Review: The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This had been on my To Read list for many years. I can't believe I put off reading Wharton so long. Pen in hand, she is virtuosic.

In The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton writes of the Gilded Age - New York in the 1920's. This is a beautiful, breath-taking parade of perfectly formed ideas in sentences that will strike awe. It is evident throughout that Wharton takes a special pleasure in featuring hypocrisy, indolence and pomposity. She knew of what she spoke because it was the world from which she had sprung.

It is a love story first, though -- hearts vs. propriety -- a struggle between what one knows is right vs. what society deems to be right. Wharton masterfully unravels the lives of the true believers and the pretenders and there is not a moment in the whole darn story that you won't be on the edge of your seat, thinking "Oh, no! or, possibly, "Thank God!"

I did not want it to end. It was simply splendid.



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