The Age of Innocence — Summary & Analysis
by Edith Wharton
Plot Overview
Published in 1920 and set in the 1870s, The Age of Innocence follows Newland Archer, a well-bred New York lawyer on the verge of marrying May Welland, the ideal product of Old New York society: beautiful, composed, and perfectly innocent. Everything changes when May's cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, returns from Europe. Ellen has left her abusive Polish husband under scandalous circumstances, and her very presence in polite society is a transgression. Yet Newland finds himself helplessly drawn to her — her directness, her refusal to perform ignorance, and her instinct for genuine feeling stand in sharp contrast to the elaborate social theater around him.
As Newland's attraction to Ellen deepens into love, he finds himself trapped between duty and desire. He presses May to move their wedding date forward, hoping to cut off his own feelings, but the emotional entanglement only grows. In a series of private meetings — in Newport, in Boston, on a winter carriage ride through the city — Newland and Ellen acknowledge their love and then, painfully, surrender it. Newland's world closes around him: the engagement becomes a marriage, and Old New York's most powerful families silently conspire to send Ellen back to Europe. The coup de grace arrives in the form of May's early announcement of her pregnancy — a calculated move that ends any possibility of escape.
The novel's final chapter jumps forward twenty-six years. May has died. Newland's son Dallas has arranged a trip to Paris that will put Newland within steps of Ellen Olenska's apartment. He goes as far as the bench across the street, then turns and walks away — preferring the memory of what might have been to the risk of confronting it in the present.
Key Themes
The central tension of the novel is the collision between the individual and society. Old New York operates by a vast, unspoken code of manners that enforces conformity through social exclusion and collective silence. Wharton understood this world from the inside: she was born into it, and The Age of Innocence is her most precise dissection of how it worked. The rules are never stated — stating them would admit they exist — and yet everyone enforces them, including those they harm.
The novel also interrogates innocence itself as a performance. May Welland appears passive and unaware, but Wharton gradually reveals a woman of considerable strategic intelligence. May's “innocence” is not ignorance — it is the mastery of a socially required performance. Ellen Olenska, by contrast, refuses the performance, which is precisely what makes her dangerous to the tribe and irresistible to Newland.
Marriage as a social contract rather than a personal bond is another major theme. Old New York marries for alliance, continuity, and reputation. Love, in the romantic sense Newland imagines, is beside the point. Wharton's own experience of a loveless marriage — she divorced Teddy Wharton in 1913 — infuses the novel with a kind of cold clarity about how trapped people could be within respectable unions.
Characters
Newland Archer is a man of genuine intelligence and sensitivity who has never tested either quality against the real world. He reads widely, thinks independently, and imagines himself more enlightened than his circle — yet when the moment of true choice arrives, he flinches. His tragedy is not that society defeats him from without, but that he defeats himself from within. Ellen Olenska is the novel's moral center: she has lived in the actual world, suffered real consequences, and arrived at a hard-won authenticity that Newland can only admire from a safe distance. May Welland Archer is the novel's most underestimated figure — serene, correct, and, in her quiet way, absolutely ruthless in protecting the social order that defines her.
Supporting characters include the formidable Mrs. Manson Mingott, Ellen and May's grandmother, a vast and irreverent old matriarch who is one of the few people in the novel willing to say what she actually thinks; and the oily Julius Beaufort, a financier of murky origins whose frank pursuit of pleasure exposes the hypocrisy of those who condemn him.
Historical Context and Legacy
Edith Wharton wrote The Age of Innocence in the aftermath of World War I, looking back at the Gilded Age New York of her childhood with a mixture of nostalgia and sharp critique. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded for this novel in 1921. Though often grouped with her earlier masterwork The House of Mirth — which tracks the destruction of a woman who fails to play by society's rules — The Age of Innocence is, if anything, colder and more controlled in its irony. Where Lily Bart is destroyed by society, Newland Archer is preserved by it, and the novel suggests that preservation may be the crueler fate.
The full text of all thirty-four chapters is available to read free here on American Literature. Whether you are working through the novel chapter by chapter for class or reading it straight through, you can start directly from the table of contents.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Age of Innocence is a novel by Edith Wharton set in 1870s upper-class New York City. It follows Newland Archer, a lawyer engaged to the socially impeccable May Welland, who falls in love with May's cousin Countess Ellen Olenska — a woman who has returned from Europe after leaving her abusive husband. The novel traces Newland's struggle between his genuine feelings for Ellen and the powerful, unspoken rules of Old New York society that demand he conform. In the end, duty wins: Newland marries May, Ellen is quietly exiled back to Europe, and Newland spends the rest of his life carrying a love he never acted on.
The central themes are the individual vs. society, innocence as performance, and the failure of marriage as a personal institution. Old New York operates through an unspoken code of manners that enforces conformity without ever acknowledging it does so — characters understand the rules perfectly but must pretend they do not exist. The theme of innocence vs. experience runs throughout: May Welland performs innocence as a social requirement, while Ellen Olenska's experience marks her as dangerous to the tribe. Wharton also explores hypocrisy and the gap between appearances and reality in a society built on gilded surfaces concealing genuine decay.
Newland Archer is the protagonist, a cultivated lawyer who imagines himself more open-minded than his circle but ultimately cannot escape its gravitational pull. Ellen Olenska is May's cousin, a free-spirited woman who has lived abroad and refuses to perform the innocence Old New York demands — she represents the life of genuine feeling Newland never lives. May Welland appears passive and innocent but is ultimately revealed as the novel's most skillful social operator, protecting her marriage with quiet, decisive moves. Supporting figures include the irreverent Mrs. Manson Mingott, the family matriarch, and the disreputable Julius Beaufort, whose open vices expose the hypocrisy of those who look down on him.
The novel ends twenty-six years after the main action. Newland Archer, now widowed, travels to Paris with his adult son Dallas and comes within a few blocks of Ellen Olenska's apartment. He sits on a bench across the street, then turns and walks away without going up. Wharton leaves the meaning deliberately ambiguous: Newland has preserved something — the ideal of what his love for Ellen could have been — and fears that reality would diminish it. Some readers see resignation and cowardice; others see a kind of dignity. What is clear is that Old New York has won: Newland lived the life society assigned him, and even at the moment of possible freedom, he chooses the past over the present.
The title is deeply ironic. On its surface it refers to the Gilded Age New York of the 1870s — a world that prided itself on decorum, purity, and moral correctness, especially as demanded of women. But Wharton's novel systematically dismantles the claim that this society was innocent in any genuine sense. The “innocence” is a social performance, enforced by collective pretense: everyone knows what is really going on, but the rules require that no one acknowledge it. True innocence — naivety, goodness, freedom from calculation — is notably absent. The title is also a kind of elegy: Wharton wrote the book after World War I, looking back at a world that had been swept away, and the word “innocence” carries a valedictory sadness alongside its irony.
Both novels are studies in entrapment and unfulfilled desire, and both feature a protagonist who loves one woman while bound to another. But they are very different in tone and setting. Ethan Frome is a spare, bleak novella set among the rural poor of New England; its trap is poverty and physical isolation. The Age of Innocence is a richly detailed, ironic novel set among the wealthy elite of Gilded Age New York; its trap is social convention and the invisible weight of collective expectation. Ethan Frome ends in physical catastrophe; The Age of Innocence ends in a quiet, internal surrender that Wharton suggests may be just as damaging. Both are available to read free on American Literature.
Yes. The Age of Innocence won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Edith Wharton the first woman ever to receive the award. The selection was somewhat controversial: the prize committee had initially favored Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, but the Pulitzer board overruled the committee and awarded it to Wharton's novel instead. The recognition cemented Wharton's reputation as one of the leading American novelists of her era and helped ensure that the book has remained a staple of high school and college curricula ever since.
Return to the Edith Wharton library.