Volume 42, Number 19 · November 30, 1995
Archer's Way
By John Updike
The Age of Innocence was begun when Edith Wharton was fifty seven and published, in October of 1920, when she was fifty-eight. She had come to the writing vocation tardily, after an upbringing in New York society and some years of an increasingly unhappy marriage to a Bostonian, Edward Wharton. She was twenty-nine when her first short story was published, and six more years passed before her first book, a nonfiction collaboration called The Decoration of Houses, appeared. Yet as the new century settled in, she, despite the many distractions of an active social life and travel schedule, and bouts of ill health on both her and her husband's part, had settled into a daily routine of morning writing and a steady, even copious, production of fiction. The House of Mirth in 1905 was her first masterpiece; Ethan Frome (1911) and The Custom of the Country (1913) followed, among many other well received, if less well remembered, titles. Against the grain of her social class, she had become a thoroughly professional, widely read, critically esteemed writer. Still, the brilliance and fullness of The Age of Innocence, coming so relatively late in her career, suggest a special renewal.
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