The Age of Innocence

By: Edith Wharton

Narrated by: Laurel Lefkow

"The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!" Awarded the 1921 Pulitzer Prize (the first to be presented to a woman), Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence is a powerful depiction of love and desire in New York's glamorous Gilded Age. When Newland Archer, happily engaged to May Welland, meets his fiancée's cousin Ellen, his entire future is cast into doubt: strong-willed, witty, and entirely unpretentious, Ellen is unlike any woman he has ever met. He is torn between his infatuation for her and his duty to marry May. In subtle and elegant language, Wharton delivers a critical look at the social mores of the time. Laurel Lefkow gives a tender and sympathetic interpretation.

Download the accompanying reference guide.Public Domain (P)2016 Naxos AudioBooks

Great book

I really enjoyed this book. It was very peaceful to listen to but still made you feel all the small inner moments, that the BS of love makes us feel.

Definitely pick this version

Even though the protagonist is a man, it’s a story better heard in a woman’s voice. And the male narrator of the other version gives Madame Olenska a strange and off putting accent, which this narrator does not. This is a novel about a man who is certain he controls his own fate but whose life and choices in fact belong to two women. It’s more appropriate that it be told by a woman. Listen to the novel, then watch the magnificent Scorsese film adaptation, so perfectly cast and sumptuously shot.

a looong meditation on toxic masculinity

the protagonist is awful and had this been a paper book, I'd have hurled it across the room.