Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Age of Innocence, is both a poignant story of frustrated love and an extraordinarily vivid, delightfully satirical record of a vanished world – the Gilded Age of New York City.Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful hardbacks make perfect gifts for book lovers, or wonderful additions to your own collection. This edition features an introduction by award-winning novelist Rachel Cusk, author of Outline.As the scion of one of New York’s leading families, Newland Archer has been born into a life of sumptuous privilege and strict duty. But the arrival of the Countess Olenska, a free spirit who breathes clouds of European sophistication, makes him question the path on which his upbringing has set him. As his fascination with her grows, he discovers just how hard it is to escape the bonds of the society that has shaped him. The novel was the inspiration for Martin Scorsese's film of the same name, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder.

A great city's greatest novelist . . . Wharton's late masterpiece stands as a fierce indictment of a society estranged from culture and in desperate need of a European sensibility, It’s a deliciously hard-edged satire of manners and customs . . . Wharton was not only ferociously witty and morally committed, she was also a great storyteller, The Age of Innocence has as much in common with that popular Oprah-ish romance-rooted literary fashion as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet does, Will writers ever recover that peculiar blend of security and alertness which characterizes Mrs Wharton and her tradition?

Edith Wharton was born in 1862 to a prominent and wealthy New York family. In 1885 she married, and the couple travelled frequently to Europe. They settled in France, where Wharton stayed through divorce in 1913 and until her death. Her first major novel was The House of Mirth (1905); many short stories, travel books, memoirs and novels followed, including Ethan Frome (1911) and The Reef (1912). She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature with The Age of Innocence (1920) and she was thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was also decorated for her humanitarian work during the First World War. She died in 1937.