The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton [2]
1891 Wharton’s first published story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” ap pears in Scribner’s Magazine.
1897 The Decoration of Houses appears; it is a nonfiction work on interior design written by Wharton and architect Ogden Codman, Jr.
1898 Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is published.
1901 The Whartons begin to build The Mount, their summer home near Lenox, Massachusetts. Edith’s mother dies in Paris.
1905 The House of Mirth is published. The novel quickly becomes one of the best-selling books of the year; its popularity so lidifies Wharton’s reputation as a major novelist. Wharton and Henry James develop a close friendship. George Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara is performed in Lon don.
1908 Wharton publishes A Motor-Flight through France, in which she recounts her travels with her husband, Edward, and Henry James. She meets Morton Fullerton, an American journalist living in London who is a friend of Henry James, and the two begin a passionate though short-lived love af fair.
1911 Wharton’s Ethan Frome is published; it was inspired by the bleak New England setting the author witnessed near her home in Lenox.
1912 Wharton begins a friendship with art historian Bernard Berenson.
1913 Edith and Edward divorce. Wharton moves to France, where she will spend most of the rest of her life. Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! is published.
1914 Wharton travels to Tunisia and Algiers, then undertakes re lief efforts during World War I. She finds homes for hun dreds of Belgian orphans and raises money for refugees.
1916 Wharton receives the French Legion of Honor award for her war relief activities. Henry James dies.
1917 T. S. Eliot’s book of poetry Prufrock and Other Observations appears.
1918 Willa Cather publishes My Ántonia.
1920 The Age of Innocence, a novel about New York society, is pub lished to great success.
1921 Wharton becomes the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which she receives for The Age of Innocence. Eugene O‘Neill’s play Anna Christie opens in New York City.
1922 T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is published.
1923 Yale University awards Wharton an honorary doctorate. Edna St. Vincent Millay receives the Pulitzer Prize for po etry.
1924 Wharton publishes a collection of novellas and short stories as Old New York.
1925 Sinclair Lewis publishes Arrowsmith, which he dedicates to Wharton. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is published. Gertrude Stein publishes The Making of Americans. Virginia Woolf publishes Mrs. Dalloway.
1926 Ernest Hemingway publishes The Sun Also Rises.
1928 Edward Wharton dies. Poet Carl Sandburg’s Good Morning, America is published.
1930 Wharton is elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She continues to write, although her health is fail ing. Robert Frost’s Collected Poems is published.
1933 Wharton publishes Human Nature, a collection of short sto ries.
1934 Wharton publishes “Roman Fever” in Liberty magazine for the then-astronomical sum of $3,000; one of her best known short stories, it is based on her travels in Italy. She continues to write and publish stories and novels. A Back ward Glance, an autobiography, is published.
1936 The World Over, a collection of short stories, is published.
1937 After a severe stroke, Edith Wharton dies on August 11. She is buried in Versailles, France.
INTRODUCTION
The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s most romantic novel, yet our expectations for her lovers, Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer, are disappointed at every turn. Wharton’s genius lies in offering the pleasure of a romance, then engaging the reader in a stunning exploration of boundaries between the demands of society and personal freedom, illicit passion and moral responsibility. In this novel of bold design, we are the innocents unaware of the more demanding rewards to come, just as the readers of the Pictorial Review were as the monthly installments appeared in 1920. Luring us with the high comic tone of the opening chapters, Wharton admits us to Newland Archer’s dreamy certainty about love and marriage, all that