The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton [8]
Edith Wharton amused her readers with the portrait of a society that was self-indulgent, ignorant of the coming end of its reign. She wrote of loss and heartbreak, staged thwarted passion, and went beyond to tell of Newland Archer’s accommodation to an honorable life. In her memoir A Backward Glance, which for the most part is far less revealing, less personal than The Age of Innocence, Edith Newbold Jones Wharton wrote: “Habit is necessary, it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.” This is not an accurate description of the novelist who led an adventurous life of the mind, who forged her life with difficulty, who found her salvation in work; but it might be a description of Newland Archer, a man of necessary habit, who steered clear of the rut, was happy in small ways.
Moving beyond her readers’ expectations of a romance, Edith Wharton portioned herself out to realize Newland’s coming of age in his assessment of the past, Ellen’s depth of emotional experience, and the unimaginative May, the woman she refused to become. Her publisher advised against a war novel, but looking back to discover the flawed innocence of an era, she informed the present days of her writing in 1919. The Age of Innocence can be considered with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (both 1925) as novels that deal with the aftermath of war, of inquiry into the passage of time and dramatic change in the social order. From her distance in Paris, Wharton upset the idea of American innocence and insularity. Moving from satire to sympathy, this novel, perhaps her greatest, makes us contemplate false security and the nature of national identity while witnessing the mysterious transformation of her experience into art.
Maureen Howard is a critic, teacher, and writer of fiction. Her seven novels include Bridgeport Bus, Grace Abounding, and Expensive Habits. A Lover’s Almanac was the first novel in a quartet of the four seasons, followed by Big as Life, Three Tales for Spring, and The Silver Screen, the summer season, which will be published in 2004. She has taught at Yale, Amherst, Princeton, and Columbia. She is the editor of The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton from Library of America. Her critical works include introductions to Mrs. Dalloway and Willa Cather, Three Novels, and an essay on Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Her reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, the New Republic, and the Yale Review. Maureen Howard was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. A former vice president of PEN, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City with her husband, Mark Probst, a novelist and financial consultant.
BOOK ONE
1
ON A JANUARY EVENING of the early seventies, Christine Nilssona 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 splendor 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.
It was Madame Nilsson’s first appearance that winter, and what the daily press had already learned to describe as “an exceptionally brilliant audience” had gathered to hear her, transported through the slippery, snowy streets in private broughams, in the spacious family landau, or in the humbler but more convenient