Reading Order
The Age of Innocence Reading Order
Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920) is a standalone novel — there is no series and no sequel. Newland Archer, an attorney in 1870s Old New York, is engaged to the conventional May Welland when he falls in love with her cousin, the unconventional Countess Ellen Olenska. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that is widely considered Wharton's masterwork — a cool, precise portrait of a social world that enforces conformity through invisible pressure rather than open force.
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The Age of Innocence
Complete The Age of Innocence Book List
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The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton·1920·Standalone novel — Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska in 1870s Old New York; approximately 350 pages; Pulitzer Prize, 1921; the Scribner and Penguin editions both have good scholarly apparatus - Buy
The House of Mirth
OptionalEdith Wharton·1905·Wharton's first major novel — Lily Bart's descent through Gilded Age New York; the companion to The Age of Innocence and in some ways its mirror image: where The Age of Innocence shows the social machinery from the male perspective and ends in resigned acceptance, The House of Mirth shows it from the female perspective and ends in destruction - Buy
The Custom of the Country
OptionalEdith Wharton·1913·Undine Spragg's relentless social climbing through the same New York and European worlds — the darkly comic counterpart to The Age of Innocence's elegiac tone; the most formally adventurous of Wharton's novels
The Age of Innocence — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Age of Innocence about?
Newland Archer is a young New York attorney engaged to May Welland — a perfect, appropriate match in all respects. When May's cousin Ellen Olenska returns from Europe (where she has left a Polish count in a scandalous separation), Newland is drawn to her unconventional directness and her willingness to question the unwritten rules that govern Old New York. The novel traces his internal conflict between his desire for Ellen and his sense of obligation to May and to the social world he has been formed by — a world that never says outright what it wants but is perfectly effective at enforcing it.
Is The Age of Innocence a love story?
The Age of Innocence is a love story in the way that most of the great social novels are love stories: less interested in the love itself than in the social forces that prevent it from being consummated. The relationship between Newland and Ellen is kept at the level of possibility and desire throughout the novel; they are almost never alone and never physical in any way that violates convention. The novel's resolution — which takes place in a chapter set thirty years later — is one of the most quietly devastating endings in American fiction.
What does 'The Age of Innocence' mean?
The title is deeply ironic. The 'innocence' of the era Wharton is depicting — 1870s Old New York — is the innocence of people who have never had to acknowledge what their social world actually does: who it includes, who it excludes, at what cost, by what methods. The social world of the novel maintains its self-image as civilized and gentle precisely by never naming what it does; its cruelties are inflicted through omission, silence, and unspoken consensus. Newland understands this, eventually — but understanding it does not allow him to escape it.
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