The Age of Innocence [Paperback]

Winner of the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a book written by a woman,The Age of Innocenceis a suspenseful, deeply moving, and brilliantly accomplished novel of the struggle between desire and destiny.

In the polished works of Edith Wharton, Old New York is a society at once infinitely sophisticated and ruthlessly primitive, in which adherence to ritual and loyalty to clan surpass all other values—and transgression is always punished.

The Age of Innocenceis Wharton’s 1920 novel of love menaced by convention, played out against a gorgeously arrayed backdrop of opera houses, lavish dinner parties, country homes, and luxurious deathbeds. The young lawyer Newland Archer believes that he must make an impossible choice: domesticity with his docile and lovely fiancée, May Welland, or passion with her highly unsuitable but irresistible cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska. What Newland does not suspect—but will learn—is that the women also hold cards in this game...Praise for Edith Wharton and The Age of Innocence

“Is it—in this world—vulgar to ask for more? To entreat a little wildness, a dark place or two in the soul?”—Katherine Mansfield

“There is no woman in American literature as fascinating as the doomed Madame Olenska....Traditionally, Henry James has always been placed slightly higher up the slope of Parnassus than Edith Wharton. But now that the prejudice against the female writer is on the wane, they look to be exactly what they are: giants, equals, the tutelary and benign gods of our American literature.”—Gore Vidal

“Will writers ever recover that peculiar blend of security and alertness which characterizes Mrs. Wharton and her tradition?”—E. M. ForsterThe upper stratum of New York society into whichEdith Whartonwas born in 1862 provided her with an abundance of material as a novelilsµ