La edad de la inocencia

Countess Olenska leans from her box toward the opera stage, revealing "a little more shoulder and chest than New York was accustomed to seeing, at least in ladies who had reason to wish to remain unnoticed." With that gesture, a crack opens in the world of old social hierarchies, where appearances outweigh desires. Written between September 1919 and March 1920 in France, "The Age of Innocence" established Edith Wharton as the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize. It was also the recognition of an author who, for years, had portrayed with lucidity and sensitivity the female condition trapped in rigid and hypocritical structures, such as marriage, which was "no longer a safe harbor, as she had been taught to believe, but a journey through unknown seas." Wharton was the great chronicler of a fading universe: courteous on the surface, but cruel in her demands. "Doesn't anyone here want to know the truth? Real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask you to pretend." A novel about imposed duty, lost opportunities and the fever of passion: everything that is not said, but felt.