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  • Published: 15 June 2012
  • ISBN: 9780307949516
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

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
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

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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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