The Age of Innocence (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details
|
More About the Authors
Discover books, learn about writers, and more.
Product Description
Review
Candace Waid's Norton Critical Edition of The Age of Innocence is a work of deep scholarship and sensitive attention to the interests of contemporary readers. It will be the indispensable guide for readers of Wharton's novel, brought to new life in this imposing edition. Professor Waid has reconstructed the cultural setting of the novel with amazingly abundant detail. The reach and pertinence of its historical sections, the selection of exciting new criticism and scholarship, and the editor's own learned, cogent, and engaging notes to the text itself all combine to make this volume a rousingly significant contribution to Wharton studies and to Gilded Age scholarship in general. --Alan Trachtenberg, Neil Gray Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies, Yale University
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Product Description
Edith Wharton's novel reworks the eternal triangle of two women and a man in a strikingly original manner. When about to marry the beautiful and conventional May Welland, Newland Archer falls in love with her very unconventional cousin, the Countess Olenska. The consequent drama, set in New York during the 1870s, reveals terrifying chasms under the polished surface of upper-class society as the increasingly fraught Archer struggles with conflicting obligations and desires. The first woman to do so, Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for this dark comedy of manners which was immediately recognized as one of her greatest achievements.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
33 of 33 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The Age of Innocence is a work of beautifully subtle observation and delicacy, but though Edith Wharton paints with pastels, she delivers a vividly moving and meaningful fable on the damage society can inflict on the individual spirit.
What is fascinating about the novel, for me, is how nothing portrayed is at all as it seems, and yet there are never any glaring or obvious revelations or realisations - Wharton creates an environment in which everything is so delicately balanced that the tiniest ripple can assume seismic proportions. Newland Archer, a slave to respectability, and yet a closet dreamer, sees the beauty of the society he lives in, and its hypocrisy, but he never fully appreciates the strength of its ties and strictures until he finds himself drawn to the lovely Ellen Olenska, who symbolises, for him, a freedom and daring that he has never known. His affianced bride, May Welland, pales in comparison - to him she is merely an obedient ornament, a 'curtain dropped before an emptiness,' but he never realises the strength that lies underneath her apparent frailty. It is the steel in May Welland's character that is one of the most interesting aspects of the novel; Ellen Olenska outwardly appears to be a strong, free spirit, who shuns convention, but she is buffeted and bruised by the society that the delicate May Welland represents. May sees far more than Newland ever credits her for, and it seems that his journey through the novel is chiefly about the gradual realisation of all that he has missed. Newland is perhaps the only true innocent in the world he inhabits.
The novel is intensely bittersweet, and there are no clear heroes or villains, only individual strengths and weaknesses operating in an environment where society itself is the deity that controls all. There is real beauty in Wharton's finely drawn characterisation and her descriptions of a grand and intricately lovely setting, but what she truly portrays through the beauty is the bleak emptiness of a world where souls are sacrificed in order to maintain the sham of society's smooth and polished surface.
What is fascinating about the novel, for me, is how nothing portrayed is at all as it seems, and yet there are never any glaring or obvious revelations or realisations - Wharton creates an environment in which everything is so delicately balanced that the tiniest ripple can assume seismic proportions. Newland Archer, a slave to respectability, and yet a closet dreamer, sees the beauty of the society he lives in, and its hypocrisy, but he never fully appreciates the strength of its ties and strictures until he finds himself drawn to the lovely Ellen Olenska, who symbolises, for him, a freedom and daring that he has never known. His affianced bride, May Welland, pales in comparison - to him she is merely an obedient ornament, a 'curtain dropped before an emptiness,' but he never realises the strength that lies underneath her apparent frailty. It is the steel in May Welland's character that is one of the most interesting aspects of the novel; Ellen Olenska outwardly appears to be a strong, free spirit, who shuns convention, but she is buffeted and bruised by the society that the delicate May Welland represents. May sees far more than Newland ever credits her for, and it seems that his journey through the novel is chiefly about the gradual realisation of all that he has missed. Newland is perhaps the only true innocent in the world he inhabits.
The novel is intensely bittersweet, and there are no clear heroes or villains, only individual strengths and weaknesses operating in an environment where society itself is the deity that controls all. There is real beauty in Wharton's finely drawn characterisation and her descriptions of a grand and intricately lovely setting, but what she truly portrays through the beauty is the bleak emptiness of a world where souls are sacrificed in order to maintain the sham of society's smooth and polished surface.
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Newland Archer, the protagonist of this ironically entitled novel set in the late nineteenth century, is a proper New York gentleman, and part of a society which adheres to strict social codes, subordinating all aspects of life to doing what is expected, which is synonymous with doing what it right. As the author remarks early in the novel, "Few things were more awful than an offense against Taste." Newland meets and marries May Welland, an unimaginative, shallow young woman whose upbringing has made her the perfect, inoffensive wife, one who knows how to behave and how to adhere to the "rules" of the society in which they live.
When Newland is reintroduced to May's cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, who has left her husband in Europe and now wants a divorce, he finds himself utterly captivated by her freedom and her willingness to risk all, socially, by flouting convention. Both Ellen and Newland, however, are products of their upbringing and their culture, however, and they resist their feelings because of their separate social obligations. Various meetings between them suggest that their feelings are far stronger than what is obvious on the surface, and the question of whether either of them will finally state the obvious remains unanswered.
Wharton creates an exceptionally realistic picture of New York in the post-Civil War era, a time in which aristocrats of inherited wealth found themselves competing socially with parvenus. Her ability to show the conflict between a person's desire for freedom and his/her need for social acceptance is striking. As the various characters make their peace with their decisions--either to conform to or to challenge social dictates--the novel achieves an unusual dramatic tension, subtle because of its lack of direct confrontation and powerful in its effects on individual destinies. This is, in fact, less an "age of innocence" than it is an age of social manipulation.
Wharton herself manipulates the reader--her best dialogues are those in which the characters never actually participate--conversations that they keep to themselves, confrontations which they never allow themselves to have, and resolutions which happen through inaction rather than through decision-making. Filled with acute social observations, the novel shows individuals convincing themselves that obeying social dictates is the right thing to do. Though the novel sometimes seems to smother the reader with its limitations on action, Age of Innocence brilliantly captures the age and attitudes of the era. Mary Whipple
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Like her elder contemporary Henry James, Edith Wharton deals with the blood battles of gilded age aristocracy. American and British readers will find much common ground in THE AGE OF INNOCENCE. Here are the transatlantics who gave us the Astors and Winston Churchill and, indeed, Henry James and Edith Wharton.
Reading THE AGE OF INNOCENCE is a bit like reading a fashion magazine edited by a tragic genius. The descriptions of clothing, food and architecture are as dazzling as can be, but the agony of the main characters is just slightly veiled.
It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928 and the reason is clear. This novel is an indictment of a society which values surface to the point of suffocation.
H. L. Mencken, of all people, failed to notice Wharton's almost subversive theme. He thought she was a portrait painter, and an increasingly sentimental one at that.
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE is not a pretty picture. It's a perfect picture, but pretty it isn't.
Reading THE AGE OF INNOCENCE is a bit like reading a fashion magazine edited by a tragic genius. The descriptions of clothing, food and architecture are as dazzling as can be, but the agony of the main characters is just slightly veiled.
It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928 and the reason is clear. This novel is an indictment of a society which values surface to the point of suffocation.
H. L. Mencken, of all people, failed to notice Wharton's almost subversive theme. He thought she was a portrait painter, and an increasingly sentimental one at that.
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE is not a pretty picture. It's a perfect picture, but pretty it isn't.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
A fine book from a fine writer
Archer Newland has a happy life. He is a member of New York's most prominent society and is newly engaged to May, a women who on the surface is everything he wants in a wife,... Read more
Published 6 months ago by J. Willis
delight
Hubby has always told me That I would never read a 'Classic.' Well boo hoo hoo Mr Smarty Pants.That is just what I have done. Read more
Published 13 months ago by ethel bridge
A brilliant measured novel
This is my second attempt at reading this book. I first tried to read it as a teenager having borrowed a copy from my local library. And I struggled. Read more
Published 18 months ago by Stubs
Witty and heartbreaking story of life in New York
By the time I had finished the first page of this book I was wondering to myself why on earth Ifd never read any Edith Wharton before, and my incredulity only increased the more I... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Katie Stevens
An explosive love story
An explosive love story packed into up-tight and tightly knit 19th Century New York. Beautiful and atmospheric prose explores every nuance of the situation and boils the plot up... Read more
Published 20 months ago by Brownbear101
Love triangle in Old New York
Set in the stifling, hypocritical atmosphere of socially-elitist Old New York of the 1870s, this depicts the love triangle centred on Newland Archer and his relationships with two... Read more
Published 20 months ago by Roman Clodia
Thought provoking
Newland Archer is an exasperating protagonist. He is discontented with his lot in life and thinks the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Read more
Published on 5 Nov 2009 by Dis Hammerhand
Innocence versus imagination
Few will seek out a novel set in the New York of the 1870s about wealthy and titled characters who flit from opera box to their brownstone mansions in broughams and landaus, but... Read more
Published on 23 Feb 2009 by Sphex
Last Generation?
The fabula of Age of Innocence is not really too intricate. Nor would it have avoided the cliche of an unhappy-marriage-in-high-society story had it not been for Wharthon's... Read more
Published on 4 Feb 2009 by Jan Zasadil
No one does New York high society better than Wharton
"It was the old New York way of taking life "with effusion of blood"; the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered... Read more
Published on 27 Dec 2008 by Misfit
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
