The Age of Innocence
A lawyer in old New York becomes engaged to a conventional woman and then falls in love with her cousin, who is getting a divorce. Wharton wrote the novel after the First World War, looking back at the 1870s with a mixture of satire and grief.
The society she describes is small, well-mannered and ruthless, and the novel's method is to show how a decision is made by not being made. The famous final chapter, in which the protagonist refuses a second chance, is one of the most controlled endings in American fiction.
Public-domain status
First published in 1920. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Edith Wharton died in 1937, so this work has been free to republish there since 2008.
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