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  • Published: 1 April 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099511281
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $19.99
Categories:

The Age of Innocence





'I love virtually all of Edith Wharton, but this one's my favourite' Lionel Shriver

'Wharton's dazzling skills as a stylist, creator of character, ironical observer and unveiler of passionate, thwarted emotions have earned her a devoted following’ Sunday Times

Newland Archer and May Welland are the perfect couple. He is a wealthy young lawyer and she is a lovely and sweet-natured girl. All seems set for success until the arrival of May's unconventional cousin Ellen Olenska, who returns from Europe without her husband and proceeds to shake up polite New York society. To Newland, she is a breath of fresh air and a free spirit, but the bond that develops between them throws his values into confusion and threatens his relationship with May.

‘Wharton evocatively records the high society of New York's gilded age’ Daily Mail

  • Published: 1 April 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099511281
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $19.99
Categories:

Other books in the series

Emma
Persuasion
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

Also by Edith Wharton

See all

Praise for The Age of Innocence

America's greatest woman novelist

Sunday Times

I love virtually all of Edith Wharton, but this one's my favourite... I admire her prose style, which is lucid, intelligent, and artful rather than arty; she is eloquent but never fussy, and always clear. She never seems to be writing well to show off. As for The Age of Innocence, it's a poignant story that, typically for Wharton, illustrates the bind women found themselves in when trapped hazily between a demeaning if relaxing servitude and real if frightening independence, and that both sexes find themselves in when trapped between the demands of morality and the demands of the heart. The novel is romantic but not sentimental, and I'm a sucker for unhappy endings

Lionel Shriver

There is no woman in American literature as fascinating as the doomed Madame Olenska. . . Traditionally, Henry James has always been placed slightly higher up the slope of Parnassus than Edith Wharton. But now that the prejudice against the female writer is on the wane, they look to be exactly what they are: giants, equals, the tutelary and benign gods of our American literature

Gore Vidal

Will writers ever recover that peculiar blend of security and alertness which characterizes Mrs. Wharton and her tradition?

E. M. Forster

Wharton's dazzling skills as a stylist, creator of character, ironical observer and unveiler of passionate, thwarted emotions have earned her a devoted following

Hermione Lee, Sunday Times

No one has bettered Edith Wharton on the cash-sex nexus of the respectable, as well as the clashes of propriety and fashion. The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth are probably the best novels by this knowing, compassionate writer

Independent on Sunday

Wharton evocatively records the high society of New York's gilded age

Daily Mail

Wharton didn't simply reproduce the glossy surfaces of high society but probed the hypocrisy, corruption, cynicism and coldheartedness that lay just underneath

Independent
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