Memories of a Long-Vanished America
An Introduction to The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton wrote the book many critics have deemed her masterpiece almost as an aside, a respite from what she considered her real, more important creative work. She recalls in her autobiography, A Backward Glance, that her work on The Age of Innocence began in 1917, as she mourned the devastating consequences and losses of the war years. "I wanted to put into words," Wharton says, "the years of the war, as I had lived them in Paris . . . in all their fantastic heights and depths of self-devotion and ardour, of pessimism, triviality and selfishness." That book, the one she really wanted to write, was to be called "A Son at the Front." "But before I could . . . begin to deal objectively with the stored-up emotions of those years," Wharton continues, "I had to get away from the present altogether. . . . I found a momentary escape in going back to my childish memories of a long-vanished America, and wrote The Age of Innocence."

Originally conceived under the working title "Old New York," The Age of Innocence is a part-nostalgic, part-satiric recreation of the surfaces of the city Edith Newbold Jones Wharton knew as she was growing up. Full of precisely rendered, historically accurate details of place, manners, events, and fashions--and populated by characters many of whom are based on the real denizens of Wharton's Old New York--the novel depicts one very particular world, while exploring how that world shaped the behavior, emotions, identities, and conflicts of the people who lived within it.

Wharton herself professed surprise that a novel so concerned with the minutiae of an already faded era was such a resoundingly popular success. She recalls in A Backward Glance how she had secretly agreed with the response to the book of her lifelong friend and companion Walter Berry, to whom she had shown it before publication. "Yes, it's good," he had said. "But of course you and I are the only people who will ever read it. We are the last people left who can remember New York and Newport as they were then, and nobody else will be interested."

But people were interested in The Age of Innocence, and they remain so--Martin Scorsese's acclaimed 1993 film version lured yet another generation to the book--for the novel has at its heart issues that resonate beyond its historical moment and that speak to readers well outside the social circle whose concerns both petty and profound animate its plot. In the story of the thwarted love between Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska, Wharton explores the timeless and universal conflicts between passion and responsibility, freedom and tradition, the desire for self-actualization and the moral requirement to honor one's commitments. With compassion and insight she addresses the difficult sacrifices inherent in the process of achieving emotional maturity: how becoming one's best self means coming to terms both with one's own limitations and with those of the culture in which one's self was formed, and then possibly sacrificing to these recognitions one's greatest dreams.

Through the ironic, intelligent, and commanding voice of its narrator; its lavish, vivid descriptions of a long-lost New York; its humorous view of the stifling and the ennobling values of fashionable society; and its good old-fashioned triangular love story, The Age of Innocence has entertained readers for more than seventy-five years. The novel's enduring greatness resides in its wise and bittersweet conviction that life never fulfills all our hopes, and that we find happiness not in idealized illusions of what might be, but in living--with as much integrity as possible--our own imperfect and circumscribed lives.

The Age of Innocence first appeared in serial form in the New York monthly Pictorial Review in July 1920. It was a resounding critical success and, in book form, a major bestseller. In 1921, the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (at the expense of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, which won the first vote, but was considered too offensive by some prominent Midwesterners). Later the book was the basis for a lucrative theatrical production which packed houses on Broadway for nearly a year before touring cities from Baltimore to Chicago.

Wharton eventually wrote A Son at the Front, which was published in 1923 in a post-war world uninterested in war novels, to perhaps the worst reviews of her career. Critics still consider it one of her least successful works. It is an irony that master ironist Wharton herself might have appreciated that The Age of Innocence, a book through which she strove to escape the intense emotions and experiences of the war, may stand, as Cynthia Griffin Wolff elucidates in her Introduction to the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition, as her "best and most subtle war novel." Just as her characters communicated their most important feelings without ever uttering them directly ("a regular deaf-and-dumb show," as Newland Archer's son describes it), so Edith Wharton, perhaps, may best have conveyed her own.

Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, during the American Civil War, into a world that could hardly have been more discouraging of her desire to be a writer. Her parents, George Frederic and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, descendants of prosperous English and Dutch businessmen, bankers, and lawyers, were pillars of the fashionable New York society Wharton would depict in many of her novels. It was a society in which the only acceptable aim for a young woman of the upper class was to enter into marriage with a gentleman of the upper class and become mistress of a household. Edith's mother, a notoriously commanding and aloof woman to whom the birth of her daughter relatively late in life was an embarrassment, was perpetually critical and disapproving of her daughter's intellectual ambitions.

But Edith demonstrated early a formidable intellect and a great love for books. Though her education--at the hands of a series of governesses--was intended only to provide her the social graces necessary for a society wife, she spoke three languages before adolescence, and read widely in the great literature of Western culture. She first attempted to write a novel at the age of eleven, but her mother criticized her first lines, effectively dissuading her from fiction writing for several more years. She did, however, begin writing poetry, and achieved her first publication at the age of thirteen when a magazine published her translations of several German poems.

Attempting to elude the negative economic repercussions of the Reconstruction, the Jones family moved to Europe for six years beginning in 1866, when Edith was five; when she returned to America, after a life-threatening battle with typhoid fever that would indelibly mark her consciousness, she found her country ugly and deeply depressing. Though the family's move to Newport, Rhode Island, temporarily revived her spirits, Wharton's affinity for Europe and her ever-deepening loathing for the increasing materialism of American life would lead to many return trips to the Continent. She would settle permanently in Paris in the early 1900s.

In 1885, after the death of her beloved father, when she was twenty-three and thus dangerously close to being considered a spinster, Edith married Edward "Teddy" Wharton, a gentleman from Boston of appropriate social background twelve years her senior. The first years of her marriage were spent in frequent travel and in making the proper social rounds in New York and Newport. Edith was pleased to be mistress of her own house and garden. But as her confidence grew, and she became more and more involved in and excited by her writing, her kindhearted but intellectually unimaginative husband and their stultifyingly predictable, possibly sexless married life began to drain her spirits.

In 1907, at the age of forty-five, she would begin a passionate love affair--apparently the only one of her life--with the journalist Morton Fullerton. The relationship was brief, but it marked a profound emotional and sexual awakening for Wharton. Teddy, meanwhile, began to suffer from mental illness--possibly manic depression. He also took a mistress, and embezzled money from his wife to buy his mistress a house. He was institutionalized in 1912, and in 1913, Edith divorced him. She would never remarry.

Wharton published her first short story in 1891; her first story collection, The Greater Inclination, in 1899; a novella called The Touchstone in 1900; and her first novel, a historical romance called The Valley of Decision, in 1902. That same year she began a correspondence with Henry James, to whom she had been introduced by mutual friends. He judged her at the time as a gifted writer but perhaps too imitative a student of his; their friendship would grow, as would James's estimation of his friend's talents, until James's death in 1916. The Age of Innocence, written soon afterward, is marked by several allusions to Wharton's dear friend and to his novel The Portrait of a Lady.

The book that made Wharton famous was The House of Mirth, published in 1905. Between that book and the publication of her autobiography, A Backward Glance, in 1934, she published sixteen novels and novellas, eight collections of short stories, several works of nonfiction, and two volumes of poetry, as well as many articles, translations, introductions, and reviews. The novel she was working on before her death, The Buccaneers, was published posthumously in 1938. This impressive productivity was spurred on in part by the fact that many of her works, including The Age of Innocence, were contracted by magazines to appear on a serial basis, requiring her to produce a certain number of words within a limited amount of time and space. Wharton both prospered and chafed under this regime; she wrote prolifically and made a tremendous amount of money, but many critics have noted that the quality of her work, particularly after World War I, suffered under the influence of its rapid production for a mass market.

Beyond her writing, Wharton's life was also distinguished by her selfless service to France and to the European refugees who flooded Paris during World War I, work for which the French government made her--the first woman so recognized--a chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur. When she died in 1937, her coffin was attended by French war veterans in recognition of her devotion to her adopted country.

Though she was a well-known public figure, Wharton was always guarded about her private life and real feelings. Her autobiography was so unrevealing that its publishers, to Wharton's fury, tried to adjust their contract to permit severe cutting of what they called long "dull" parts. Wharton had destroyed many photographs, letters, and literary documents that might well have better illumined her life. Her letters to Morton Fullerton, which she had asked him to destroy, did not surface until the mid-1980s, many years after her death.

Edith Wharton's interior life is known best through her letters to many treasured friends, through their reminiscences of her, and through the miracle of her writing. As Wharton's biographer Shari Benstock noted, "Nothing in Edith Jones's background heralded her diverse creativity and abounding energy, nor was she encouraged to develop her 'gift.'" Yet she did, through a force of character and imagination which enabled her to produce a body of work remarkable for its craft, its insight into human nature, and its depictions of the complex interactions between individuals and their limited social worlds, full of pitfalls and obstacles, in which they do or do not reach for meaning.

The Age of The Age of Innocence
by Cynthia Ammons
Adapted from the Introduction to the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition of Summer


Though The Age of Innocence is set, except for its denouement, in the 1870s, its mood reflects Edith Wharton's awareness of the tremendous changes about to alter forever the insular world of Old New York. Not only would the First World War change the whole consciousness and shape of the world, but other major changes would occur in the United States as well. As Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick point out in 1915: The Cultural Moment, between 1880 and 1920, half of the rural population, which in 1880 comprised fifty percent of the workforce, abandoned farming as a way of life. During the same period, the gross national product and the per capita income in the United States doubled, yet one third to one half of the population lived in poverty. Between 1890 and 1915, fifteen million new immigrants came to the country, arriving primarily from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe, from which large numbers of Jews emigrated. Greeting the arrival of these immigrants were increasingly intense waves of racism and xenophobia.

For women, the situation at the turn of the century was mixed. Many women privileged by race or class, or by a combination of the two, found the three to four decades leading up to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and their gaining the right to vote exciting, filled with new opportunities. A number of traditionally male occupations were for the first time opened to them. According to United States census figures, employment as a carpenter, stonecutter, mail carrier, teamster, detective, banker, or undertaker became possible for women in the early twentieth century; and women's representation in the professions--primarily the clergy, law, architecture, medicine, photography, teaching, nursing, dentistry, and journalism--rose from 6.4 percent in 1870 to 13.3 percent in 1920. New occupations or ones newly defined as suitable for women--such as stenographer, typist, trained nurse, department-store clerk--opened up. Women's enrollment in colleges and universities between 1900 and 1920 increased by 1,000 percent in public institutions and 482 percent in private ones. For native-born, middle-class white women, sexual mores began to change, with birth control emerging as a discussable issue in some circles and pleasure in sexual relations starting to be recognized as a female, not just a male, possibility. Hemlines were rising, corsets were being discarded, hair was being worn shorter. So widespread and sweeping were the changes that even by the early 1890s the term "New Woman"--evoking the image of a confident, self-reliant, young adult capable of playing a public as well as a private role in society--had become commonplace. Not everyone was pleased about the advent of the New Woman, and not all women had access to the ideal. Furthermore, the ideal itself often varied depending on race, class, ethnicity, religion, region, or politics. Despite such differences, however, economic, social, and political change was finally taking place for many women.

In The Age of Innocence, Wharton looks back with some nostalgia and a great sense of loss on the old ways and the world of her childhood. But it seems unlikely that she would ever have become the woman or the writer she did if those old ways hadn't begun to ebb in the sea of change then occurring in the world beyond Old New York.


1) Wharton's title The Age of Innocence was an allusion to a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds depicting a five-year-old girl. What light does this cast on Wharton's view of the world she was writing about? Do you think the title is ironic? Newland Archer seems to love May largely for her innocence, yet he "did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience." What kind of innocence, then, does he want?

2) What do you make of Newland Archer's assertion--and of his later regret for that assertion--that "women should be free--as free as we are"? Do you think Wharton, who believed in many of Old New York's values, among them the importance of family, might have agreed with him? Do you think any aspects of Old New York's double standard for men's and women's conduct still hold sway in today's society?

3) Wharton seems both to satirize and to respect the society she writes about in The Age of Innocence. Where do you think one ends and the other begins? What good was there in the "old ways" as Wharton illustrates them? What was not so good? What is good and bad in the "new ways"? How does the relationship between Newland and his son Dallas reflect on the evolution of Old New York?

4) "That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a stranger through May Welland's familiar features." Is "knowing nothing and expecting everything" a fair characterization of May? If not, what does she know that Archer doesn't know she knows? And if she doesn't expect everything, what is she willing to forgo? In what ways is May different from what Newland thinks she is? How does Wharton reveal strengths and individuality in her that Newland doesn't perceive?

5) What does Newland's relationship with Ellen bring out in him that his relationship with May does not? What, beyond it being taboo, troubles him? Does he seem comfortable with her? More "himself"? In what ways is Newland's perception of Ellen Olenska as limited and/or inaccurate as his perception of May? What do his feelings for Ellen really "mean"?

6) In early outlines for The Age of Innocence, Wharton tried on the idea of having Newland break his engagement to May and marry Ellen; eventually the two separate and return to their own worlds. In the end, why do you think she didn't opt for this plot line? What, if she had, would have been different about the "message" of the book? What, if she had pursued this plot, would you ultimately have thought of Newland? Of Ellen?

7) What does Wharton reveal about Old New York and/or about Newland Archer through the characters of Cynthia Mingott, Ned Winsett, Julius Beaufort, Mr. Welland, and Janey?

8) In what ways has American society evolved, and in what ways does it still seem similar to the particular American social subset Wharton wrote about? In what arenas does a significant pressure to conform still exist? Do you think there are places today where Countess Olenska might receive the same sort of reception she received in Old New York? Do mainstream American values still differ from European ones when it comes to sex, divorce, and marital fidelity? Or as regards artists, Bohemians, and "people who write"?

9) Why do you think Newland doesn't, in the end, meet with Ellen after May's death? Does his decision strike you as "right"? Why does he send his son, Dallas?

10) Do you agree with Newland Archer that he missed "the flower of life"? What would this other life have been like, if he could have lived it without negative consequences to May or anyone else?

11) Though it was for the most part well received, at least one influential critic thought The Age of Innocence was irrelevant to the larger issues of its day. A recurring criticism of Wharton's work was that it was largely concerned with the trivial concerns of trivial people. Do you agree with these criticisms? If not, what gives Wharton's subject matter its larger significance? How do depictions of the love lives of the upper class illumine larger or more important issues about the world? What do these criticisms presuppose about what is important, or what constitutes a large issue?

The House of Mirth (1905)
With an Introduction and Notes by Cynthia Griffin Wolff
0-14-018729-4

Wharton's second novel (after The Valley of Decision, published in 1902) was the novel that made her famous. A critically acclaimed, runaway bestseller in its own day, it remains a bitingly relevant, blackly comic satire of the moral and aesthetic bankruptcy of high society, and a deeply tragic vision of the spiritual consequences to women of a world that defines them chiefly as the ultimate commodity. The beautiful Lily Bart, age twenty-nine, seeks a husband who can satisfy her cravings for endless admiration and all the trappings of wealth--while ignoring the one man who might be capable of actually making her happy. Her quest comes to a scandalous end when she is accused of being the mistress of a wealthy man and exiled from the only world she knows how to navigate.

Ethan Frome (1911)
With an Introduction and Notes by Doris Grumbach
0-14-018736-7

Wharton's best-known book is unique among her thirty-one novels, novellas, and collections of short stories both in substance and in style. Constructed as a story-within-a-story told by an unnamed narrator, and set in a bleak, frozen rural landscape, it is the tale of the struggling farmer Ethan Frome and his difficult, hypochondriacal wife Zeenie, whose marriage is threatened by the arrival in their household of Zeenie's vivacious cousin Matty. In her Introduction, Wharton claimed that the genesis of this austere, tragic book was her "uneasy sense that the New England of fiction bore little . . . resemblance to the harsh and beautiful land as I had seen it." Later, in her autobiography, she would call it the work she most enjoyed "making," and to which she "brought the greatest joy and the fullest ease."


The Reef (1912)
With an Introduction by Anita Brookner
0-14-018731-6

Anna Leath, an American widow living in France, has renewed her relationship with her first love, the diplomat George Darrow. But on his way to her chateau, Givre, where he hopes to consolidate their marriage plans, Darrow encounters Sophy Viner, who is as vibrant and spontaneous as Anna is reserved and restrained. Months later, when Darrow finally makes his way to Givre, he learns that Anna's stepson, Owen, is engaged to the girl. And what to Darrow was a forgettable interlude becomes the reef on which the lives of four people are in danger of foundering. Acutely observed and rigorously crafted, distinguished by a compelling mood of fatality, The Reef met with negative reviews and poor sales upon its first publication. Wharton, discouraged, called it a "poor miserable lifeless lump." Henry James, however, thought it the finest thing she had yet written, a "passionately poignant" drama reminiscent of ancient Greek tragedy.


The Custom of the Country (1913)
With an Introduction by Anita Brookner
0-14-018190-3

Considered by many literary critics to be Wharton's best novel, The Custom of the Country is about, in the words of Anita Brookner, "the upwardly mobile and what eventually puts an end to their aspirations, about the unscrupulous and the entrenched, about nearly getting what one wants and being rendered powerless by the forces of society that lie in wait for those who overreach themselves." Mr. and Mrs. Spragg are hoping to forge an entrie into society and arrange a suitably ambitious match for their only daughter. As Wharton unfolds the story of Undine Spragg--a heroine who is as vain, spoiled, and selfish as she is irresistibly fascinating--she provides a detailed glimpse of what might be called the interior decor of upper-class America and its nouveau riche fringes. Her vision of social behavior is both supremely informed and supremely disenchanted; her intricate and satisfying plot is supremely entertaining.


Summer (1917)
With an Introduction and Notes by Elizabeth Ammons
0-14-018679-4

Written in six weeks while Wharton was on vacation from her home in Paris and her exhausting relief work on behalf of World War I refugees, Summer revisits the rural Massachusetts Berkshire setting, the culturally impoverished and uneducated characters, and many of the themes of Ethan Frome. Wharton herself called the book her "hot Ethan." Summer is the story of Charity Royall, who lives unhappily with her hard-drinking adoptive father in the isolated village of North Dormer, until a visiting architect awakens her sexual passion and hope for escape. Inspired in part by Wharton's own secret affair with Morton Fullerton, in part by her own passionate view of American small-mindedness, this is a tale of forbidden desire and thwarted dreams.


Available from Penguin

The Buccaneers
Completed by Marion Mainwaring
0-14-023202-8

Wharton's last, uncompleted novel, published posthumously in 1938, is a romantic tale about five wealthy American girls who set sail for London where they marry lords, earls, and dukes who find their beauty charming--and their wealth useful. Now completed by Marion Mainwaring, who took her cue from Wharton's own synopsis, The Buccaneers is "brave, lively, engaging . . . a fairy-tale novel, miraculously returned to life" (The New York Times Book Review).


Penguin Classics wishes to thank and credit the following writers and books for information used in creating this Reading Group Guide:

Shari Benstock, No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, Macmillan Publishing Company, 1994.

Richard H. Lawson, Edith Wharton, New York, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1977.

The Letters of Edith Wharton, R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, editors, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, Macmillan Publishing Co., 1988.

Margaret B. McDowell, Edith Wharton, Boston, Gwayne Publishers, G.K. Hall & Company, 1976.

Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933, 1966.

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words, New York, Oxford University Press, 1977.

A student site about Wharton.(Contains Wharton's biographical information, a bibliography, and the student's take on Wharton's politics and literature.)

A Wharton fan page. (Contains general information, chronology, biography, bibliography of Wharton's works and works about her, and more links.)

A Wharton bibliography.<

Wharton's home and foundation.