List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction

The Text of The Age of Innocence:

Backgrounds and Contexts

LETTERS
To Rutger B. Jewett, January 5, 1920
To Bernard Berenson, December 12, 1920
To Sinclair Lewis, August 6, 1921
To Mary Cadwalader Jones, April 11, 1927
To Mary Cadwalader Jones, February 17, 1921

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHY
Candace Waid * [Biographical Note on Edith Wharton]
Edith Wharton * A Little Girl’s New York
Edith Wharton * From A Backward Glance
[The Background]
[Little Girl]
R.W.B. Lewis * From Edith Wharton: A Biography
[Entry into Society]
[A Broken Engagement]
[Marriage and Sexual Ignorance]

SOURCES
Literary Sources
Honoré de Balzac * From Contes drôlatiques
• Innocence
• The Danger of Being Too Innocent

Edith Wharton * The Valley of Childish Things, and Other Emblems
Edith Wharton * The New Frenchwoman

Time and Money: Economic Contexts and the Shifting Narratives of Ethnic Power
The Source for the Beaufort Scandal
The Panic: Excitement in Wall Street * New York Times, September 19, 1873
The Financial Crisis: More Failures Yesterday * New York Times, September 20, 1873
Panics * The Nation, September 25, 1873

The Business of Society: Contemporary Commentary on the New York Aristocracy
"Secrets of Ball Giving": A Chat with Ward McAllister
Recipes for Roman Punch
M.E.W. Sherwood * From Manners and Social Usages
• How He Came to be a Famous Ball Organizer—Reminiscences of Cotillion Dinners
• Beginning His Experiment at Newport
• Objects of the Patriarch’s Society
• Duplicate Invitations Presented
• Society’s Limits Narrowing
• Famous Dinners of Recent Years
• The Etiquette of Balls
• Fashionable Dancing
• On Serving Roman Punch

Francis W. Crowninshield * From Manners for the Metropolis: An Entrance Key to the
Fantastic Life of the 400
Mrs. Burton Harrison * The Myth of the Four Hundred

Leisure: High and Low
James Maurice Thompson * The Long Bow
W. Gurney Benham * [The Living Waxworks]
Kate Greenaway * From Language of Flowers
John H. Young * The Language of Flowers
Divorce and Marriage in New York * The New York Tribune, October 7, 1883

Criticism

REVIEWS: AMERICAN AND BRITISH
Katharine Perry * Were the Seventies Sinless?
William Lyon Phelps * As Mrs. Wharton Sees Us
Henry Seidel Canby * Our America
Carl Van Doren * An Elder America
R. D. Townshend * The Book Table: Devoted to Books and Their Makers, Novels Not
for a Day
Mrs. Wharton’s Novel of Old New York
Vernon L. Parrington, Jr. * Our Literary Aristocrat
The Age of Innocence
The Innocence of New York
Katherine Mansfield * Family Portraits
Frederick Watson * The Assurance of Art

MODERN CRITICISM
Julia Ehrhardt * "The Read These Pages Is to Live Again": The Historical Accuracy of
The Age of Innocence
Jennifer Rae Greeson * Wharton’s Manuscript Outlines for The Age of Innocence: Three Versions
Cynthia Griffin Wolff * The Age of Innocence as Bildungsroman
Elizabeth Ammons * Cool Diana and the Blood-Red Muse: Edith Wharton on Innocence and Art
Nancy Bentley * [Realism, Relativism, and the Discipline of Manners]
Anne MacMaster * Wharton, Race, and The Age of Innocence: Three Historical
Contexts
Dale M. Bauer * [Whiteness and the Power of Darkness in The Age of Innocence]
Brian T. Edwards * The Well-Built Wall of Culture: Old New York and Its Harems
Brigitte Peuker * Scorsese’s Age of Innocence: Adaptation and Intermediality

Edith Wharton: A Chronology

Selected Bibliography