The Age of Innocence (Annotated)

Critical Edition with Afterword and Author Biography | Edith Wharton

By: Edith Wharton

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The most elegant autopsy of a society ever written — and the novel that made Edith Wharton the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize.

New York, 1870s. Newland Archer is a lawyer from a good family, engaged to the perfectly suitable May Welland, living exactly the life his world has prepared for him. Then May's cousin Ellen Olenska arrives — separated from her European husband, dangerously independent, indifferent to the rituals that hold Old New York together. Newland falls in love with her. Nothing violent happens. No one raises their voice. The novel is the story of how a society destroys a man without ever touching him.

Edith Wharton published The Age of Innocence in 1920, having lived through the collapse of everything the novel describes. The Gilded Age world of her childhood — its elaborate codes, its dinner parties with fixed seating, its unspoken rules about who could be received and who could not — had been obliterated by the First World War, the influenza pandemic, and the approaching roar of the modern century. She turned back to look at it not with nostalgia but with the precision of an archaeologist: here is how it worked, here is what it cost, here is what it pretended not to know about itself.

The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. Wharton was the first woman to receive it for fiction.

✦ Complete and unabridged text of the 1920 first edition.

This edition also includes:

✦ The Anatomy of Renunciation: Edith Wharton, Old New York, and the Architecture of Desire — a critical afterword by Henry Bugalho examining the novel as an act of intellectual archaeology: why Wharton chose to reconstruct the world of the 1870s at the precise moment when Western civilization was shattering, what the novel's famous restraint conceals and reveals, and how renunciation — the thing Newland chooses, the thing Ellen refuses — becomes the central moral and aesthetic problem of the book.

✦ About the Author: Edith Wharton (1862–1937) — a biographical essay on the woman behind the novel: born into Old New York with the name Jones — as in "keeping up with the Joneses" — she spent her life escaping the world she was born into, through writing, through Europe, through a long love affair, through the slow collapse of a marriage to a man whose mind was disappearing. The novels were the laboratory. The life was the experiment.

✦ Edition prepared and introduced by Henry Bugalho, Erato Press.

For readers who enjoy:

✦ Edith Wharton, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kazuo Ishiguro ✦ Gilded Age historical fiction — New York society at its most beautiful and most suffocating ✦ Novels where nothing explodes but everything breaks ✦ The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and the rest of Wharton's merciless New York

Newland Archer had everything his world considered worth having. The novel is about what that cost him.