begin a passionate though short-lived love af fair.

1911 Wharton’s Ethan Frome is published; it was inspired by the bleak New England setting the author witnessed near her home in Lenox.

1912 Wharton begins a friendship with art historian Bernard Berenson.

1913 Edith and Edward divorce. Wharton moves to France, where she will spend most of the rest of her life. Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! is published.

1914 Wharton travels to Tunisia and Algiers, then undertakes re lief efforts during World War I. She finds homes for hun dreds of Belgian orphans and raises money for refugees.

1916 Wharton receives the French Legion of Honor award for her war relief activities. Henry James dies.

1917 T. S. Eliot’s book of poetry Prufrock and Other Observations appears.

1918 Willa Cather publishes My Ántonia.

1920 The Age of Innocence, a novel about New York society, is pub lished to great success.

1921 Wharton becomes the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which she receives for The Age of Innocence. Eugene O‘Neill’s play Anna Christie opens in New York City.

1922 T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is published.

1923 Yale University awards Wharton an honorary doctorate. Edna St. Vincent Millay receives the Pulitzer Prize for po etry.

1924 Wharton publishes a collection of novellas and short stories as Old New York.

1925 Sinclair Lewis publishes Arrowsmith, which he dedicates to Wharton. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is published. Gertrude Stein publishes The Making of Americans. Virginia Woolf publishes Mrs. Dalloway.

1926 Ernest Hemingway publishes The Sun Also Rises.

1928 Edward Wharton dies. Poet Carl Sandburg’s Good Morning, America is published.

1930 Wharton is elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She continues to write, although her health is fail ing. Robert Frost’s Collected Poems is published.

1933 Wharton publishes Human Nature, a collection of short sto ries.

1934 Wharton publishes “Roman Fever” in Liberty magazine for the then-astronomical sum of $3,000; one of her best known short stories, it is based on her travels in Italy. She continues to write and publish stories and novels. A Back ward Glance, an autobiography, is published.

1936 The World Over, a collection of short stories, is published.

1937 After a severe stroke, Edith Wharton dies on August 11. She is buried in Versailles, France.

INTRODUCTION

The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s most romantic novel, yet our expectations for her lovers, Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer, are disappointed at every turn. Wharton’s genius lies in offering the pleasure of a romance, then engaging the reader in a stunning exploration of boundaries between the demands of society and personal freedom, illicit passion and moral responsibility. In this novel of bold design, we are the innocents unaware of the more demanding rewards to come, just as the readers of the Pictorial Review were as the monthly installments appeared in 1920. Luring us with the high comic tone of the opening chapters, Wharton admits us to Newland Archer’s dreamy certainty about love and marriage, all that lies ahead in an ordered universe, his little world of fashionable New York in the 1870s.

The strict rules of that society are rendered in detail—the moments when talk is allowed during the opera, the prescribed hours for afternoon visits, the lilies of the valley that must be sent to May Welland, the untainted girl who is about to become Newland’s fi ancee. In the opening scenes there are two observers, Wharton and Newland. The novelist is full of historical information about the city of her childhood and the customs of her privileged class. New York, constructed out of memory and verified by research, is not a discarded back-lot affair of an old Hollywood studio, but a place that must come alive for the writer as well as her readers. This lost world, lavish with particulars of dress, food, wine, manners, is weighted with an abundance of reality, all the furnishings of excessively indulged, overly secure lives. But as the writer calls up her New York of fifty years earlier, Newland Archer also instructs us in the mores of the best of families and the questionable behavior of flashy intruders on the rise. This dual perspective is playful: the novelist assessing her man, placing him in a rarefied world that he too finds narrow and amusing, though all the while he is a player in it.

Wharton’s education of the reader continues as each character comes on stage. Newland is a self-declared dilettante, May an innocent thing, Countess Olenska an expatriate with a problematic past. Julius Beaufort, a freewheeling climber, may be the scoundrel of the piece. The novelist is knowingly