Newland Archer is the man who has everything. Heir to one of New York’s prominent families, a gentleman lawyer, popular and successful, he is engaged to the beautiful but conventional May Welland when May’s cousin, the exotic and worldly Countess Ellen Olenska, arrives from Poland after separating from her husband. Newland finds himself hopelessly smitten by the countess and helplessly trapped by the conventions and merciless judgments of his time and place.  The Age of Innocence proceeds to entangle the three in a tale of passion pitted against the constraints and duties of New York society in the 1870’s, with outcomes that show that even those who seem to have everything don’t always get what they really want.

The Age of Innocence was serialized in four parts by the Pictorial Review in 1920 before publication in book form.  It went on to win the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the first ever win by a book written by a woman. It ranks 58th on the Modern Library of the Top 100 Works of Fiction. The book has been adapted for stage and film five times, the most recently by Martin Scorsese in 1993.

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