Book Review: The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton (1920)

 

My paperback of The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton. First published in 1920, this edition published in 2004. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Edith Wharton, 1862-1937

Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel The Age of Innocence looked back at the Gilded Age of the 1870’s in New York City society. It was a world that Wharton knew very well—born Edith Jones, her family was supposedly the inspiration for the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses.”

The novel opens with main character Newland Archer attending the opera, and Wharton makes it clear that there’s just as much action happening in the boxes of the wealthy as there is on the stage. The Age of Innocence follows Newland as he courts the beautiful but conventional May Welland. Newland is tempted by his attraction to Ellen Olenska, May’s cousin who married a Russian count and returned to New York when her marriage collapsed.

The Age of Innocence is a study of how an individual interacts with the society around him. Newland has a desire to break free of the strict role that society expects him to play. There’s a marvelous moment when Newland suggests to May that they elope. She tells him, “We can’t behave like people in novels, though, can we?” (p.70) Of course, the irony is that they are people in novels, although they both feel a strong pull to act within the conventions of upper-class society.

Another theme of the novel is the role of women in society. Wharton knew from her own life experience how limited women’s options were in upper-class society. Thankfully for literature lovers, Wharton was able to break free and enjoy a fantastically successful career as an author.

Wharton writes of men understanding “the abysmal distinction between the woman one loved and respected and those one enjoyed—and pitied.” (p.80) Wharton underscores society’s role in determining these roles for women: “All the elderly ladies whom Archer knew regarded any woman who loved imprudently as necessarily unscrupulous and designing, and mere simple-minded man as powerless in her clutches.” (p.81)

At his wedding, Archer muses on the customs of his society, as there was debate as to whether or not the wedding gifts should be “shown”: “It seemed inconceivable to Archer that grown-up people should work themselves into a state of agitation over such trifles…Yet there was a time when Archer had had definite and rather aggressive opinions on all such problems, and when everything concerning the manners and customs of his little tribe had seemed to him fraught with worldwide significance.” (p.149)

Wharton’s sharp irony and sense of humor is on full display throughout the novel. One of my favorite lines was Newland’s response to his mother-in-law querying him as to how he intended to spend the afternoon: “Oh, I think for a change I’ll just save it instead of spending it—” (p.181)

Another humorous moment is Wharton’s explanation of why Archer has taken to reading history in the evenings rather than poetry. If May sees him reading poetry, she inevitably asks him to read it aloud. “In the days of their engagement she had simply (as he now perceived) echoed what he told her; but since he had ceased to provide her with opinions she had begun to hazard her own, with results destructive to his enjoyment of the works commented on.” (p.239-40)

There is heartbreak and pain as well, as the romantic Newland clashes with the demands of the pragmatic society around him. As he says to Ellen, “I want somehow to get away with you into a world…where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter.” Ellen responds, “Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there?” (p.235)

Edith Wharton is one of my favorite authors, and The Age of Innocence is a masterful novel—it is at once a detailed portrait of a specific time and place, and it also transcends that specific time and place to continue to speak to readers now, more than a century after it was first published.

Book Review: The Writing of Fiction, by Edith Wharton (1925)

 

Paperback of The Writing of Fiction, by Edith Wharton, 1925. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Edith Wharton, one of the great American authors.

I’ve read several of Edith Wharton’s novels, and one book of her short stories, but I hadn’t heard of her 1925 book The Writing of Fiction until recently, as was looking through her bibliography. Wait, Edith Wharton wrote a book about writing? I need to get it!

The Writing of Fiction is a short read, only 125 pages in the paperback edition. The book contains Wharton’s thoughts and theories about fiction writing. There’s not much in the book about American authors, as most of the influences that Wharton discusses are French, English, or Russian—very typical for the time Wharton was writing. I had to look up a fair number of the authors and novels Wharton discusses as I read the book, and chances are you will too, unless you’re very well-versed in 19^th century European literature.

My favorite name that I had to look up was Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. I had to make sure that Edith Wharton wasn’t pulling my leg with that one. She wasn’t. Quiller-Couch published using the pseudonym Q, which seems to me a tragic waste of a fantastic name. I learned that Quiller-Couch was also a literary critic, and he coined the phrase, “Murder your darlings,” meaning sometimes you must sacrifice what you think is best in your art.

I liked Wharton’s quote about artistic inspiration: “Many people assume that the artist receives, at the outset of his career, the mysterious sealed orders known as ‘Inspiration,’ and has only to let that sovereign impulse carry him where it will.” (p.18) I think this is a common misconception about art: that you simply need to sit down at the pad of paper, typewriter, or computer, and you will be visited by the mysterious muse of artistic creation. Of course, it’s usually more complicated than that.

Throughout The Writing of Fiction, Wharton mentions authors she admires, such as Tolstoy, Stendhal, Jane Austen, and Balzac, to name a few. Wharton is generous with her praise and reserved in her criticism. Wharton mentions specific novels and short stories, but she doesn’t focus exclusively on one author until the last chapter of the book, when she does a deep dive on the work of Marcel Proust. She writes of Proust: “His endowment as a novelist…has probably never been surpassed.” (p.119) That’s high praise indeed.

When I finished reading The Writing of Fiction, it struck me that Wharton never tells the reader that she’s a novelist herself. I understand that Wharton came from a more restrained era, and she obviously didn’t write this book in order to blow her own horn about how great her own novels were. Nevertheless, what’s missing from The Writing of Fiction are any examples from Wharton’s own work as a writer. How did she come up with the marvelous beginning of The Age of Innocence, where Newland Archer surveys the crowd at the opera? How was she able to get inside the minds of characters like Newland, and Lily Bart in The House of Mirth? Wharton knew New York City society very well, but how did she also successfully write rural novels like Ethan Frome and Summer? I’d love to know the answers to those questions, but unfortunately Wharton doesn’t reveal anything about her own work in the book. For that reason, it’s hard not to feel a little disappointed by The Writing of Fiction.

Book Review: The Reckoning, by Edith Wharton (Originally published in 1902, Penguin Little Black Classics edition 2015)

The Penguin Little Black Classics edition of The Reckoning, by Edith Wharton. You can see my other Edith Wharton books in the background. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Edith Wharton, 1862-1937.

Edith Wharton’s 1902 short story “The Reckoning” was re-issued as part of Penguin’s “Little Black Classics” series in 2015. (I reviewed Joseph Conrad’s “To-morrow,” another title in that series here.) “The Reckoning” is paired with Wharton’s first published short story “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” which appeared in 1891. Both stories highlight Wharton’s depth as a writer.

In “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” we follow an aged widow, the titular Mrs. Manstey, who derives all of her enjoyment in life from looking out of her window and noticing the changes that occur slowly, day by day. The story is a deft little character study, and already it’s clear that Wharton has a real talent for describing people. I especially enjoyed this sentence:

“She loved, at twilight, when the distant brown-stone spire seemed melting in the fluid yellow of the west, to lose herself in vague memories of a trip to Europe, made years ago, and now reduced in her mind’s eye to a pale phantasmagoria of indistinct steeples and dreamy skies.” (p.4) 

“The Reckoning” is the tale of Julia and Clement Westall, who have founded their marriage on the intellectual understanding that it is not a bond for life, it’s merely an arrangement made until it no longer suits one of them, at which time they can break it off. Needless to say, what sounds fine in theory might not work so well in practice. One of my favorite quotes from “The Reckoning” is when Julia is describing her drawing-room:

“The prints, the flowers, the subdued tones of the old porcelains, seemed to typify a superficial refinement which had no relation to the deeper significances of life.” (p.24)

Wharton is always superb when writing about marriage, and I thought this passage was marvelous:

“Her husband’s personality seemed to be closing gradually in on her, obscuring the sky and cutting off the air, till she felt herself shut up among the decaying bodies of her starved hopes. A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair. If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature.” (p.29-30)

“The Reckoning” is another excellent piece of writing from Edith Wharton.