- Published: 15 June 2012
- ISBN: 9780307949516
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Trade Paperback
- Pages: 320
- RRP: $22.99
The Age of Innocence

















VINTAGE DECO: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on.
One of Wharton’s most famous novels—the first by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize—exquisitely details a tragic struggle between love and responsibility in Gilded Age New York.
Newland Archer, an aristocratic young lawyer, is engaged to the cloistered, beautiful May Welland. But when May’s cousin Ellen arrives from Europe, fleeing her failed marriage to a Polish count, her worldly and independent nature intrigues and unsettles Archer. Trapped by his passionless relationship with May and the social conventions that forbid a relationship with the disgraced Ellen, Archer is torn between possibility and duty. Wharton’s profound understanding of her characters’ lives makes the triangle of Archer, May, and Ellen both urgent and poignant. An incisive look at the ways desire and emotion must negotiate the complex rules of society, The Age of Innocence is one of Wharton’s most moving works.
- Published: 15 June 2012
- ISBN: 9780307949516
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Trade Paperback
- Pages: 320
- RRP: $22.99
Other books in the series
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