Orgel Stephen - The age of innocence

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

EDITH WHARTON was born into Old New York Society in 1862, with impeccable social credentials and financial security. Her early years alternated between houses in Newport and Manhattan (its geographical boundaries demarcated by Washington Square and Central Park, its social spine formed by Fifth Avenue). Although Wharton started writing verses and stories as a child, her first attempts at professional authorship were delayed until 1889. A further decade passed before she broke into the literary scene with a collection of short stories in 1899 and the appearance in 1902 of The Valley of Decision. It took The House of Mirth to make Whartons fame upon its publication in 1905. Until her death in 1937, Wharton published on an annual basis novels, novellas, poetry, essays, and travel literature. Besides The House of Mirth, her best-known novels are Ethan Frome (1911), The Reef (1912), The Custom of the Country (1913), Summer (1917), and The Age of Innocence (1920) for which she received the Pulitzer Prize. In 1885 she married Edward (Teddy) Wharton, a childless union that rapidly proved unsuitable, though they did not divorce until 1913. After years of residing in Newport, New York, and The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts, Wharton moved permanently to France in 1910. During the First World War Wharton was active in refugee work; this era is reflected in several novels, stories, and essays. She died in 1937 and is buried in Versailles.

STEPHEN ORGEL is the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities at Stanford University. His most recent books are Imagining Shakespeare (2003), The Authentic Shakespeare (2002), and Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeares England (1996). His editions include Whartons The Custom of the Country and Miltons Paradise Lost (with Jonathan Goldberg) for Oxford Worlds Classics, Marlowes poems and translations, Ben Jonsons masques, The Tempest and The Winters Tale in the Oxford Shakespeare, and Macbeth, King Lear, Pericles, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Sonnets in the New Pelican Shakespeare, of which he is general editor.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

EDITH WHARTON

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
STEPHEN ORGEL

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Introduction, Explanatory Notes Stephen Orgel 2006
Chronology Martha Banta 1994

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First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 2006

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ISBN 0192806629 9780192806628
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I am indebted to Michael Wyatt for information, for a series of energetic conversations about Wharton, and for providing the ideal setting, Florence, where this edition was completed. Villa I Tatti, where Wharton paid many visits to her dear friend Bernard Berenson, was as warmly welcoming to me as it had been to her, and I thank Joseph Connors, the director, for his hospitality, and the librarian and staff for their manifold kindnesses. Leonard Barkan gave me the benefit of his expertise to illuminate a viticultural point. Judith Luna has once again been the ideal editor.

The Age of Innocence was Edith Whartons first novel after the end of the First World War. Settled in Paris since 1910, she had been intensely active in war work throughout the conflict, and her admiration for her adopted country was immense and unqualified. But with victory came the growing realization that the war had changed her own world for good. The Paris she had loved, that had served her as a refuge from the materialism of her own country and the miseries of her marriage, a culture rich in emotional, spiritual, and sensual satisfactions, she now found transformed beyond recognition. It was, she wrote to her friend Bernard Berenson in 1919, simply awfula kind of continuous earthquake of motors, busses, trams, lorries, taxis and other howling and swooping and colliding engines, with hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens rushing about in them and tumbling out at ones door. The fact that the chief agent of change in this account is U.S. citizens gives her sense of her own place in the events of the past five years a particular poignancyin working to save France from the barbarians she has helped to Americanize it. She had determined, even before the wars end, to leave Paris and find a place in the country. The house, in the village of Saint-Bricesous-Fort in the northern suburbs of Paris, required much restoration, and finally became her principal home in 1919. In moving there she was escaping from herself as much as from her unwelcome compatriots; and it is not coincidental that her imagination turned to the reconstruction of a past that was uniquely her own and gave her an opportunity not to remake her history, but to contemplate how she came to be herself.