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Zusatztext “Elegiac...a novel of cruelty! loss! and grief.” —Hermione Lee “Flawlessly executed...distinguished....a sad and beautiful love story! a brilliant satirical study.” — The New York Times “Wharton’s touch is the deftest! the surest! of all our American manipulators in the novel.” — The New Republic Informationen zum Autor Edith Wharton was born into a privileged New York family in 1862 and died in France in 1937. In addition to her works as a novelist, most famously The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country, and Ethan Frome, she also was a renowned interior designer, and was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Klappentext The Age of Innocence, one of Edith Wharton's most renowned novels and the first by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, exquisitely details the struggle between love and responsibility through the experiences of men and women in Gilded Age New York. The novel follows Newland Archer, a young, aristocratic lawyer engaged to the cloistered, beautiful May Welland. When May's disgraced cousin Ellen arrives from Europe, fleeing her marriage to a Polish Count, her worldly, independent nature intrigues Archer, who soon falls in love with her. Trapped by his passionless relationship with May and the social conventions that forbid a relationship with Ellen, Archer finds himself torn between possibility and duty. Wharton's profound understanding of her characters' lives makes the triangle of Archer, May, and Ellen come to life with an irresistible urgency. A wry, incisive look at the ways in which love and emotion must negotiate the complex rules of high society, The Age of Innocence is one of Wharton's finest, most illuminative works. With an introduction by Peter Washington INTRODUCTION When The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, Edith Wharton was naturally pleased, though by no means overwhelmed. The first woman to be so honoured, she was then aged fifty-eight and at the height of her powers. Rich, famous and the author of several hugely successful best-sellers, she could reasonably regard the Pulitzer as no more than official recognition of her status as the leading American novelist of her day. Pleasure soon gave way to distaste when Wharton discovered from the prize citation that she was being rewarded for writing 'the American novel which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood'. Nauseated by the priggishness of this twaddle and baffled by its grotesque inaptitude as a description of her book, she wrote ironically to friends about the absurd idea of uplifting American morals when she had done little but satirize them for more than thirty years. But her irony turned to fury when it was further revealed that the Pulitzer jury had originally selected Sinclair Lewis's Main Street for the prize, only to find the judgment overturned in favour of Wharton by the craven prize trustees, who were alarmed by the offence Lewis's satire on small-town life was causing among their wealthy benefactors. For Wharton this was the final insult: The Age of Innocence had been chosen, not for its quality, but because it was safe. What had started out as a coronation was becoming a fiasco. Wharton was embarrassed on her own behalf and angry for Lewis, one of the few living American novelists she respected. She was also justifiably puzzled by the behaviour of the trustees, for her study of aristocratic manners is, in the end, a far more disturbing book than Lewis's amiable and often sentimental satire on Mid-Western prejudices, and she knew it. One can only miss this fact-and the ironic force of the book's title-if one reads the novel in one's own age of innocence. Though written in a grand manner far from the engaging colloquialism of Main S...
