Episode #71: Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence with Dr. Emily Orlando
In celebration of Edith Wharton’s birthday on January 24, join The Gilded Gentleman for this very special look into perhaps Wharton’s most famous and best-loved novel.
Edith Wharton published The Age of Innocence at a very important moment in her life. When the novel came out in 1920, she had been living in France full-time for nearly 10 years and had just seen the devastating effects of World War I up close. Her response was to look back with a sense of nostalgia to the time of her childhood to recreate that staid, restrictive world of New York in the 1870s that despite its often social cruelty and harsh judgments seemed to have some kind of moral center. It was a world in which Wharton as a creative woman however could not live and work and thus transferred her life in stages to France.
In this episode, Dr. Emily Orlando, a noted Wharton scholar joins Carl to delve into the background of this novel, take a deep dive into the personalities of the major characters and for a discussion of just what Whatron wanted to say in her masterpiece. Edith Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel in 1921.
Carl is joined by special guest:
— Dr. Emily Orlando, a Professor of English and the E. Gerald Corrigan Chair in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Fairfield University. She is an internationally recognized scholar on the American writer Edith Wharton.
LISTEN NOW: Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence with Dr. Emily Orlando
Related Podcasts:
A Sprig of Witch Hazel: Edith Wharon’s Secret Affair
Edith Wharton’s Paris