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- Published: 4 December 1993
- ISBN: 9781857152029
- Imprint: Everyman
- Format: Hardback
- Pages: 360
- RRP: $39.99
Categories:
The Age of Innocence
Formats & editions
VINTAGE DECO: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on.
Edith Wharton's novel reworks the eternal triangle of two women and a man in a strikingly original manner. When about to marry the beautiful and conventional May Welland, Newland Archer falls in love with her very unconventional cousin, the Countess Olenska. The consequent drama, set in New York during the 1870s, reveals terrifying chasms under the polished surface of upper-class society as the increasingly fraught Archer struggles with conflicting obligations and desires. The first woman to do so, Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for this dark comedy of manners which was immediately recognized as one of her greatest achievements.
- Published: 4 December 1993
- ISBN: 9781857152029
- Imprint: Everyman
- Format: Hardback
- Pages: 360
- RRP: $39.99
Categories:
Other books in the series
The New Penguin Book Of American Short Stories, From Washington Irving To Lydia Davis
Edgar Allan Poe And Edith Wharton And Ernest Hemingway And Lydia Davis And Mark Twain And Washington Irving
The Voyage of the Beagle
Charles Darwin
The Black Tulip
Alexandre Dumas
The Lady of the Camellias
Alexandre Dumas fils
Faust, Part I
Goethe
Faust, Part II
Goethe
Selected Poetry
Goethe Johann Wolfgang Von
The Nibelungenlied
Hatto A T
Volpone and Other Plays
Ben Jonson
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
Georges Perec
Venus in Furs
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Man and Superman
George Bernard Shaw
Military Dispatches
The Duke Of Wellington
Sketches from a Hunter's Album
Ivan Turgenev
The Prelude
William Wordsworth
About the author
The upper stratum of New York society into which Edith Wharton was born in 1862 provided her with an abundance of material as a novelist but did not encourage her growth as an artist. Educated by tutors and governesses, she was raised for only one career: marriage. But her marriage, in 1885, to Edward Wharton was an emotional disappointment, if not a disaster. She suffered the first of a series of nervous breakdowns in 1894. In spite of the strain of her marriage, or perhaps because of it, she began to write fiction and published her first story in 1889.
Her first published book was a guide to interior decorating, but this was followed by several novels and story collections. They were written while the Whartons lived in Newport and New York, traveled in Europe, and built their grand home, the Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts. In Europe, she met Henry James, who became her good friend, traveling companion, and the sternest but most careful critic of her fiction. The House of Mirth (1905) was both a resounding critical success and a bestseller, as was Ethan Frome (1911). In 1913 the Whartons were divorced, and Edith took up permanent residence in France.
Her subject, however, remained America, especially the moneyed New York of her youth. Her great satiric novel, The Custom of the Country was published in 1913 and The Age of Innocence won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1921.
In her later years, she enjoyed the admiration of a new generation of writers, including Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In all, she wrote some 30 books, including an autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934). She died at her villa near Paris in 1937.