The Age of Innocence Summary | Chapterly
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: A Complete Summary "The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend." Overview The Age of Innocence (1920) is Edith Wharton's masterpiece and one of the great American novels. Set in the 1870s New York society in which Wharton herself was raised, it tells the story of Newland Archer, a conventional young lawyer who falls in love with Countess Ellen Olenska -- a woman whose refusal to conform to social expectations threatens everything his world is built to protect. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921, making Wharton the first woman to receive the award. It is a remarkable achievement: a book that is simultaneously a love story, a social satire, and a profound meditation on the costs of conformity. Wharton writes about the Gilded Age with the authority of an insider and the clarity of an exile -- she knew this world intimately and had escaped it, which gave her the distance to see it clearly. The title is deeply ironic. The "innocence" of old New York is not genuine naivete but willful blindness -- a collective agreement to ignore unpleasant truths,...