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years later, Newland Archer reviews his life. Here Wharton’s voice works in close to Newland‘s, becomes one with a self-assessment that is both personal and historical. In an age-old storyteller’s device, she reveals the afterlife, what happened to her characters. Do they live on in the present? In a sympathetic portrait, May, dead after many years of marriage, is memorialized by her husband as energetic mother and devoted wife. Newland has found work as a useful minor player in public life, accepting his nature as “a contemplative and a dilettante.” Now Wharton asks her readers to consider Newland as a survivor, suggesting that there is something near heroic in his accommodation to the inescapable facts of his life, to living out the duties and pleasures. He treasures his love of Countess Olenska, knowing she is most fully realized in memory. The false rhetoric of freedom, the hackneyed phrases of that romance no longer come to mind. He speaks to himself as he always has when he is most truthful, most self-revealing. The show is not quite over; there is one more scene, elegiac and surprisingly dramatic. Newland Archer frames his view as he has from that first night at the opera. He stands apart as he did that day in Newport when Ellen appeared at a distance on the pier. He is fifty-seven years old as he looks up at her window in Paris, treasuring the past, possessing their love in imagination. His perspective is no longer innocent. He remains a dreamer, but a dreamer self-aware.

Edith Wharton amused her readers with the portrait of a society that was self-indulgent, ignorant of the coming end of its reign. She wrote of loss and heartbreak, staged thwarted passion, and went beyond to tell of Newland Archer’s accommodation to an honorable life. In her memoir A Backward Glance, which for the most part is far less revealing, less personal than The Age of Innocence, Edith Newbold Jones Wharton wrote: “Habit is necessary, it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive ... one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in the big things, and happy in small ways.” This is not an accurate description of the novelist who led an adventurous life of the mind, who forged her life with difficulty, who found her salvation in work; but it might be a description of Newland Archer, a man of necessary habit, who steered clear of the rut, was happy in small ways.

Moving beyond her readers’ expectations of a romance, Edith Wharton portioned herself out to realize Newland’s coming of age in his assessment of the past, Ellen’s depth of emotional experience, and the unimaginative May, the woman she refused to become. Her publisher advised against a war novel, but looking back to discover the flawed innocence of an era, she informed the present days of her writing in 1919. The Age of Innocence can be considered with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (both 1925) as novels that deal with the aftermath of war, of inquiry into the passage of time and dramatic change in the social order. From her distance in Paris, Wharton upset the idea of American innocence and insularity. Moving from satire to sympathy, this novel, perhaps her greatest, makes us contemplate false security and the nature of national identity while witnessing the mysterious transformation of her experience into art.

Maureen Howard is a critic, teacher, and writer of fiction. Her seven novels include Bridgeport Bus, Grace Abounding, and Expensive Habits. A Lover’s Almanac was the first novel in a quartet of the four seasons, followed by Big as Life, Three Tales for Spring, and The Silver Screen, the summer season, which will be published in 2004. She has taught at Yale, Amherst, Princeton, and Columbia. She is the editor of The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton from Library of America. Her critical works include introductions to Mrs. Dalloway and Willa Cather, Three Novels,