Description

Winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize for Literature and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton s masterful portrait of desire and betrayal during the splendid Golden Age of Old New York. Everything in Newland Archer s easy life seems to be perfectly on track; he has a comfortable position in society, a high-powered job and a beautiful and well-bred fiancée, May Welland. But when May s mysterious cousin Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York after leaving a terrible marriage, Newland soon falls deeply in love with her. Torn between duty and passion, expectation and scandal, Newland struggles to make an impossible decision. Against a backdrop of a New York on the cusp of modernization, Wharton s classic skewers the orchestrated customs and inflexible mores of the 1870s high society. Among the novel s many film adaptations, Martin Scorsese s 1993 film stands out, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder and Richard E. Grant.