"The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!" 🥀
Edith Wharton captures that stifling conflict between individual desire and social duty so perfectly. If you're picking it up, highly recommend the for the scholarly notes that explain all those rigid 1870s social codes. "Each time you happen to me all over again." ✨
Revisiting Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence . Set in the 1870s Gilded Age, it’s a masterclass in the "effusion-less" violence of high society. Newland Archer is caught between the "safe" innocence of May Welland and the scandalous, worldly freedom of Countess Ellen Olenska.
Includes an introduction and notes by Stephen Orgel that put the novel's autobiographical overtones into context.
