World War I obviously caused worldwide horror and tragedy, making the concerns of the coddled New York upper class seem especially foolish. However, Wharton wrote the book immediately after World War I, so it’s influenced by this retrospective view of the 1870s. This dynamic proceeded in part from serious wealth inequality The Age of Innocence deals solely with the very wealthy portion of society. The novel mostly takes place during the 1870s, which formed the beginning of the American Gilded Age, a period of rapid economic growth that earned its name by glossing over serious social problems with the appearance of great success. In 1910 Wharton moved permanently to France, where in 1916 she was named an officer of the Legion of Honor for her wartime work on behalf of refugees. Wharton was a prolific writer, writing in total 22 novels and novellas, 87 short stories, nine volumes of nonfiction, and two volumes of poetry. She had an affair with an American journalist living in London, and she divorced Edward Wharton in 1913. Over that same period, however, her marriage unraveled. She achieved literary celebrity with The House of Mirth (1905), followed by Ethan Frome (1911), The Reef (1912), The Custom of the Country (1913), Summer (1917), and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she won a Pulitzer Prize, becoming the first woman to achieve that distinction.

Married off at twenty-three to Edward Wharton, a wealthy Bostonian, Wharton did not begin to write full-time and publish novels until she was in her forties, when she was living in Lenox, MA. What Newland does not suspect-but will learn-is that the women also hold cards in this game.Born Edith Newbold Jones to socially prominent middle-class parents (the phrase 'keeping up with the Joneses' refers to two of her great-aunts), Edith Wharton's literary ambitions surprised and slightly embarrassed her merchant-class family. The young lawyer Newland Archer believes that he must make an impossible choice: domesticity with his docile and lovely fianc e, May Welland, or passion with her highly unsuitable but irresistible cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska.

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

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton