Abstract
Beginning in 1920 Wharton wrote a number of historical novels all set in the American nineteenth century. The Age of Innocence, published in that year, opens in the early 1870s; the four novellas of the Old New York series, published collectively in 1924, have the decades of their setting as sub-titles: False Dawn (The ’forties), The Old Maid, (The ’fifties), The Spark (The ’sixties), and New Year’s Day (The ’seventies); and The Buccaneers, Wharton’s last and unfinished novel, published posthumously in 1938, is also set in the early 1870s.
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Notes and References
Lewis, Edith Wharton (London: Constable, 1975), pp. 423–4.
Yvor Winters, Maule’s Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism (1938; rpt. in In Defense of Reason (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1947)), p. 185.
Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: 1934; rpt. London, Constable, 1972), p. 175.
James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers (1823; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 43.
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (New York: D. Appleton, 1920), P. 66.
Edith Wharton, ‘Henry James in His Letters’, Quarterly Review, ccxxxiv (July 1920), 188–202, p. 198.
Edith Wharton, The Old Maid (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1924), pp. 4–5.
Edith Wharton, The Spark (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1924), p. 7.
Edith Wharton, New Year’s Day (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1924), p. 150.
Edith Wharton, False Dawn (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1924), P. 99.
Edith Wharton, The Buccaneers (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1938), p. 357.
Edith Wharton, A Motor-Flight Through France (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), p. 11.
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© 1990 Janet Patricia Goodwyn
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Goodwyn, J. (1990). The Age of Innocence. In: Edith Wharton. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20447-2_8
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