Edith Wharton

The Age of Innocence By Edith Wharton Annotated Novel

The Age of Innocence, which was set in the time of Wharton's childhood, was a softer and gentler work than The House of Mirth, which Wharton had published in 1905. In her autobiography, Wharton wrote of The Age of Innocence that it had allowed her to find "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. Scholars and readers alike agree that The Age of Innocence is fundamentally a story which struggles to reconcile the old with the new.