Maravilloso. ♥

I loved this book and seem to be developing a penchant for reading books which drift along in a sedate way and in which not much appears (on the surface) to happen. Appearances are deceptive though and Wharton’s prose is beautiful and the dialogue sharp, and with depth of meaning.
The novel is set in high society New York in the 1870s; a social milieu where convention reigned on the surface, but where some of the men had slightly scandalous secrets. Newland Archer and May Welland and about to be engaged to be married and the novel follows their engagement and early married life. Newland falls in love with newcomer Ellen Olenska, who has fled a violent marriage in Europe.
This is really about the society of women; Newland Archer believes in his own moral and intellectual superiority, but he really doesn’t have a clue what is happening behind the scenes. Wharton dissects the hypocrisy of a society where customs and position take centre stage. But she also extols the virtue of stability and family life at the same time. This was really like a chess match between Ellen and May; the man being the pawn and the prize and unaware that he was either. The men in the novel are innocent in the sense that they are naive, but they are also corrupt because they are unfaithful and philandering. The women play their game to maintain family, stability and tradition; the men to follow their own devices and desires. Wharton analyses with precision and lays out the society she grew up in for all to see. A great novel and worth reading.

Oh, Edith Wharton. I wonder if she ever thought that her stories would still ring so true almost a hundred years later… Not just because of the classic love-triangle situation, but also the concern with appearances and reputations and the grand show that people put on for others to watch and judge.

The character development in this book is simply amazing. One is tempted to judge and pigeonhole these people, but the more you read, the more they reveal themselves to be much more complicated and interesting than they appeared at first. I do confess to a small book-crush on Newland (not because of Daniel Day-Lewis’ interpretation, though that is totally worth checking out), who is tragically stuck between two ways of thinking: the old-school one that he was brought up in, and the more modern one, which is right around the corner but not quite acceptable yet for someone of his station. He doesn't want to ruffle any feathers, but he is noticing with increasing annoyance that some of the customs held up by his social circles simply don't make sense anymore. His struggle is so vividly depicted that you end up just as torn as he is and by the end of the book, you just want the guy to be happy.

The sharp, witty writing that jabs so cleverly at the shallowness of the lives of the New York upper crust is another very strong point of this novel. Edith Wharton shows us the gorgeous, highly polished surface of society and scratches at it mercilessly, but she somehow avoids being condescending. Her long descriptions of furniture and priceless china is not there to mock so much as it is there to show us what these people cared about, and how ultimately silly it. I admire her restraint and the complete absence of meanness in her prose.

Ellen Olenska is one of the most wonderfully drawn characters I have encountered in a long time. Her strength of character, her need for independence, her yearning for happiness: all these things stunted by the conventions of the society she returned to, looking for comfort and support. Her story is really tragic: the bad marriage, the straight-laced relatives who can’t understand why she wants a divorce, the man she knows she cannot have because she refuses to hurt her cousin or to be someone’s mistress. Ellen wants to be first fiddle and she will not settle for less, even if that means giving up the man she loves. I admired her, but I also felt incredible sorrow for her.

This is one of my favorite books, and I warmly recommend it to everyone. If you have already read it, give it another go: I find out new delightful details and meanings every time I pick it up.

پس از زد و خورد های بسیار با خودم، همون ۳ رو میدم :))
بهترین کتاب خانم ادیث وارتون، بهترین کتاب من نبود؛ اما کتاب جالب و با اهمیتی بود در عین حال.
داستان عاشقانه سرراستی داشت که برای هرکسی میتونه جذاب باشه، اما از اون مهمتر پس زمینه تاریخی و اجتماعی داستانه که امیدوارم سپهر یا آرمان یا سعید توی ریویوو شون بهش اشاره کنن.
ممنونم از دوستای خیلی کاربلد و خفنم که منو توی همخوانی راه دادن. خییییلی خوندن باهاشون کیف میده. و ممنونم از دوست مترجم درجه یکم آرمان که کتابو بهم هدیه داد ♡♡♡♡

(L'’Amour Vainqueur - William Adolphe Bouguereau)

Suddenly, before an effulgent Titian, he found himself saying: “But I ‘m only fifty-seven –“ and then he turned away. For such summer dreams it was too late; but surely not for a quiet harvest of friendship, of comradeship, in the blessed hush of her nearness.

When deadening conformity to the discipline and traditions of a small society has almost become one’s second nature, even dreams can hardly breathe, suffocated in the airless vacuum of an oppressive and hypocrite environment in which the double standards on marriage, divorce and sexuality and the stifling expectations towards men and women strangle both sexes alike, no less caging the men than the women in a straightjacket of duty and propriety. Who would have expected such in the Land of the Free, making Wharton sneer that ‘It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country’?

What a stunning masterpiece.

Honestly? Because all I can do for the moment is waxing poetic over Edith Wharton’s gorgeous and meticulous prose and stand awestruck and speechless at Wharton’s craft and perceptiveness, every word I could possibly jot down would feel shamefully trite and inadequate. So I will just humbly bow down and read this fabulous novel once more, perhaps next winter.

I was quite surprised to discover what a powerful imprint watching Martin Scorsese’s film back in 1994 must have made on me, sensing the verbal Newland Archer, Ellen Olenska and May Welland seamlessly converging with memories of the actors who played them, supplanting almost any other visualisation of them taking shape in my mind.

Forgive me for the ironic appliance of this sweet and innocent-looking painting professing that love conquers all. To refer to Vergil’s motto that Love conquers all, and so let us surrender ourselves to Love would be needlessly cruel and sarcastic in the context of this novel, but a little irony seems to fit it like a glove (I don’t think Edith Wharton would mind).

Frailty, is Thy Name Newland Archer? I don’t think so. You chose loyalty, a virtue implying sacrifice and betrayal of others and of yourself, a wry self-submission to inauthenticity. This reader imagines you torn like the man in Willem Elsschot’s ‘The Marriage’, looking back on your life moodily though melancholic rather than embittered or cynic.

When he noticed how the fog of time
put out the embers in his wife’s eyes,
eroded her cheeks, cleaved her forehead,
then he looked away and was consumed by regret.

He cursed and ranted and pulled at his own beard
and met her with that gaze, but could no longer love,
he saw the greatest sin in the duty of the devil
and how she looked up at him like a dying horse.

But she did not die, even though his hellish mouth sucked
the marrow from her bones, that kept on carrying her.
She did not dare to speak, to ask or to complain,
and shivered where she stood, but lived and stayed healthy.

He thought: I will beat her to death and burn down the house.
I have to wash this mould from my rigid feet
and run through the fire and through the puddles
untill I reach another love in someother country.

But he did not kill her, because inbetween dream and act
there are hindering laws and practical issues,
and even melancholy, that no one can explain
and that comes at night, when we all go to sleep.

The years went by. The children grew up
and saw how the man, they called their father,
seated motionlessly and silently at the fire place,
gave them a godforsaken and grizly gaze.

(‘The marriage’ by Willem Elsschot (1910))

The Age of Innocence is one of those books that have been teetering on my to-read pile for months while I attended to life’s copious demands. Once I started it, however, there seemed to be nothing else in the world worth reading—or doing. I was utterly absorbed.

The novel centers on the microcosm of 1870s New York’s elite society and uses it as a lens to scrutinize not only the nuanced spectacle of the leisured class, but also that of the human soul. In The Age of Innocence, Wharton casts a visceral spotlight on the messy and volatile instabilities permeating the seemingly stable narratives of privileged polite society. More specifically, the novel portrays the subtle choreography of mannered social etiquette as, in large part, a masquerade.

From childhood on, Newland Archer was taught the pantomimic language of this social performance, indoctrinated into Old New York’s cult of silence, which finds strength in legacy and reputation and uses its substantial power to impose a false, all-encompassing “all rightness” in untenable circumstances in order to protect itself. As such, Newland is expected to marry the innocent, naïve, and “artless” May Welland who, unencumbered by dreams of subversion, would make a “blameless” wife incapable of surprising him. Yet, Newland cannot bear thoughts of that future, stretching away in safe, dull years on the other side of the gulf separating him from the object of his truest desires: the untouchable Countess Oleska. May’s disgraced cousin.

I loved this book. Wharton explores, with both ingenuity and a poisonous bite, the angst of agency and individuality and its unsettling struggle for power in the act of attempting to escape the societal structures in which we are embedded. The novel’s subject, after all, is the journey of repositioning one’s self in relation to the tradition and culture we grew up in, and the difficulty of continuing to live in the complexity and clarity of that learned wisdom. Newland, for much of the novel, luxuriates in the seductive premise of living an unmoored life, outside the narrow parameters of his privileged slice of New York, which formed him but which he feels he has now completely outgrown. He is eager to go, to cast off the dreadful moorage that is his engagement to May Welland and seize what he can of the world for himself.

Newland, above all, wants Ellen. Seeing Ellen again, for so many years, has brought his world to a proper perspective, and their shared resistance to being taxonomized by the stale societal scripts they were born into brought them closer together. Newland throws himself at Ellen with the sort of carelessness and abandon that befits his youth and station. Despite the powerful tides tugging them apart, he is determined to weather the risks that love and desire necessitate. Yet, of course, the central irony here is that no matter how far Newland’s fall from grace would be, Ellen’s would still be from greater a height. Their clannish society’s customs dictate that such dissent (and descent) from the universal script of propriety must be severely punished. And as these scripts usually go, Ellen (who’s still reeling from her own marital scandal) is set to bear the cost.

While reading this book, the question of who is in the luxurious position of being able to transgress lied like a needle in the back of my mind. Newland’s battle for coherence and self-agency is predicated on the interdependent working of class, race, and gender. Newland flirts with the idea of surpassing the limitations of his social reality, but his desire struck me as yet another masquerade. It is subversive, certainly, but it cannot genuinely harm him—like a defanged serpent. The potential loss and fracture of Newland’s bachelor dreams lead him to disillusionment, but not to any real rebuilding. At the end, Newland cannot truly escape the world that formed him because he is incapable of seeing it clearly in the first place. Newland therefore becomes the prisoner and eventually the victim—if he is a victim at all—of his own misperceptions.

Ultimately, what comes forcefully in The Age of Innocence is the cost of negating the reality of the world we live in and the people we love and are responsible for to uphold the incomplete fictions of our illusions. The ending twisted my heart into sadness and pity, but I can’t conceive of a more apt conclusion for this novel.

n  “Each time you happen to me all over again.”n

Good Lord, what an exquisite little gem.
Had I been a lady in the 20s, this might have sent me out of my mind.

One of the reasons why I don't usually fully enjoy classics, is that I can't stand stuffy writings and prefer a concise yet impactful prose, instead. While Edith Wharton's style is humorous and quite modern for her time period, I must admit it suffered from the same overly descriptive prose that characterizes big names of classic literature.

Aside from this, The Age of Innocence is a wonderful story that made my romantic and dramatic heart dream and ache in the most delicious way.
I love how it deals with imparities between individuals, whether they're based on gender or social status, and how it portraits true love as something you can't avoid, even if you have to.
Loved the characters, especially May, and the ending. It reminded me so much of how Daisy Jones & The Six's ends, and it was also probably my favorite part.
I'm also going to watch the movie, tonight. I mean...Winona Ryder, Michelle Pfeiffer and Edith Warthon all in the same movie?
Sounds like H E A V E N.



n  n
{this book and other classics I'm gonna try getting around to reading this year, will be featured in a shelf called classic-lit-palooza and will be picked from a list of titles considered classics or cult novels that I compiled on a sleep deprived Wednesday night. It comprehends all those famous books I've always wanted to read and that I've challenged myself to finally pick up in 2021-2022.
I'll try to review or just rate these books in an objective way, and do my best not to let questionable/old-fashioned contents spoil my enjoyment, although I'll definitely take into account that many of these novels might contain or glorify those behaviors and elements that are considered problematic for today's standards.}

Tragic Tale of a Man Suffocated by Convention in 1870s New York



Newland Archer, a promising young lawyer growing up in the cream of New York society, is engaged to May Welland. Everyone around him considers this to be a brilliant match.

Except that May's cousin, Ellen Olenska, arrives from Europe, and Newland finds himself drawn to Ellen. Ellen, a native New Yorker, is fleeing a bad marriage abroad. She is beautiful, kind, and entirely unpretentious.

Newland, though, is trapped in what is expected of a man of his circumstances.

He marries May and passes up the chance to be happy with Ellen, who is probably the love of his life. He does this in spite of the fact that May, sensing she has a rival, gives Archer a chance to bail out of their engagement.

Archer ends up married to a woman with whom he cannot communicate and with whom he has little in common.

This novel brilliantly depicts how society's stifling expectations of conformity in the 1870's crushed the life and love out of people.

The title "Age of Innocence" is probably ironic.

The "innocent" people who pretend not to know what is happening specifically between Archer and Ellen, who in fact never consummate their love, although everyone assumes they have, wordlessly conspire to force their own to "toe the line" in the manner seen to be fitting. Under a veneer of "niceness" is a stultifying and controlling malice.

The writing is excellent and the detailed depictions of 1870's New York fascinating and crystal clear.

Newland's circle is filled with superficial people who look down their noses at artists, writers and "foreigners" (such as Madame Olenska) or anyone who is a little bit different. They skewer anyone who has the audacity to fail in business and ostracize their unfortunate relations.

These people fill their days with gossip, clothes, opera, and doing the expected things (dinner parties, vacations in Newport or St. Augustine, etc., decorating their expensive homes, etc.) Everything must be "comme il faut" (for example, ladies are not supposed to wear the dresses they have ordered from Paris until a year or two elapses).

The book is masterfully put together.

Although this novel is very different than "Ethan Frome", as in "Ethan Frome", Wharton deals with a tragic, doomed loved that is pried apart by social expectations.

The book's ending is surprising and poignant.

This is not a "fun" book, but it is a worthwhile read.

I listened to the audio and read along in the Kindle book.

Dick Hill was an decent, but not great, audio reader, although he wasn't too subtle. He would overemphasize any passages that were intended to be satirical.

The blurb on GR gives a good summary so I will start with that as the first paragraph:

Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s masterful portrait of desire and betrayal during the sumptuous Golden Age of Old New York, a time when society people “dreaded scandal more than disease.” This is Newland Archer’s world as he prepares to marry the beautiful but conventional May Welland. But when the mysterious Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York after a disastrous marriage, Archer falls deeply in love with her. Torn between duty and passion, Archer struggles to make a decision that will either courageously define his life—or mercilessly destroy it.



Elite New York society says of the Countess, separated from her husband who remains in Europe, “And now it’s too late; her life is finished.” For a time she considers going back to her husband. She shocks people by wearing the wrong things, hanging out with the wrong people or by engaging men in frank conversation. In elite New York society at that time a woman could not walk away from conversation with a man to engage in conversation with another man; she had to wait for him to come to her.

The Countess shocks people by referring occasionally to ‘my husband’ when everyone expects her never to mention him. But she is somewhat protected by her family connections: she is Newland’s wife’s cousin. Even though people will say in conversation “I don’t want to hear about anything unpleasant in her history” all of them already know all the dirt.

Those in New York society at the time thought themselves superior to their counterparts in Europe. They think know European customs because they all honeymoon and vacation there for months at a time. Their goal is to keep out the “new people.” They spend fortunes on dresses from Paris but wait a year to wear them because it is not sheik to wear the ‘latest fashions.’ A woman is dishonored by her husband’s shady financial dealings. While they claim to be well-read and to love art and music, they will not hang out with those types of people or invite them to their parties. In conversation people are so uptight blush and pale constantly.



Newland thinks of his wife May as a ‘Stepford wife.’ Seeing her brow glistening in the light “…he said to himself with a secret dismay that he would always know the thoughts behind it, that never, in all the years to come , would she surprise him by an unexpected mood, by a new idea, a weakness, a cruelty or an emotion.” May is “That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything…”

Newland thinks of himself as enlightened. Among men he says “Women should be free – as free as we are,” knowing full well that “Nice women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore – in the heat of the argument – the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them.” But of May he thinks: “There was no use trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free…”



After Newland and the Countess fall in love they enter into a kind of limbo: “Her choice would be stay near him as long as he did not ask her to come nearer; and it depended on himself to keep her just there, safe but secluded.” I’m reminded of another novel I read recently: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. Can you really pine away with love for someone your entire life?

There is good writing. Just a couple of examples:

Said of an ancient matron: “She always, indeed, struck Newland Archer as having been rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a rosy life-in-death.”

The opera lets out: “Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.”

There’s a lot of local color of New York’s Fifth Avenue district and of the mansions of Newport, Rhode Island.



A great read and I will add it to my favorites! Thanks to Tina, Tom, Jaidee, Joshie, Dan and Heather who encouraged me to read more of Edith Wharton, this book in particular.

(Edited 11/11/2021)

Top photo of a New York Fifth Avenue mansion from boweryboyshistory.com
Interior of a modern Fifth Avenue mansion from thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2013/
A mansion in Newport RI (Chateau Sur Mer) from assets.simpleviewinc.com
The author from edithwharton.org

I think I love this book for the wrong reasons.

I think I'm supposed to love this book because its a scathing take down of the hypocrisy of 1870's New York high society. How all the opulence and beautiful clothes and lovely ritual masked a conniving, cut throat, grasping horde of wealthy opportunists who spent their lazy, pointless lives slinging barely concealed verbals barbs at each other and ostracizing anyone who didn't adhere to their "rules" for civility.

But I just really love the romance of it.

I love the slowly dying innocence of a world that didn't know it was dying. The decadent dinners and balls and receptions. I love how everyone HAS to do things like go to the opera and attend parties. I love all the cards everyone drops off at everyone's house. I fucking LOVE old Mrs. Manson Mingot whose too fat to go up stairs so she "scandalously" moves her bedroom downstairs and makes people think of "french fiction" when they have to walk through it to visit her. I love the country homes and the women leaving the room after dinner while the men smoke cigars and talk "business." And the clothes, heavens above I have never wanted to wear a corset more in my life! Don't tell me you've never wanted to spend four months with dress makers in Paris! I will not hear of it!

Everything is just so lovely and quiet and so sure of its rightness. Everyone has their role, their obligation to keep things exactly as they are. Harmonious, gentle, proper.

I love the way that passion explodes into everything like a bomb or a wrecking ball and comes within a hairs breath of reordering the world only to be cast out again. I love the way you only get the smallest taste of fire and lust, just enough to know how delicious it might be, before its extinguished.

I love the characters. Gentle, arrogant Newland Archer who doesn't know true, honest emotion until it bites him on the butt. Not as innocent as she appears May Welland, who masks a smoldering fire of determination behind pastel dresses and blushes. Quietly radiant Ellen Olenska who sails into New York society utterly blind to how appalling everyone finds her independence.

I get that I'm supposed to understand that its allegorical and apparently Edith Wharton even wrote other versions of the story where Newland and Ellen get to be together and end up hating each other and they don't actually even really know each other and that everyone is really kind of awful but I can't help it. I lose my damn fool mind when he kisses that parasol guys. HE KISSES THE PARASOL. Its not even hers!!!!!!!!!

I love the epic, romantic tragedy of it all. The way the story sort of just fades into a kind of dreamy, half remembered memory that will always be lovelier than the actual things that happened. I love how Wharton even gives them one last chance, with all the societal restrictions and wives and husbands at last out of the way, to be together and with only a staircase separating them Newland Archer instead consigns Ellen Olenska to the shadowed, shimmering halls of his memory. How he prefers to keep their tragic, almost love affair with him rather than confront a living, breathing reality that might not live up to those hopeless, romanticized images he holds.

"Each time you happen to me all over again."

Who in the world wouldn't want someone to say that to them.

Who in the world.

Esta novela tiene mucho de ensayo histórico, retrata a la perfección el Nueva York de finales del siglo XIX y el modus vivendi de su élite económica. Pero lo que de verdad me conquistó de esta historia fueron los tres protagonistas y sus distintas capas, ya que cuanto más los conoces, más te sorprenden, hasta llegar a un final inesperado pero que da sentido a todo lo que has leído. Edith Wharton escribe de maravilla y estoy deseando seguir conociendo su obra.

RESEÑA COMPLETA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXyNx...

Splendido.