Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence

Abstract

The word of the age of Innocence is New York upper-class leisured society. There is a “younger set” that, surprisingly enough to us moderns, yields to its older relatives in matters of how to think and behave. The families that make up the characters in the time they lived, ‘the early seventies’, i.e. the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the 1870’s, and also because of the social environment in which they moved and found the meanings of their lives.