newland Archer's impossible love for Ellen Olenska in a world that enforces its rules through silence and unspoken pressure. Wharton's Pulitzer Prize winner and widely considered her masterwork. If you were drawn to its cool precision and its portrait of a world that gets what it wants without ever saying what it wants, these novels will find you in the same territory.
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The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
The companion to The Age of Innocence from the female perspective — Lily Bart's destruction by Gilded Age New York; where Newland Archer survives the social world by capitulating to it, Lily Bart is destroyed because she cannot capitulate fully enough; the two novels together give you the complete Wharton portrait of Old New York
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The Custom of the Country
by Edith Wharton
Undine Spragg's relentless social climbing — the darkly comic counterpart to The Age of Innocence; where Newland Archer is too scrupulous to pursue what he wants, Undine is entirely without scruples and gets everything she wants; Wharton's most formally adventurous and formally angry novel
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Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
The Russian companion to The Age of Innocence — both are novels about a person who chooses the conventional life over the life they actually desire, and both trace what that choice costs; where Wharton gives you a man who surrenders his desire and survives, Tolstoy gives you a woman who does not surrender and is destroyed
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
James and Wharton were close friends and each other's most important literary interlocutors — they debated the novel's possibilities throughout their careers; The Portrait of a Lady and The Age of Innocence are the defining American social novels about a person trapped by the gap between their inner life and the social world's demands
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
The Victorian English parallel to The Age of Innocence — Dorothea Brooke's idealism and the community that contains and ultimately frustrates it; Wharton admired Eliot deeply, and both novels are about the gap between what an individual is capable of and what the social world will allow
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens, the English butler who gave his life to his profession and realizes too late what he has missed — Ishiguro's Booker Prize-winning novel is perhaps the most powerful contemporary re-creation of what The Age of Innocence does: a man of great reserve and self-suppression who understands, at the end, what his choices have cost him; the final pages are devastating in the same quiet key as Wharton's epilogue
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Washington Square
by Henry James
Catherine Sloper in 1840s New York — James's most accessible novel and the most direct predecessor to Wharton's New York fiction; very short (around 200 pages) and the best entry point to James for Wharton readers; the Washington Square world is the Old New York world forty years before The Age of Innocence
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Persuasion
by Jane Austen
Anne Elliot, who let herself be persuaded to break off her engagement to Captain Wentworth and must live with the decision for eight years — Austen is the great predecessor of both Wharton and James in the fiction of social constraint and suppressed feeling; Persuasion is the most emotionally concentrated of her novels and the one that most directly anticipates The Age of Innocence in its portrait of what it costs to be sensible rather than happy
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