Download The Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Edith Wharton PDF

By Edith Wharton

Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s masterful portrait of hope and betrayal through the luxurious Golden Age of outdated long island, a time while society humans “dreaded scandal greater than disease.”

This is Newland Archer’s global as he prepares to marry the gorgeous yet traditional may perhaps Welland. but if the mysterious Countess Ellen Olenska returns to ny after a disastrous marriage, Archer falls deeply in love along with her. Torn among accountability and fervour, Archer struggles to choose that would both courageously outline his life— or mercilessly spoil it.

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Julius Beaufort, a freewheeling climber, may be the scoundrel of the piece. The novelist is knowingly leading us into melodrama, the dominant mode of the popular theater of the age she recreates, a theater of plays in which good and evil were clearly sorted out, not tainted by moral ambiguity or shaded feelings. As we read what has so often been praised as an historical novel, we must bear in mind the year it was composed, 1919. The Age of Innocence calls upon history to inform the present, and Wharton portrays a cast of clueless characters who could not conceive the slaughter of World War I or President Wilson舗s ill-fated proposal for the League of Nations.

Lovell Mingott, a large blonde lady in creaking satin, he sat down beside his betrothed, and said in a low tone: 舠I hope you舗ve told Madame Olenska that we舗re engaged? 舡 Miss Welland舗s face grew rosy as the dawn, and she looked at him with radiant eyes. 舡 He made no answer but that which his eyes returned, and she added, still more confidently smiling: 舠Tell my cousin yourself: I give you leave. 舡 She made way for him by pushing back her chair, and promptly, and a little ostentatiously, with the desire that the whole house should see what he was doing, Archer seated himself at the Countess Olenska舗s side.

At each turn when Newland is about to declare his love for Ellen Olenska, May trumps him. Wharton echoes May舗s manipulations in drawing us into the love story only to cut off the possibility of freedom. We may gasp at the end of a chapter in which Newland舗s wife wins another round: more melodrama, but without the easy solution of that genre which would render May demonic: She is a realist with a healthy desire for self-preservation. Looking at May舗s mother before their marriage, Newland 舠asked himself if May舗s face was doomed to thicken into the same middle-aged image of invincible innocence.

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