The Age of Innocence

"I like this book for its willingness to embrace the tragic. No happy endings."

"I think of Wharton as Jane Austen a century on. She’s not afraid to punch a bit harder. Her novels are not romances in the sense that Austen’s are, although both are set in a certain wealthy layer of society, and where the question is whether people are going to form happy relationships or not. They’re not comic romances; Wharton’s novels are more tragic than that. A lot of her books are set in 1870s New York, when some enormous fortunes have been made, where New York is still under construction, and the balance of power is shifting between old money and new. That’s a fabulous motor for fiction: a society in flux. And the great thing about Wharton is that she was part of this world, she grew up in it. She’s writing anthropological work about her own people. The Age of Innocence is about a young man called Newland Archer. He’s engaged to someone that I think it is fair to call ‘a perfectly nice girl.’ She’s called May, she’s lovely, and she’s absolutely a paid-up member of the society they are both in. At the start of the novel, May’s cousin Countess Ellen Olenska returns from Europe—which, in Wharton’s novels, is always a site of potential danger and excitement. Newland encounters her for the first time at the opera. Then he hears she’s potentially engaged in a divorce. So there’s an element of scandal about her. He befriends her because of his fiancé’s connection to her, and then he falls in love with her. She’s just as wealthy as any of the members of this society, but she’s not part of it. She doesn’t accept its strictures. Plus he falls totally in love with her while already being engaged to her cousin. So it’s a magnificent romantic tragedy. Wharton isn’t afraid to give her characters unhappy or complicated endings. In The Age of Innocence and in lots of Wharton’s books, wealth functions as a heavy cloth, a prophylactic stopping people from seeing each other’s hearts and understanding each other’s true feelings. It’s an amazing novel. All of Wharton’s books are brilliant. Well, apart from her ghost stories , which aren’t my favourite. They just aren’t scary. Yes, in a sense everyone is worried about what everyone else has, whether that’s more money or more of any other unexpected asset. People are constantly examining each other. There’s a whole raft of novels, as you say, of old British families marrying into American money, because there aren’t enough funds to keep the big house going. There were a lot of marriages of convenience in the 19th century and the early 20th century, where you might effectively trade a lump of US currency for a title and a country house. But that also leads to complication, because think of a young woman from gilded age New York coming to live in a leaky house in rural Borsetshire… Francis Hodgson Burnett wrote a few books about people trading spouses, steamships carrying young women to be married off on one side of the Atlantic or another. Wharton is very good on that. Her book The House of Mirth is incredible. Ah, it’s incredible. It’s all about Lily Bart trying to find some secure berth for life and marriage, and not quite ever being able to compromise her own brilliant personality to do that. There’s another one called The Custom of the Country , in which Undine Spragg—what a name—a young arriviste from the Midwest, the middle of nowhere, really, who arrives in New York and ruins her parents’ savings to buy her way into high society, and slowly climbs the brutal cliff face towards acceptance in society. But, as you say, she never feels she’s arrived. Even as the novel ends, she’s achieved her greatest financial triumph so far. Then in the very final pages, she spots a tiny bauble someone else has that she doesn’t, and you can already see her starting to plot. It’s an amazing portrayal of the human inability to accept what we have."

"It's a masterpiece. Despite being almost a hundred years old, it still speaks powerfully on the assumptions we make about each other, and our human failures to communicate our needs and desires."

"The descriptions of Manhattan in the 1870s — the houses, the streets, the clothes people wore — knocked me flat, especially because you can look at some of the same places today and it's as if you never saw them until you read her."

"Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence," which I just finished."

"My No. 1 go-to book is "The Age of Innocence," by Edith Wharton."