The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton • 1920
Devastation Rating
love loss literary fiction historical betrayal
Our Take
Newland Archer chooses respectability over passion and spends the rest of his life knowing it. Wharton writes society as a cage so elegant you almost do not notice the bars. The final scene — the window, the choice not to go up — is the quietest devastation in American literature.
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