书名：The Age of Innocence 纯真年代
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1170
作者：Edith Wharton
出版社名称：Signet Classics
出版时间：2008
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451530882
商品尺寸：10.6 x 2.2 x 17.1 cm
包装：简装
页数：316

The Age of Innocence 《纯真年代》是著名美国女作家Edith Wharton的经典之作，是英国“卫报”百大经典名著之一，各大推荐书单榜上有名。此书一经出版便被翻译成各种语言，同时也无数次被改编为电影，在文学史上有着举足轻重的地位。Wharton曾获美国普利策小说奖，在她之前从未有过女性作家获得此奖项。此外，她也获得过诺贝尔文学奖提名，可谓女性作家的先锋人物。Wharton精通德语、法语、意大利语和西班牙语，其作品广受全世界读者的青睐。她有着过人的洞悉能力和独到的见解，融入在细腻的人物刻画和细节描述中，值得文学爱好者深入研读。
The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s masterful portrait of desire and betrayal during the sumptuous Golden Age of Old New York, a time when society people “dreaded scandal more than disease.” It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize. Wharton wrote, “I found a momentary escape in going back to my childish memories of a long-vanished America... it was growing more and more evident that the world I had grown up in and been formed by had been destroyed in 1914.” Scholars and readers alike agree that The Age of Innocence is fundamentally a story which struggles to reconcile the old with the new.
Reviews:
“The Age of Innocence was fundamentally about America and its failure to fulfill its own possibilities” —Robert Martin
“Wharton is a writer who brings glory on the name America and this is her best book... The style is a thing of beauty from the first page to the last” —William Lyon Phelp
“There is no woman in American literature as fascinating as the doomed Madame Olenska… Traditionally, Henry James has always been placed slightly higher up the slope of Parnassus than Edith Wharton. But now that the prejudice against the female writer is on the wane, they look to be exactly what they are: giants, equals, the tutelary and benign gods of our American literature.” — Gore Vidal

The Age of Innocence centers on an upper-class couple’s impending marriage, and the introduction of the bride’s cousin, plagued by scandal, whose presence threatens their happiness. Though the novel questions the assumptions and morals of 1870s New York society, it never develops into an outright condemnation of the institution. The novel is noted for Wharton’s attention to detail and its accurate portrayal of how the 19th-century East Coast American upper class lived, and the social tragedy of its plot. Wharton was 58 years old at publication; she had lived in that world and had seen it change dramatically by the end of World War I.

Edith Wharton was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, known for such classics as The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. A member of the New York elite, Wharton drew on her experiences as part of society to critique its inner workings and the conflict between personal desires and societal norms. Wharton died in 1937, leaving behind a rich literary legacy.

REGINA BARRECA, is the author of numerous books, including They Used to Call Me Snow White, But I Drifted, a landmark book on women’s humor, and Too Much of a Good Thing Is Wonderful. She is a frequent contributor to the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times and writes a weekly column for The Hartford Courant. A professor at the University of Connecticut, she maintains a heavy speaking schedule throughout the US and Canada, 
NICOLE HOLLANDER’s Sylvia cartoon strip is syndicated nationally and internationally by Tribune Media Services. Sylvia appears in over 80 newspapers, among them The Chicago Tribune, The Detroit News, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Denver Post, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Palm Beach Post, San Francisco Examiner, San Jose Mercury News, and The Seattle Times.

On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York. Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances“above the Forties,” of a new Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy．Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the“new people” whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music．

It was Madame Nilsson’s first appearance that winter, and what the daily press had already learned to describe as“an exceptionally brilliant audience” had gathered to hear her, transported through the slippery, snowy streets in private broughams, in the spacious family landau, or in the humbler but more convenient“Brown coupe” To come to the Opera in a Brown coupe was almost as honorable a way of arriving as in one’s own carriage; and departure by the same means had the immense advantage of enabling one (with a playful allusion to democratic principles) to scramble into the first Brown conveyance in the line, instead of waiting till the cold－and－gin congested nose of one’s own coachman gleamed under the portico of the Academy．It was one of the great livery－stableman’s most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it．