LitPicks Book Reviews—November 2012

Theme—The Age of Edith We've had The Age of Jane (Austen), and now Edith Wharton seems to be getting her due. This month we feature a fictional biography of Edith, a re-make of her masterpiece, and the original masterpiece itself, The Age of Innocence.

The Innocents
Francesca Segal
288 pp.

Book Review by Molly Lundquist
November 2012
Francesca Segal's smart update of The Age of Innocence is pitch perfect—from the homonym of the titles to the satirical gaze leveled at social conformity. Even character names are parallel—Adam Newman for Newland Archer, and Ellie for Ellen.

Segal, though, offers a more nuanced judgment of community than Edith Wharton does. The Innocents' tight-knit Jewish enclave in 21st-century North London is far more benign, if still benighted, than the upper-crust of Manhattan's late 19th century. And the conformity Adam Newman struggles against is as much in his mind as imposed from without.

The Age of Desire
Jennie Fields
368 pp.

Book Review by Molly Lundquist
November, 2012
Edith has sex (yes, Edith Wharton!), even though one would be hard-pressed to find the words sex and Wharton in the same sentence. It's hard to think of her—with the jutting chin and high-necked gowns—as a sexual being; indeed, Wharton never thought of herself in that way. Yet this very juxtaposition forms the crux of Jennie Fields's fictional biography.

Edith is trapped in, what is for her, a loveless marriage, although one can't help but pity her aggrieved husband. Teddy Wharton, a kind if simple man, loves his wife with a desperate intensity, yet sex between the two is nonexistant. Having attempted it once in the marriage, a traumatized Edith told Teddy, "never again."

The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton, 1920
~ 300 pp. (varies by publisher)

Book Review by Molly Lundquist
September 2011
Forbidden love has always found literary expression—as far back as Tristan and Isolde, right up to the present day's Twilight series.

We're drawn to these stories because of the exquisite tension between desire and restraint. That tension mirrors our own and so, when splashed across a huge fictional canvass, our own lives feel enlarged. It's as if we, ourselves, have been part of a grander story. Edith Wharton's novel of forbidden love does just that for us.