Reading Order
The Age of Innocence Reading Order
The Age of Innocence (1920) by Edith Wharton is the novel that won her the Pulitzer Prize — the first woman to receive it — and remains her most widely read and beloved work: the story of Newland Archer, a young New York lawyer engaged to the perfectly conventional May Welland, who falls in love with May's unconventional cousin Ellen Olenska, a countess who has returned from Europe having separated from her husband. Set in the 1870s New York society of Wharton's own childhood, the novel is both an exquisitely rendered portrait of that vanished world and a ruthless analysis of how that world enforces its codes on those who try to break them — and how Newland, despite believing himself more enlightened than his world, ultimately cannot escape it.
Where to start
The Age of Innocence (1920) — the complete novel; no prequel required
Complete The Age of Innocence Book List
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The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton·1920
The Age of Innocence — Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Age of Innocence a love story?
It is a love story, but a tragic one — not tragic because the lovers die or because their love is impossible in principle, but tragic because Newland cannot bring himself to choose it. He loves Ellen Olenska with a depth and completeness that he never feels for May; Ellen clearly loves him; and yet Newland, despite his belief that he is more enlightened than the society around him, ultimately allows that society to close around him and prevent the relationship. The novel's tragedy is not external obstacle but internal capitulation — Newland's discovery that he is, in the end, more his world's creature than he thought. The ending, in which an older Newland chooses not to go up to Ellen's apartment in Paris, is one of the most devastating in American fiction.
Who is May Welland in The Age of Innocence?
May Welland is Newland's fiancée and then wife — a young woman of perfect social form, physical beauty, and conventional virtue who appears throughout most of the novel as essentially a cipher, a social ideal rather than a person. One of the novel's most brilliant achievements is the revelation at the end that May has known about Newland and Ellen all along, and that the socially conventional move she makes — telling Ellen that she is pregnant before the pregnancy is confirmed — is a move of great tactical intelligence. May is not the innocent her name suggests: she is a completely effective player of the social game who wins, in the end, because she plays it far better than her apparently more sophisticated husband.
Why is The Age of Innocence set in the 1870s if Wharton wrote it in 1920?
Wharton set the novel in the 1870s New York of her own childhood deliberately — she was looking back at a world that had already vanished, transformed by the social upheavals of the late nineteenth century and the First World War. The novel is partly an elegy for that world (its stability, its rituals, its codes of conduct) and partly a ruthless indictment of the price that world extracted from those who did not conform. By setting it in the past rather than the present, Wharton could simultaneously mourn the lost world and expose its cruelties — the kind of double perspective that gives the novel its characteristic combination of tenderness and irony.
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