The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton, 1920
A newly engaged lawyer in 1870s New York finds his tidy future unsettled when his fiancée’s cousin returns from Europe with a freedom he cannot name.
Edith Wharton
1862–1937
Wharton writes about people who know the rules of their world down to the inch and still get caught by them, and she does it with a dry eye and a sharp ear for what people say to each other when they mean something else. Start with The Age of Innocence, where a lawyer's careful plans meet a woman who has already broken with convention, or with Ethan Frome, a short, cold, spare book about a New England farm where an outsider slowly learns what happened. Both leave you with the sense of a whole society pressing on a few private lives.
Feels like longing, dread and love.
Start with The Age of Innocence.
Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones into the old New York society she satirized; she wrote the novel in France after World War I.
The secret room you build for someone who is not there.
Since then there had been no farther communication between them, and he had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absentminded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent—that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there. Books by Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton, 1905
A beautiful woman with no money navigates New York drawing rooms where charm is capital and every kindness arrives with an invoice. Wharton's sharpest, saddest social novel.
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton, 1911
A stranded engineer in a snowbound New England village pieces together the story of a poor farmer, his invalid wife, and the young cousin who comes to keep house.
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