What an unexpected delight!
I had never read any Wharton and this was a great place to start. By the first page I was hooked by her
language, social insights, wit, and the surprising modernity of the book. Gentleman lawyer Newland Archer, having sowed
his requisite wild oats in a two-year affair with a married woman, is ready to
settle down to wedded life and has decided upon the virginal and beautiful May
Welland. Both are complicatedly related to
much of the best of New York society circa 1870. As the story opens, they are attending the
opera, along with anyone who is anyone, and will be going to the ball
afterward hosted by one of the luminaries of society. Glancing across the theater, he spies May in
her box along with a new figure, who turns out to be her cousin, Ellen, Countess
Olenska, newly back from the Continent after a failed marriage to an abusive Polish
count. This is a bit scandalous, but
Newland decides to help rally around his fiancée’s family who have decided to
support Countess Olenska’s re-entrance into polite society. He asks May for her permission to go ahead and
announce their engagement, earlier than they had planned, at the ball. It’s
giving nothing away to say that subsequently Newland falls madly in love with
Ellen and she with him. An almost
perfect book for which Wharton. in 1920, was the first female winner of the Pulitzer Prize. 364 pp.
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