The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton's masterwork captures the opulence and deceit of a bygone era. It follows Newland Archer, a young lawyer engaged to marry virginal socialite May Welland in 1870s New York, when he meets her cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, a lady unrestrained by convention and surrounded by scandal. Archer must choose between happiness and the social code that has governed his life as all three are dragged into a love triangle packed with sensuality, cunning, and betrayal. Irony and surprise, struggle and acceptance abound in the resulting story of failed love. This classic novel, which won the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction ever given to a woman, paints a timeless depiction of "society."