Newland Archer is engaged to May Welland when Countess Olenska, someone he only remembered from childhood, comes into his world of Old New York. There is much rumor concerning the Countess and her scandalous affair of living with a secretary of the Count's.

         In Newland's glass-fragile world, everyone ignores anything unpleasant yet gossips uncontrollably about it, and the girls seem vacant and disturbingly innocent. Newland had fallen into this, but the Countess Olenska awakens his hatred of his own society, with its strict system of courtesies and form. She stands out and catches his interest, but can he tell his sweet innocent fiance?

The story really sucked you into this world, up to the point where you could feel Newland's frustration with it. It was like traveling through time.

To tell the truth, the ending bugged me. You'll see if you read it whether you like it or not.

I felt that much more aware of the world. It was one of those books that can give you a history of a certain place at a certain time, but it's easy to swallow.

Edith Wharton was actually born in the Old New York she writes about. She was upper-class, but had the same disgust for the narrowness of her society that Newland Archer has in this book.

It is a nice way to escape the world around you (like any book actually...)

Here are some quotes I especially liked:



"...beauty - a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings."



"The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies..."



"...her resolute determination to carry to its utmost limit that ritual of ignoring the "unpleasant" in which they had both been brought up."



"The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman...into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon."



"...but young men aer so foolish and incalculable - and some women so ensaring and unscrupulous - that it was nothing short of a miracle to see one's only son safe past Siren Isle and in the haven of a blameless domesticity."



"His own exclamation: "Women should be free - as free as we are," struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as non-existent. "Nice" women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore - in the heat of argument - the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern."



"In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs."



"..he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience."



"...all their vain terrors shrivelling up like ghosts at sunrise."



"It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency about courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes", except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them,"



Of course, that's not ALL of the ones I wrote down, but it's probably about half. Crazy, aren't I? I just love my quotes!

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Created Feb 22, 2003 at 11:50am • Submit your own review...