Book: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence is beautifully written. I had seen Martin Scorsese's film (1993), and listened to the book (2002), but reading it gave me a new pleasure. Her language is fluent, the plots are wave-like, the observations on human character and society are full of sharp irony yet shimmered with sensitivity and warm sympathy. Edith Wharton kept the Victorian tradition. I am reminded of E.M. Forster's novels. This book won Pulitzer's prize. So beautiful....

For reference:
Henry James (1843-1916)
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
E.M. Forster (1879-1970)
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)

I just saw parts of the film again in silence. It is a beautiful film. One quote:

If her simplicity had been the simplicity of pettiness he would have chafed and rebelled; but since the lines of her character, though so few, were on the same fine mould as her face, she became the tutelary divinity of all his old traditions and reverences. Such qualities were scarcely of the kind to enliven foreign travel, though they made her so easy and pleasant a companion; but he saw at once how they would fall into place in their proper setting. He had no fear of being oppressed by them, for his artistic and intellectual life would go on, as it always had, outside the domestic circle; and within it there would be nothing small and stifling--coming back to his wife would never be like entering a stuffy room after a tramp in the open. And when they had children the vacant corners in both their lives would be filled. (p.196)