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    The Age of Innocence
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    The Age of Innocence
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    The Age of Innocence
    Ebook380 pages7 hours

    The Age of Innocence

    By Edith Wharton

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The Age of Innocence is a 1920 novel by American author Edith Wharton. It was her twelfth novel, and was initially serialized in 1920 in four parts, in the magazine Pictorial Review. Later that year, it was released as a book by D. Appleton & Company. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize

    The Age of Innocence, which was set in the time of Wharton's childhood, was a softer and gentler work than The House of Mirth, which Wharton had published in 1905. In her autobiography, Wharton wrote of The Age of Innocence that it had allowed her to find "a momentary escape in going back to my childish memories of a long-vanished America... it was growing more and more evident that the world I had grown up in and been formed by had been destroyed in 1914." Scholars and readers alike agree that The Age of Innocence is fundamentally a story which struggles to reconcile the old with the new.

    Extrait
    | I.
    On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.
    Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances "above the Forties," of a new Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the "new people" whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music.
    It was Madame Nilsson's first appearance that winter, and what the daily press had already learned to describe as "an exceptionally brilliant audience" had gathered to hear her, transported through the slippery, snowy streets in private broughams, in the spacious family landau, or in the humbler but more convenient "Brown coupe." To come to the Opera in a Brown coupe was almost as honourable a way of arriving as in one's own carriage; and departure by the same means had the immense advantage of enabling one (with a playful allusion to democratic principles) to scramble into the first Brown conveyance in the line, instead of waiting till the cold-and-gin congested nose of one's own coachman gleamed under the portico of the Academy. It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it...|

     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRaanan Editeur
    Release dateJan 28, 2020
    ISBN9782714904034
    Author

    Edith Wharton

    Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was an American novelist—the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence in 1921—as well as a short story writer, playwright, designer, reporter, and poet. Her other works include Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, and Roman Fever and Other Stories. Born into one of New York’s elite families, she drew upon her knowledge of upper-class aristocracy to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age.

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    • 4/5
      Upper class New York in the late nineteenth century is cleverly revealed as locked in strictures of avoiding unpleasantness, doing one’s duty, behaving appropriately and shunning foreigners and eccentric people.
      Proprietary is more important than kindness and thoughtfulness.
      The families described are either related or linked by long acquaintance and live a structured and utterly orderly life, totally intolerant of those who step outside acceptable ways. The weight and dullness of this existence is cleverly revealed by the author.
      Within this lifestyle the main male protagonist falls in love just before his appropriate marriage. The object of his attention is not only different and breaks social rules she is also “foreign” having lived in Europe most of her life and married a French Count. This despite being a cousin of one of the social group depicted.
      The interest of this novel lies in the way it draws you into this fascinating and in some senses cruel lifestyle.
      By the novel’s end the next generation is depicted as having thrown off the strictures of their parents which only serves to highlight how unfortunate, insensitive and even ridiculous was their lifestyle.