The Age of Innocence
Based on Wikipedia: The Age of Innocence
In 1921, a committee of judges faced an uncomfortable choice. They had agreed to give the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Sinclair Lewis for his satirical novel Main Street. But the political implications made them nervous. So they changed their minds and gave the award instead to Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence—making her the first woman ever to win the prize.
It was a decision born of cowardice that accidentally established Wharton as, in the words of one critic, America's "First Lady of Letters."
The irony would not have been lost on Wharton herself. Her novel is, after all, a story about how society's careful rules and polite evasions can trap people in lives they never quite chose.
A World Already Gone
Wharton wrote The Age of Innocence in her late fifties, already a celebrated author with publishers eager for her work. But something had changed. The novel became, by her own admission, "a momentary escape in going back to my childish memories of a long-vanished America."
That America—the rigid, gilded world of 1870s New York high society—had been destroyed, she believed, in 1914.
Wharton had spent the war years in Europe, watching a generation of young men fed into the machinery of modern combat. Trench warfare. Poison gas. Artillery barrages that turned landscapes into moonscapes. When the guns finally fell silent in 1918, Theodore Roosevelt—the embodiment of a certain kind of confident American optimism—died just months later.
Everything Wharton valued seemed to have ended at once.
So she did what writers often do with grief: she went backward. She reconstructed the world of her childhood with meticulous care, every dinner party and opera box and social slight rendered in precise detail. Scholars and general readers agree on at least this much: The Age of Innocence is fundamentally a story struggling to reconcile the old with the new.
The Triangle
The novel opens in the 1870s with Newland Archer, a young lawyer from one of New York's most prominent families, anticipating his engagement to May Welland. Everything about this match is correct. May is beautiful, well-bred, and utterly conventional—a "perfect product of Old New York society," as the novel puts it.
Newland is proud of himself. He imagines a traditional marriage in which he will play the worldly husband-teacher and May the innocent wife-student.
Then Ellen Olenska arrives.
Ellen is May's cousin, but she might as well be from another planet. She has spent years in Europe, married to a Polish count who was apparently cruel, unfaithful, and quite willing to steal her money. Now she has fled that disaster and returned to New York, trailing scandal behind her like a comet's tail.
At first, Newland finds her unsettling. Her mere presence threatens the reputation of his bride-to-be's family. But Ellen does something dangerous: she refuses to follow the rules. She attends parties with disreputable people. She treats her maid as an equal. She invites Newland, her cousin's fiancé, to visit her alone.
She makes him think.
The Divorce That Wasn't
Ellen's decision to divorce Count Olenski sends quiet shockwaves through New York society. Living apart from one's husband can be tolerated—it happens, people understand, these things are complicated. But divorce? Divorce is unacceptable.
The family panics. A law partner at Newland's firm asks him to talk Ellen out of it, to save the Wellands from disgrace. He agrees.
He succeeds.
But in persuading Ellen to abandon her divorce, Newland discovers that he has fallen in love with her.
Terrified of his own feelings, he begs May to elope—to accelerate their wedding, to bind him to his proper life before he does something foolish. She refuses, not understanding his urgency.
Weeks later, Newland tells Ellen he loves her. She loves him too, she admits. But she is horrified at what their love would do to May. She will not let him leave his fiancée for her.
Then May's telegram arrives. She has agreed to move up the wedding after all.
The Marriage
Newland and May marry. He tries to forget Ellen.
It doesn't work.
His society marriage becomes what the novel calls "mediocre"—not unhappy in any dramatic way, just empty. The social life he once found absorbing now feels hollow and joyless. Ellen has moved to Washington, keeping her distance, but he cannot stop loving her.
Their paths cross again in Newport, Rhode Island. Newland learns that Count Olenski wants Ellen back, and her family is pressuring her to return to Europe and reconcile with him. When she refuses, they cut off her money.
Newland becomes obsessed with finding a way out. He urges Ellen to run away with him.
She refuses.
Then Ellen is called back to New York to care for her sick grandmother, the formidable Mrs. Manson Mingott. The old woman accepts Ellen's decision to remain separated from the count and agrees to restore her allowance.
Under renewed pressure from Newland, Ellen finally agrees to meet him secretly, to consummate what has been until now only an emotional affair.
But something changes her mind.
The Farewell Dinner
Ellen decides to return to Europe permanently. May announces that she and Newland will throw Ellen a farewell party.
During this dinner, Newland makes a decision: he will abandon May and follow Ellen across the Atlantic. That very night, after the guests have left, he will tell his wife he is leaving her.
He never gets the chance.
May interrupts him with news. She learned that morning that she is pregnant.
Then she adds something else. She had told Ellen about the pregnancy two weeks earlier—even though, at that point, she wasn't certain of it.
The implication lands like a blow. May suspected the affair. She told Ellen she was carrying Newland's child, and that is why Ellen decided to leave.
Newland is trapped. He stays with May. He surrenders his love for his child's sake.
Twenty-Six Years Later
May dies. The children grow up. Newland becomes an old man.
One day, he and his eldest son Dallas find themselves in Paris. Dallas has learned that his mother's cousin Ellen still lives there, and he has arranged a visit to her apartment.
Newland is stunned. He has not seen Ellen in more than a quarter century.
They walk to her building. They stand outside. Dallas goes up alone while Newland waits on the street, watching the balcony of her apartment.
He considers going up.
He doesn't.
Instead, he walks back to his hotel without seeing her. His final words about the love affair are these: "It's more real to me here than if I went up."
The Ironic Title
The novel's title operates on multiple levels of irony. On the surface, it evokes a famous painting—a portrait of a young girl by Sir Joshua Reynolds that became known as The Age of Innocence, though Reynolds himself never called it that. An engraver named Joseph Grozer gave it that title in 1794, and it became enormously popular, reproduced everywhere as a sentimental image of childhood purity.
Wharton's title is a comment on the polished outward manners of New York society compared to its inward machinations. Everyone performs innocence. Everyone knows the performance is false. The innocence is the age's defining characteristic precisely because it is so carefully maintained and so thoroughly artificial.
May Welland, the beautiful bride, is "outwardly a picture of Innocence." But she is also capable of manipulating her husband and driving away her rival with a strategically timed announcement of pregnancy.
The society that condemns Ellen for leaving her abusive husband is the same society that tolerates Lawrence Lefferts making "a big show of his morality every time his wife suspects he is having an affair."
Innocence, in this world, is not the absence of knowledge. It is the agreement not to acknowledge what everyone knows.
The Characters
Newland Archer
The novel's protagonist is a young, popular, successful lawyer whose entire life has been shaped by the customs of upper-class New York. His engagement to May is one accomplishment in a string of them. He expects to be happy.
Through Ellen, he begins to see his world differently. He notices the sexual inequality, the shallowness, the way the intricate social web punishes anyone who steps outside its boundaries. He falls in love with a woman he cannot have and cannot forget.
Throughout the novel, he pushes against acceptable behavior—following Ellen to Skuytercliff, then to Boston, finally deciding to follow her to Europe. But he always stops short. He cannot find a place for his love in the world he inhabits.
Some scholars see Wharton most clearly in Newland, not Ellen. He is the one trapped between two worlds, unable to fully belong to either.
May Welland
May has been raised to be a perfect wife and mother. She follows society's customs flawlessly. Mostly, she appears to be exactly the shallow, uninteresting young woman that New York society requires.
But there are glimpses of something more. Early in their courtship, in St. Augustine, she offers to release Newland from their engagement so he can marry "the woman he truly loves"—thinking he wants to be with a married woman from his past. It is a moment of startling maturity and compassion.
After their marriage, May suspects Newland's feelings for Ellen. She never confronts him directly. Instead, she maintains the illusion of a perfect marriage before society while quietly maneuvering to drive Ellen away.
On her deathbed, years later, May tells their son Dallas that the children can always trust their father "because he gave up the thing he wanted most out of loyalty to their marriage."
She always knew.
Ellen Olenska
May's cousin, the scandalous countess who fled a disastrous European marriage, is the novel's most complex figure. She treats servants as equals. She ignores social boundaries. She helps Newland see beyond the narrow world he inhabits.
But she is not simply a free spirit. Her love for Newland drives her most important decisions: dropping her divorce proceedings, remaining in America, and finally leaving forever when she learns May is pregnant.
Critical reception of Ellen has shifted dramatically over time. Early readers saw her as a willful temptress. Later generations recognized her as a woman far ahead of her time, fiercely independent and morally serious.
One thing has remained constant: as one critic put it, "Ellen has only to walk alone across a drawing room to offend its definitions."
Mrs. Manson Mingott
The matriarch of the powerful Mingott family, grandmother to both Ellen and May, was born Catherine Spicer to an unremarkable family. Widowed at twenty-eight, she built her family's social position through sheer force of personality.
She controls the family. When Newland wants the wedding date moved up, she makes it happen. She controls the money—withholding Ellen's allowance when the family disapproves of her behavior, then restoring it when she changes her mind.
Mrs. Mingott is a maverick. She receives guests on the ground floor of her house, a practice associated with women of questionable morals. She welcomes Ellen when everyone else wants to shun her.
Wharton based this character on her own great-great-aunt, Mary Mason Jones, a formidable woman said to have inspired the phrase "Keeping up with the Joneses." The idea was that fashionable society would always strive to match her standards—because she set them.
The World Wharton Built
The novel is celebrated for its meticulous accuracy in depicting how the nineteenth-century American upper class actually lived. Wharton had been raised in that world. She knew its opera boxes and dinner parties, its summer houses in Newport and its unwritten rules about who could be received and who could not.
She also knew its cruelty. The same society that seemed so stable and refined was capable of destroying anyone who threatened its carefully maintained surface.
By the time Wharton wrote the novel, that world had vanished. The Great War had killed millions and shattered the confidence of Western civilization. The old certainties were gone.
Wharton's earlier novel The House of Mirth, published in 1905, had been sharper and more caustic in its critique of society. The Age of Innocence is gentler—not because Wharton had mellowed, but because she was writing an elegy for something she had loved even as she saw its flaws.
The novel questions the assumptions and morals of 1870s New York without ever becoming an outright condemnation. Wharton understood that the old world had its own kind of beauty, even if that beauty was built on exclusion and hypocrisy.
What Remains
At the end of the novel, Newland Archer sits outside Ellen's Paris apartment, an old man who has spent twenty-six years in a marriage that was never what he wanted. He has the chance to see her again.
He chooses not to.
"It's more real to me here than if I went up."
This is either wisdom or cowardice, depending on how you read it. Perhaps Newland knows that the Ellen he loves exists only in memory, and that meeting her again would replace that perfect image with something ordinary and present. Perhaps he is simply afraid.
Wharton leaves the question open. The novel ends with Newland walking away, carrying his memories of a love he never consummated and a world that no longer exists.
The age of innocence is over. It was always, in some sense, a fiction. But it was his fiction, and he has chosen to keep it.