The Age of Innocence Summary
Edith Wharton

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton Edith Wharton was born January 24, 1862, into a family known as one of the pillars of New York society. Her parents, George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens... Read more

I. On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York. Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distan... Read more

Biography EssayWhile at the close of her career Edith Wharton was sometimes regarded as passe, a literary aristocrat whose fiction about people of high social standing had little to tell about the mas... Read more

During the early decades of the twentieth century--at a time when New York City could ban women from smoking in public--one American woman published works which discussed love outside of marriage, sca... Read more

Perhaps the most striking thing about Edith Wharton 's reputation as a novelist is the fact that she has been "reclaimed" so many times. This fact seems all the more remarkable when one reflects that... Read more

Although Edith Wharton is better known as a novelist than a short-story writer, she was in fact writing and publishing stories well before her debut as a novelist in 1902. Her first published story ... Read more

The endings of books are commonly viewed as a means of providing closure to the conflict previously aroused in the text. However, an ending may be simply a way of epitomizing a quality of a character... Read more

The endings of books are commonly viewed as a means of providing closure to the conflict previously aroused in the text. However, an ending may be simply a way of epitomizing a quality of a character... Read more

In The Age of Innocence, Wharton makes significant commentary criticizing the society of New York. Society plays a major role in the lives of the novel's characters. Most people, in the New York s... Read more

In the novel, all but one character are bound to the status quo and code of society. It seems as though their own personal passions and thoughts are unimportant compared to those of those who judge th... Read more

When focusing on any character's actions in a story, a direct correlation appears between each event and that person's characteristics. In one such instance, Edith Wharton's protagonist, Newland Arche... Read more

The 1870's in New York was a period of social repression and ideological conformity. In the novel The Age of Innocence, the author, Edith Wharton, makes these American struggles evident through her us... Read more

The Age of Innocence Book Notes is a free study guide on The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Browse the summary below:   Author Biography / Context of the Work   One-Page Plot Summary... Read more