The Age of Innocence

Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much-loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Age of Innocence, is both a poignant story of frustrated love and an extraordinarily vivid, delightfully satirical record of a vanished world. This edition features an introduction by award-winning novelist, Rachel Cusk.

As the scion of one of New York's leading families, Newland Archer has been born into a life of sumptuous privilege and strict duty. A sensitive, intelligent young man, he still respects the rigid social code by which his class lives. As he contemplates his forthcoming marriage to the striking and equally well-born May Welland, he gives thanks that she is 'one of his own kind'.

But the arrival of the Countess Olenska, a free spirit who breathes clouds of European sophistication, makes him question the path on which his upbringing has set him. As his fascination with her grows, he discovers just how hard it is to escape the bonds of the society that has shaped him.

About the Author

Edith Wharton was born in 1862 to a prominent and wealthy New York family. In 1885 she married Boston socialite ‘Teddy’ Wharton but the marriage was unhappy and they divorced in 1913. The couple travelled frequently to Europe and settled in France, where Wharton stayed until her death in 1937.

Edith's first major novel was The House of Mirth (1905); many short stories, travel books, memoirs and novels followed, including Ethan Frome (1911) and The Reef (1912). She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature with The Age of Innocence (1920) and she was thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was also decorated for her humanitarian work during the First World War.