The Age of Innocence (Thrift Editions) - Softcover

Wharton, Edith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0486298035 ISBN 13: 9780486298030

Publisher: Dover Publications Inc, 2003

Synopsis

Deeply moving study of the tyrannical and rigid requirements of New York high society in the late 19th century and the effect of those strictures on the lives of three people. Vividly characterized drama of affection thwarted by a man’s sense of honor, family, and societal pressures. A long-time favorite with readers and critics alike.

About this title

Review:

"We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?" from the book" ---

Edith Wharton was looking back to her own innocence when in 1920, in her late fifties, she wrote The Age of Innocence, a story of the cracks that were beginning to appear in old-fashioned fin de siècle New York society. Newland Archer is about to be married when his fiancée's cousin returns to New York, in search of a divorce from her abusive Polish husband, and his complacent, sedate world rocks on its pedestal. In the best Brief Encounter tradition, the lovers fight their feelings, little realising that their passion is well-understood by their nearest and dearest. It won the Pulitzer prize for fiction, the first awarded to a woman author, and it still has a haunting road not taken quality that leaves the listener musing on might-have-beens. Laurel Lefkow, who can sound marvellously raunchy reading such titles as The Devil Wears Prada, adopts a precise well-behaved diction perfectly matched to the novel. --The Times

From the Publisher:

A Norton Critical Edition. The editor, Candace Waid is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dover Publications Inc
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0486298035
• ISBN 13: 9780486298030
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240