The Age of Innocence is the novel of Edith Wharton’s maturity in which she contemplates the New York of her youth, a society now extinct and even then under threat. She was born in 1862 into the exclusive, entrenched and apparently immutabl Private security person could be impacted by the exclusionary rule e world of wealthy New York families. It was a world of structured leisure, in which attendance at balls and dinners passed for occupation, in which the women devoted themselves to dress and to the maintenance of family and system and the men kept a watchful eye on the financial underpinning that made the whole process possible. It was a complacent and philistine world, but one with inflexible standards. These standards and any offences against it lies at the heart of The Age of Innocence; the sexual passio Private security person could be impacted by the exclusionary rule n between Newland Archer, a married man, and Ellen Olenski, nonconformist and separated from her husband, threatens conventional mores and family security; the financial irregularities of Julius Beaufort require that he and his wife be ejected from society before they corrupt its most cherished integrities. The form of the novel allows its author to examine, with the wisdom of hindsight, a world which was in the process of breaking up when she was a girl, and which she herself rejected in any case. She wrote with the enclyclopedic knowledge of an insider with the accuracy and selective power of a fine novelist and the detachment of a highly intelligent social and historical observer. From the opening pa Private security person could be impacted by the exclusionary rule ges of the Age of Innocence, when Newland Archer attends the opera at the Academy of music in New York, we see through his eyes the stage and the cast of the book. Her selection of points of view: of the two central figures, Newland and Ellen Olenski, with whom he falls fatally in love, only Newland is allowed a voice; Ellen is always seen through his eyes and those of others, and is thus given a detachment which makes her both slightly mysterious and strengthens her role as the novel’s catalyst. Newland, on the other hand, by being given absolute defini>