Winner of the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a book written by a woman, The Age of Innocence is a suspenseful, deeply moving, and brilliantly accomplished novel of the struggle between desire and destiny.
The House of Mirth (1905).
In Europe, she met Henry James, who became her good friend, traveling companion, and the sternest but most careful critic of her fiction.
They were written while the Whartons lived in Newport and New York, traveled in Europe, and built their grand home, the Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts.
Her first published book was a guide to interior decorating, but this was followed by several novels and story collections.
In spite of the strain of her marriage, or perhaps because of it, she began to write fiction and published her first story in 1889.
She suffered the first of a series of nervous breakdowns in 1894.
But her marriage, in 1885, to Edward Wharton was an emotional disappointment, if not a disaster.
Educated by tutors and governesses, she was raised for only one career: marriage.
What Newland does not suspect--but will learn--is that the women also hold cards in this game...
About the Author: The upper stratum of New York society into which Edith Wharton was born in 1862 provided her with an abundance of material as a novelist but did not encourage her growth as an artist.
The young lawyer Newland Archer believes that he must make an impossible choice: domesticity with his docile and lovely fianc e, May Welland, or passion with her highly unsuitable but irresistible cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska.
The Age of Innocence is Wharton\'s 1920 novel of love menaced by convention, played out against a gorgeously arrayed backdrop of opera houses, lavish dinner parties, country homes, and luxurious deathbeds.
In the polished works of Edith Wharton, Old New York is a society at once infinitely sophisticated and ruthlessly primitive, in which adherence to ritual and loyalty to clan surpass all other values--and transgression is always punished.
Winner of the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a book written by a woman, The Age of Innocence is a suspenseful, deeply moving, and brilliantly accomplished novel of the struggle between desire and destiny
