Edith Wharton's Top 3 Books

1862 – 1937… When Scorsese made the film about the novel by Edith Wharton "The age of innocence" was because he found in this work that paradoxical aftertaste between the most internal claims and the corseted ones of social conventions.

From that idea, a tension between the romantic and the abhorrent exploded in the film of a destiny that is moving away due to the inability to make decisions consistent with feelings.

But beyond the anecdotal of Scorsese that serves as an introduction, the Edith Wharton's work shines for its expression of the strictures of morality in a New York that it was not yet the cosmopolitan center that it would become, because it clung to the traditional in the face of the gradual arrival of the cultural miscegenation that identifies it today and that then served to further close the social circles of the well-established elites.

Although New York is not the entirety of his bibliography, it does become the main setting for his best novels. A New York set with the preciousness of this author who designs captivating scenarios of the time, where she also profiles the personalities of protagonists with disturbing edges, without forgetting that necessary point of feminism that perhaps was an escape valve for her personal circumstances.

But the most curious thing about it is that in many of their stories, also loaded with irony and acid humor, we find reflections with the present. And it is that such human stories about the contradictions between the most intimate spheres and the external guidelines of the moral and the social always remain in force.

Edith Wharton's Top 3 Recommended Novels

The Age of Innocence

An innocence apparently extended to all areas for the calmest acquiescence of the moral standards that sought their perpetuation among the higher social spheres in a new world that already resisted narrowness and impositions.

Countess Olenska as the most unexpected trigger for that transition to freer spaces of consciousness. But every transition is hard for the pioneers. Olenska will drag unsuspecting inhabitants of the old moral standards spearheaded by Newland Archer into his vision of life. Because Archer loves or thinks he loves May Welland. In fact, it is more than likely that they could have loved her without further consideration if Olenska had not come into their lives. Passion is unleashed among the censored, as it always happens with everything that is prohibited.

Archer's existential anguish points to that break with everything, while the world continues to conspire against him from his very wife May Welland, who may not seek to expose her husband to great dilemmas but rather seeks to maintain the order of things. In a world that pointed to great changes in the new twentieth century looming on the horizon, everything seems to be destabilizing, from the particular passion of the fatal triangle to the value of many other social considerations.

The Age of Innocence

The spinster

A short novel loaded with the intensity of the brief. The New York of 1850 is being prepared and decorated for one of the weddings of the year or of the century.

The Ralston, to the uses and customs of the families of rancid European ancestry are preparing to perpetuate a line that controls the economic but that yearns for a classism typical of the noble titles supplied with a greater adherence to the traditional. And of course, that the future bride, Charlotte Lovell, arrives in the days before the event with a blemish incompatible with the greatness of the link can be disastrous.

The bad conscience makes Charlotte confess everything to her cousin Delia, the great reference of New York classism of the moment. And the shared secret is responsible for corroding everything. Because respect for bosses also extends to the moral sphere for Delia. And her disturbing confession spreads like a dark omen for the days to come. But the show must go on, the imperative of the crossing between families favors turning a blind eye.

However, disenchantment will have to spring somewhere, that kind of betrayal of Charlotte that Delia will assume as her own. Nothing worse for feminism than a woman rooted in what should be and what should never happen. Because the conflict is then served and it will never cease until its most bloody end.

The Spinster by Edith Wharton

The Bunner Sisters

For once we leave the elitist environments of New York at the end of the 19th century and travel to the heart of Manhattan to meet two older sisters, Ann Eliza and Evelina, who are getting ahead with their small neighborhood haberdashery shop.

On her birthday, Ann gives Evelina a watch so that her sister can wear it proud and with which they will both better control their working time in their small shop. The small detail of the gift serves the author to develop a skein that jumps from the particular fraternal relationship towards an entire social universe of the ever-changing big city, even more so in 1892 that looked with vertigo to that twentieth century seen from the perspective of the modernity and the fears of great changes.

In the sister's kind gesture, doubts and enigmas are also awakened in us, staged with a rich customs of the time and of the great Manhattan loaded with millions of intra-stories in that great human anthill on the shores of the Atlantic.

A curiously magnetic novel from the small, from the detail that is equated, balanced and at the same time supports the great weaving of lives and customs of the time. A small story that seems to come out of a snuff box flavored with the nineteenth century and that ends up becoming a big Pandora's box for an entire big city.

The Bunner Sisters
5/5 - (15 votes)

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