The Age of Innocence

Winner of the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a book written by a woman, The Age of Innocence is a suspenseful, deeply moving, and brilliantly accomplished novel of the struggle between desire and destiny.

In the polished works of Edith Wharton, Old New York is a society at once infinitely sophisticated and ruthlessly primitive, in which adherence to ritual and loyalty to clan surpass all other values--and transgression is always punished.

The Age of Innocence is Wharton's 1920 novel of love menaced by convention, played out against a gorgeously arrayed backdrop of opera houses, lavish dinner parties, country homes, and luxurious deathbeds. The young lawyer Newland Archer believes that he must make an impossible choice: domesticity with his docile and lovely fianc e, May Welland, or passion with her highly unsuitable but irresistible cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska. What Newland does not suspect--but will learn--is that the women also hold cards in this game...

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 03/04/2008
ISBN: 9780451530882
Pages: 336
Weight: 0.36lbs
Size: 6.79h x 5.79w x 0.91d
Accelerated Reader Quiz #/Name: 10826 / Age of Innocence
Reading Level: 8.8 / Interest Level: Upper Grade / Point Value: 19