The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece is a devastating portrait of Gilded Age New York—and the impossible choice between passion and duty. Newland Archer is a proper young gentleman engaged to the perfect society bride when her cousin, the scandalous Countess Olenska, returns from Europe. Ellen Olenska has fled a disastrous marriage and refuses to play by society's rules. As Newland falls desperately in love with her, he must choose between the life his world expects and the woman who makes him feel alive. Wharton's prose is a scalpel, dissecting the cruelty of convention and the tragedy of roads not taken. A Raven's Gate Classics edition.