In the Library
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton, 1920
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 7.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 34
- Length
- Length 101k words
£1.99
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On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth does the same thing, watching New York's unwritten rules crush someone who cannot obey them, but the cost falls on a woman with no safety net.
£1.99
The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James
The Portrait of a Lady does the same thing, tracing a bright, independent woman as she is slowly boxed in by the very society she thought she could outwit.
£1.99
About the book
At the opera, Newland Archer watches his fiancée's cousin arrive late, in a dress cut a shade too bold for New York, and feels the whole box incline toward disapproval without a word being spoken. This is Edith Wharton's own world, the one her narrator calls hieroglyphic: nothing said aloud, everything understood, a raised eyebrow doing the work of a verdict. Newland falls for Ellen Olenska because she has stopped pretending that unhappiness is bad taste, because she has already paid the price he is too careful to pay. He does not leave May Welland for her. He marries the girl his tribe chose and spends the rest of his life keeping a vow he never quite made, mourning quietly the man he might have been. The novel's cruelty is that manners can do a knife's work without ever raising a hand. Decades later, given one last chance to climb the stairs to where Ellen waits, he sits on a bench below, and how long he stays there is the whole measure of the life he chose.