Reading group: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton is our book for September
For this month’s reading group, we’re going to look at Edith Wharton’s 1920 masterpiece, The Age of Innocence. It’s 100 years since the publication of this story of New York society, unhappy couples, loss and love – and it’s going to be fascinating to see how it measures up today. Not least because the passing of time is one of its chief sources of inspiration. Wharton set the novel in the Gilded Age, in 1870s New York society, and said that in writing the book, she found “a momentary escape in going back to my childish memories of a long-vanished America … it was growing more and more evident that the world I had grown up in and been formed by had been destroyed in 1914.”
Perhaps every generation feels that sadness eventually; certainly, the 1980s, 40 years ago now, seem long distant from our era of coronavirus and populism. Yet while we’ll be able to see parallels with Wharton, we shouldn’t assume the past is always speaking directly to us. When The Age of Innocence was reviewed in The Guardian in 1920, the reviewer (going under the initials “FS”) sniffed:
Mrs Wharton tries her best to make the story moving but she is dealing with dead stuff and dead people. They lived in New York in the [18]70s and nothing she can do will make them come alive again. They interest us as old letters, old newspapers interest us; not as real people of our own generation, our own society can interest us.
That attitude, in turn, makes the people of 100 years ago seem very distant. Although not everyone agreed, even then. The Age of Innocence was quickly recognised as an important book and went on to win the 1921 Pulitzer prize, with Wharton the first female winner. The judges said the novel revealed “the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood” – a curious appraisal of a book that is more generally regarded as a damning satire on the Gilded Age. And, while we’re dwelling on the odd things olden critics used to say, the assessment of the scholar Vernon Parrington is also worth noting. In 1921 he delighted in the fact that The Age of Innocence contained “no scenes, no vulgar jealousies or accusations, nothing to offend the finest sensibility”. Don’t let that put you off!
Related: The 100 best novels: No 45 - The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)
More recently, the novel has been generally accepted as a masterpiece and, as Robert McCrum put it in 2014, “a fierce indictment of a society estranged from culture”. Which again sounds as if it might have plenty of resonance for us. We’ll see. I’m looking forward to reading it in the coming weeks.
Until then, one last reminder that the past is a foreign country. Here are the opening sentences:
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 distances ‘above the Forties’, of a new Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the “new people” whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music.”
Wonderful! I’ve got a good feeling about this book. I hope you’ll join me as I read through. And, thanks to Macmillan, we have five copies of this lovely hardback collector’s edition, with an introduction by Rachel Cusk, to give to the first five people from the UK to post “I want a copy, please”, along with a nice, constructive thought in the comments. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to post, please email the lovely people on culture.admin@theguardian.com, with your address and your account username so they can track you down.
And if you miss out or can’t get your hands on a copy at your library or bookshop right now, it is also available on Project Gutenberg for free.
