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.”
Similar Books
Thematic connections across eras and genres — books that talk to each other.
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Both anatomize American class anxiety through a man who loves a woman he cannot have — Gatsby tries to buy his way into the world Newland is trying to escape
The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James
James's Isabel Archer (note the shared surname) is the American woman abroad choosing wrongly — the same territory approached from the woman's consciousness rather than the man's
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
The provincial cage, the romantic imagination, the desire for something more than the arranged life — Flaubert from outside the cage, Wharton from inside
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton
Wharton's own companion piece — the same trap of convention and duty destroying the same quality of longing, transposed to rural New England poverty
Washington Square
Henry James
Same Old New York world, same period — James's portrait of a woman imprisoned by her father's social control, a different configuration of the same cage
The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton
Wharton's earlier portrait of the same Old New York world, with a woman protagonist — Lily Bart is what Ellen Olenska could become if she stays too long and runs out of resources