It’s the start of a new week and it’s actually the last week of this project. I’m a bit sad to be ending it because there’s more I want to reread and I know I won’t do much of that once I go back rereading “new” books, but I am also excited to go back to the Dark is Rising sequence.

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for fiction AND made her the first woman to win said prize. But to be honest, I remembered reading it mostly because two of its fashioned references were in The Classic Ten.

This is the story of Newland Archer, a young man who thinks he’s different from everyone else in New York high society but really acts the same way as them (question: does merely thinking differently set you apart if it doesn’t influence your actions?). At the start of the story, he’s in love with May Welland, but when her scandalous cousin Ellen Olenska returns from Europe (fleeing an allegedly abusive husband), he slowly finds himself falling in love with her.

Spoilers: I just finished the part where Newland has declared his love for Ellen, who has rejected him and so he has gone on to marry May and is now unhappy in his honeymoon.

Honestly, while the Wikipedia page for this book calls May “shallow, uninterested and uninteresting”, I feel like calling this into question because the whole book is through Newland’s perspective. When he loves may (or fancies himself in love with her), she’s very interesting. When he’s in love with Ellen, he thinks she’s the most fascinating and May conforms to society’s demands. All the while he is conforming to society’s demands, with some of his actions being described as though they happened automatically. Does he or does he not have any autonomy, given that he’s a man from one of the most privileged classes in New York?

Well, now that Newland has done the conventional thing of getting married to May, I’m looking forward to rediscovering the rest of the story and seeing if my opinion of Newland and May changes.