“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”

Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence reveals the contradictions between love and duty, sincerity and social expectation. Against the backdrop of glittering yet stifling nineteenth-century New York unfolds the story of Newland Archer and Countess Ellen Olenska — two people yearning for freedom in a world governed by propriety. It is a subtle, emotionally resonant work about the price of choice and how society shapes the course of our lives.