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Edith Wharton

The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton's twelfth novel, initially serialized in four parts in the Pictorial Review magazine in 1920, and later released by D. Appleton and Company as a book in New York and in London. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize. Though the committee initially agreed to award the prize to Sinclair Lewis, the judges rejected his Main Street on political grounds and "established Wharton as the American 'First Lady of Letters'", the irony being that the committee had awarded The Age of Innocence the prize on grounds that negated Wharton's own blatant and subtle ironies, which constitute and make the book so worthy of attention. The story is set in upper-class New York City in the 1870s, during the Gilded Age. Wharton wrote the book in her 50s, after she had established herself as a strong author with publishers clamoring for her work.
362 printed pages
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Impressions

  • Diana Shamsshared an impression6 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    🔮Hidden Depths
    🚀Unputdownable

    One of the most intricate book on relationships. I had no expectations when started this book apart from this being an American classic, but turned out to be a deep and beautifully told story of a fragile balance of social status, responsibilities, kindness and love. The storyline is perhaps another version of man’s spiritual journey as in Pushkin’s Eugen Onegin and a male version of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The main character is an extremely well bread American gentleman who outgrew the norms of society and whose vague dissatisfaction with what life in the New York upper class of the late 19th century could give have transformed into a love to an equally intelligent and passionate woman he could never marry. The final part of the book give the novel several more layers of meaning and leave reader with an emotional aftertaste which is hard to dismiss without reflecting on one’s own life choices and their price for oneself and others close by.

  • veratodorovashared an impression3 years ago
    💧Soppy

    A story about internal fight and feelings storm, American classic.
    Американская классика, стиль повествования немного похож на сценарий пьесы или фильма.

  • b4807310359shared an impression2 years ago
    👎Give This a Miss

Quotes

  • Diana Shamshas quoted6 years ago
    She and Mr. van der Luyden were so exactly alike that Archer often wondered how, after forty years of the closest conjugality, two such merged identities ever separated themselves enough for anything as controversial as a talking-over.
  • b6592819865has quoted3 years ago
    When Newland Archer
  • Anna Osipovahas quoted3 years ago
    Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk. The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else. At least that was the view that the men of his generation had taken. The trenchant divisions between right and wrong, honest and dishonest, respectable and the reverse, had left so little scope for the unforeseen. There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level, and surveys the long windings of destiny. Archer hung there and wondered....

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