The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence, novel by Edith Wharton, published in 1920. The work presents a picture of upper-class New York society in the late 19th century. The story is presented as a kind of anthropological study of this society through references to the families and their activities as tribal. Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the novel was written in the fragmented aftermath of the First World War, which Edith Wharton experienced first-hand in Paris.

Newland Archer, the ambivalent protagonist, represents the apogee of good breeding. He is the ultimate insider in post–Civil War New York society. Although engaged to May Welland, a beautiful and proper fellow member of elite society, he is attracted to the free-spirited Countess Ellen Olenska, May’s cousin and a former member of their circle who has been living in Europe but has left her husband, a cruel Polish nobleman, under mysterious circumstances and returned to her family’s New York milieu. His upcoming marriage to the young socialite will unite two of New York’s oldest families, but from the novel’s opening pages, Olenska imports a passionate intensity and mysterious Old World eccentricity that disrupt the conventional world of order-obsessed New York. Ellen’s hopes of being set free from her past are dashed when she is forced to choose between conformity and exile, while Newland’s appointment by the Welland family as Ellen’s legal consultant begins an emotional entanglement the force of which he could never have imagined.

Wharton, who has been called “the last Victorian writer,” grew up in a world of wealth and privilege, living in Gilded Age splendour thanks to a fortune comprising three large inheritances as well as a substantial income as a writer. For all that, her life was not easy: married to a depressed alcoholic and surrounded by the idle rich, she was able to depict from experience the unhappiness and dissatisfaction of the indolent upper class. Drawing on the distinct observational style of anthropology, then a burgeoning science, Wharton narrates a romance doomed by duty in 1870s “Old New York.” Though Wharton’s is a critical eye, mindful of the suffering often inflicted by the unimaginative, oppressive enforcement of arbitrary mores, the equation of greater liberty with unqualified happiness does not go unquestioned.

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Though her setting is more than a century old, Wharton’s vigorous prose and themes are timeless. Like other of her novels, The Age of Innocence has lent itself well to film adaptation, with the best of three versions made by the noted director Martin Scorsese in 1993.