Set in 1870's New York, Age of Innocence follows the courtship of an upperclass couple and how a beautiful woman surrounded by scandal threatens their happiness.
Newland Archer has made a highly desirable engagement to May Welland but when he meets her cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska who has left her Polish husband, he begins to doubt his choice of bride.
Countess Olenska shocks staid New York society with her unconventional views about how to conduct her life (especially her decision to divorce her husband).
Newland begins to question the hypocrisy of his life in a gilded cage and falls in love with Ellen.
About the Author
Edith Wharton once said, about critics and biographers: "After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them & invent others." It seems that there is an abundance of blatantly wrong or just slightly incorrect information about Wharton's life and literature; it also seems that this problem was one Wharton herself faced.
Born Edith Jones, January 24, 1862, she went on to become the first woman to ever win the Pulitzer prize for her novel The Age of Innocence, in 1921. You can read Wharton's own impressions of her life in the autobiography A Backward Glance. Her life story is as interesting as those of the women in her novels, and her biography is an excellent source of history, entertainment and context.
To find out more about Edith Wharton's life, click on the link below
http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/index.html
Here's the trailer for the 1993 Martin Scorcese film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer.
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