# The Age of Innocence

- Author: Edith Wharton
- First published: 1920
- Publisher: Penguin Classics
- This edition: 1996
- ISBN: 9780140189704
- Shelf: Tonight's Classic (one a night, from this pool); World Classics

## Card

In the New York society of the 1870s, an engaged young lawyer is drawn to his fiancée's unconventional cousin.  
Every gesture at the opera or the dinner table carries meaning, and the restraint makes the feeling underneath sharper.  
For a night of opera gloves and regret.  

## About this book

Newland Archer is about to marry May Welland, a well-bred young woman from one of the right families. Then May's cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, returns from Europe after leaving an unhappy marriage, and her freedom unsettles the whole circle. Newland, asked to advise her, finds himself drawn to her frankness and to a life outside the rules he has always kept. The novel shows how much a society can say without saying anything aloud.

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