Jim Fonseca's Reviews > The Age of Innocence

The blurb on GR gives a good summary so I will start with that as the first paragraph:

Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s masterful portrait of desire and betrayal during the sumptuous Golden Age of Old New York, a time when society people “dreaded scandal more than disease.” This is Newland Archer’s world as he prepares to marry the beautiful but conventional May Welland. But when the mysterious Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York after a disastrous marriage, Archer falls deeply in love with her. Torn between duty and passion, Archer struggles to make a decision that will either courageously define his life—or mercilessly destroy it.



Elite New York society says of the Countess, separated from her husband who remains in Europe, “And now it’s too late; her life is finished.” For a time she considers going back to her husband. She shocks people by wearing the wrong things, hanging out with the wrong people or by engaging men in frank conversation. In elite New York society at that time a woman could not walk away from conversation with a man to engage in conversation with another man; she had to wait for him to come to her.

The Countess shocks people by referring occasionally to ‘my husband’ when everyone expects her never to mention him. But she is somewhat protected by her family connections: she is Newland’s wife’s cousin. Even though people will say in conversation “I don’t want to hear about anything unpleasant in her history” all of them already know all the dirt.

Those in New York society at the time thought themselves superior to their counterparts in Europe. They think know European customs because they all honeymoon and vacation there for months at a time. Their goal is to keep out the “new people.” They spend fortunes on dresses from Paris but wait a year to wear them because it is not sheik to wear the ‘latest fashions.’ A woman is dishonored by her husband’s shady financial dealings. While they claim to be well-read and to love art and music, they will not hang out with those types of people or invite them to their parties. In conversation people are so uptight blush and pale constantly.



Newland thinks of his wife May as a ‘Stepford wife.’ Seeing her brow glistening in the light “…he said to himself with a secret dismay that he would always know the thoughts behind it, that never, in all the years to come , would she surprise him by an unexpected mood, by a new idea, a weakness, a cruelty or an emotion.” May is “That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything…”

Newland thinks of himself as enlightened. Among men he says “Women should be free – as free as we are,” knowing full well that “Nice women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore – in the heat of the argument – the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them.” But of May he thinks: “There was no use trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free…”



After Newland and the Countess fall in love they enter into a kind of limbo: “Her choice would be stay near him as long as he did not ask her to come nearer; and it depended on himself to keep her just there, safe but secluded.” I’m reminded of another novel I read recently: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. Can you really pine away with love for someone your entire life?

There is good writing. Just a couple of examples:

Said of an ancient matron: “She always, indeed, struck Newland Archer as having been rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a rosy life-in-death.”

The opera lets out: “Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.”

There’s a lot of local color of New York’s Fifth Avenue district and of the mansions of Newport, Rhode Island.



A great read and I will add it to my favorites! Thanks to Tina, Tom, Jaidee, Joshie, Dan and Heather who encouraged me to read more of Edith Wharton, this book in particular.

(Edited 11/11/2021)

Top photo of a New York Fifth Avenue mansion from boweryboyshistory.com
Interior of a modern Fifth Avenue mansion from thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2013/
A mansion in Newport RI (Chateau Sur Mer) from assets.simpleviewinc.com
The author from edithwharton.org