The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Time for me at this late age to mount and assault on the American writers. In this novel, Pride and Prejudice meets Anna Karenina. Wharton’s novel looks at the strictures of aristocratic New York in the late nineteenth century, particularly as played out by Newland Archer, a young man of that time and place, and his fiancée May and the woman who comes into his life, Countess Olenska. The novel explores the way a young man with some imagination and perhaps hope for ‘escape’ is defeated by the machinations of his society, of doing the ‘right thing’. The novel is beautifully observed.