The Age of Innocence

Newland Archer, engaged to the entirely suitable May Welland, falls in love with her cousin Ellen Olenska, who has left a European husband — and the novel is about how 1870s New York society prevents anything from happening without ever once saying so out loud. Wharton wrote it in her late fifties, looking back at the world she was raised in, and the coercion she describes is all unwritten: seating plans, silences, a dinner party arranged to remove someone. It earns its place as a study of how informal norms govern more tightly than law.

Context: Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, awarded for this novel in 1921.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the 468-title curriculum this card came from; listed in the Ages 13-99+ band under Fiction.
• Edith Wharton — the author.
• New York City — the city the book anatomises.
• Marriage — the institution the plot is trapped inside.
• Institutions — the unwritten rules doing the real governing.