Age of Innocence

Newland Archer has everything a 1870s New York gentleman should want: old money, refined taste, and a fiancée as beautiful and proper as May Welland. Then Ellen Olenska arrives from Europe, scandalized, independent, and utterly indifferent to the codes that govern his world. What follows is a quiet devastation. Wharton constructs her novel like a locked room, every exit blocked by propriety and duty and the suffocating expectations of Gilded Age society. The real horror isn't that Newland can't have Ellen. It's that he's been so thoroughly trained to want her quietly, secretly, and never act on it. Wharton, who grew up inside this world, wrote this novel in 1920 as a kind of autopsy on the class that made her, and found it wanting. The title is perfectly vicious: there is no innocence here, only the sophisticated suppression of everything that might have mattered. This is a novel for anyone who knows what it costs to be respectable.