The Age of Innocence
New York in the 1870s runs on unwritten rules, and a young lawyer engaged to the correct girl finds them enforced most gently at the moments they matter most, after her cousin comes back from Europe trailing a scandalous marriage. Dinner invitations, opera boxes and a carefully advanced wedding date do work that argument never has to. Wharton wrote it after the war as an anatomy of the tribe she was raised in, and it was the first novel by a woman to take the Pulitzer.
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