The Age of Innocence [Paperback]

Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize,The Age of Innocenceis an elegant, masterful portrait of desire and betrayal in old New York—now with a new introduction fromacclaimed author Colm Tóibín for the novel’s centennial.

With vivid power, Wharton evokes a time of gaslit streets, formal dances held in the ballrooms of stately brownstones, and society people who dreaded scandal more than disease. This is Newland Archer's world as he prepares to many the docile May Welland. Then, suddenly, the mysterious, intensely nonconformist Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York after a long absence, turning Archer's world upside down.

This classic Wharton tale of thwarted love is an exuberantly comic and profoundly moving look at the passions of the human heart, as well as a literary achievement of the highest order.Chapter 1

On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.

Though there was already talk of the election, in remote metropolitan distances above the Forties, of a new Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the new people whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music.

It was Madame Nilsson's first appearance that winter, and what the daily press had already learned to describe as an exceptionally brilliant audience had gathered to hear her, transported through the slippery, snowy streets in private broughams, in the spacious family landau, or l3œ