The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton (1920)
“The most devastating love story ever written about a man who does exactly what society tells him — and spends the rest of his life wondering what he lost.”
About Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was born into exactly the Old New York world she describes — the Jones family of fashionable Manhattan, old Dutch money, Academy of Music boxes, Newport summers. She knew the world from inside. She also escaped it: she moved permanently to France in 1913, divorced her husband (an act of exactly the kind of scandal Old New York managed in silence), and wrote The Age of Innocence from Paris in 1920, looking back at the world she had both inhabited and fled. She was 58 when it was published. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 — she was the first woman to receive it.
Life → Text Connections
How Edith Wharton's real experiences shaped specific elements of The Age of Innocence.
Wharton was trapped in a loveless marriage to Edward Wharton for years before finally divorcing in 1913
Newland's trapped marriage to May — the life arranged, the interior exile, the years of correct behavior
The novel is not simply an anthropological study. It is a memoir in the third person. Wharton knew exactly what Newland feels because she felt it.
Wharton's great passion was for Morton Fullerton, a journalist — an affair conducted in Paris, outside the social framework of her New York life
Ellen as the figure of the life not chosen — European, honest, outside the system
Ellen is the road Wharton took. Newland is the self she might have remained if she had not left.
Wharton left New York permanently and never returned, spending her remaining years in France
Ellen's departure for Paris — the escape that Newland cannot make
Wharton made the choice Newland cannot. The novel is partly a study in why some people make that choice and others don't.
Writing from France in 1920, Wharton was looking back at a world that had already ended — Old New York destroyed by WWI and the new money that followed
The novel's elegiac quality — mourning a world it is also criticizing
The irony and the elegy coexist because Wharton felt both. She hated the cage and missed the world it had made.
Historical Era
1870s New York Gilded Age — the world of old Dutch families, pre-industrial wealth, and the rigid social conventions that characterized upper-class Manhattan before the new money of the 1880s-90s transformed it
How the Era Shapes the Book
The novel is set in the 1870s but published in 1920 — a gap of fifty years that Wharton uses deliberately. The Old New York she describes is already extinct when she writes it, destroyed by the very forces (new money, social mobility, European influence) that Newland's world resisted. This gives the novel its elegiac quality: the cage is terrible, and it is also gone, and both facts are true simultaneously. The 1920 reader is being asked to mourn a world they never lived in and would not have chosen.