Descriptions, Reviews, etc.
Description:
Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning classic novel of passion and desire. The beautiful Countess Ellen Olenska, fleeing her brutish husband, returns from Europe to the upper-class world of Old New York in the 1870s. Her rebellious independence and impulsive awareness of life stir the educated sensitivity of Newland Archer, already engaged to marry Ellen's cousin. "(Wharton's) best book".-- The New York Times.
Review Quotes: "Wharton is not generally viewed as one of literature's great optimists, and yet, by the last chapter of The Age of Innocence, people are a little less hypocritical, a little more willing to see and accept the world. ... A larger life and more tolerant views that's the greatest promise the novel holds out to us, and it's as necessary now as it was when Edith Wharton put it into words."
--Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot, from the foreword
"Will writers ever recover that peculiar blend of security and alertness which characterizes Mrs. Wharton and her tradition?"
--E. M. Forster
