The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton - Bog

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence was a softer and more gentle work than The House of Mirth, set in the time of her childhood. Wharton wrote, "I found a momentary escape in going back to my childish memories of a long-vanished America... it was growing more and more evident that the world I had grown up in and been formed by had been destroyed in 1914." Scholars and readers alike agree that The Age of Innocence is fundamentally a story which struggles to reconcile the old with the new. Wharton was raised in that old world of rigid and proper New York society which features in the story. She spent her middle years, including the first World War in Europe where the devastation of new mechanized warfare was felt most deeply. As explained by Millicent Bell in the Cambridge companion to Wharton,