THE FOLIO SOCIETY

‘Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!’

When the respectable young lawyer Newland Archer becomes engaged to the beautiful May Welland he is content to be ‘placidly in love’, marrying one of his own kind. For this is Old New York, where money and social conformity are paramount. Their decorous courtship, however, is interrupted by the arrival of May’s cousin Ellen Olenska, fleeing her marriage to a Polish Count. Ellen seeks ‘rest and oblivion’ among friends, but her bohemian ways – an inappropriate dress, an ill-advised visit, a dubious acquaintance – do little to win her allies among society’s chosen. To Newland, however, she has everything May lacks – sophistication, wisdom, independence – and he falls passionately in love, with tragic consequences.

First published in 1920, The Age of Innocence is set 50 years earlier, in a New York without cars or electricity, when Fifth Avenue was dark by night and society was limited to a few hundred aristocratic families. In faultless prose, and with a subtle wit, Wharton dissects the dark hypocrisies, deep-seated prejudices and hidebound conventions of the period as shown in the importance a gentleman ascribed to the correct deployment of gloves and buttonhole flowers. Beneath the glittering surface of the American upper class, with its balls, card parties and operas, Wharton uncovers a painful conflict between personal desire and tribal rule.

As novelist Rachel Cusk says in her newly commissioned introduction, ‘The Age of Innocence is a commentary on the loss of a social era, of a whole mode of life and its attendant ways of being.’ Edith Wharton was born in New York in 18 62 and made her literary name when she reached her forties, with such novels as The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome. After 28 years of marriage to Edward Wharton, she divorced in 1913 and settled in Paris, where she wrote this, her last great novel – a bittersweet masterpiece which won Wharton the Pulitzer Prize and lasting acclaim.