Never a particularly happy marriage, the match ended in divorce in 1913 after Teddy became mentally unstable. Wharton first attracted notice as a writer with her short-story collection The Greater Inclination (1899); a half dozen years later The House of Mirth (also in Literature and Its Times) catapulted her to fame. From then until her death, Wharton wrote prolifically, producing nonfiction prose, poetry, translations, short stories, and 16 novels. Her eleventh novel, The Age of Innocence is a critical yet loving depiction of the New York she knew. More than any type of character, it features an upper-class code of conduct that embodied laudable standards of loyalty, fidelity, and honesty, but could also demand tremendous personal sacrifice.
Old money greets new. Old wealth, that is, wealth earned by merchants such as the Astor, Roosevelt, and Dodge families, still dominated New York upper-class society at the beginning of the 1870s. However, the newly wealthy, the families of bankers and manufacturers, were rapidly gaining ground. The 1870s and 1880s would in fact prove to be pivotal decades in this regard. Three events signaled the relaxation of boundaries set up by old wealth to let in the new.
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