The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was born into a distinguished New York family and was privately educated in America and abroad. In 1905 she published The House of Mirth and two years later moved to France. The author of Ethan Frome (1911), The Reef (1912), and The Custom of the Country (1913), she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1920 for The Age of Innocence. In addition to many novels, she wrote short stories—which in brief used her major themes of nineteenth-century New York, the standards of high society, and the supernatural—and poetry, travel books, and an autobiography.

Cynthia Griffin Wolff received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University. She has taught at Boston University, Queens College, Manhattanville College, and The University of Massachusetts at Amherst; currently, she holds the Class of 1922 Chair of Humanities at MIT. She has written three books: Samuel Richardson and the Eighteenth Century Puritan Character, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (the second edition of which was published in 1995 by Addison-Wesley), and Emily Dickinson. She has edited more than a dozen books and has authored monographs and several dozen essays—most recently examinations of mid-nineteenth-century slave and abolitionist narratives.