Episode 289: “The Age of Innocence” by Edith Wharton, Ch. 1-8

Welcome to The Literary Life Podcast and a new series featuring the book The Age of Innocence. Our hosts, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks introduce us to American Gilded Age author, Edith Wharton, the “First Lady of American Letters.” They also share their own experiences with reading Wharton’s stories, novels, and letters, as well as some background on the time period and cultural context in which she was writing. In discussing the first several chapters of this book, Angelina and Thomas point out small details and subtleties that Wharton uses to give us hints about the characters and situations she presents.

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Commonplace Quotes:

No one is more of a slave than he who thinks himself free without really being so.

Goethe, from “Maxims and Reflections”

Our whole destiny seems to lie in the opposite direction, in being as little as possible ourselves, in acquiring a fragrance that is not our own but borrowed, in becoming clean mirrors filled with the image of a face that is not ours.

…I am saying only that the highest good of a creature must be creaturely–that is, derivative or reflective–good. In other words, as St. Augustine makes plain (De Civ. Dei xii, cap. I), pride does not only go before a fall but is a fall–a fall of the creature’s attention from what is better, God, to what is worse, itself.

Applying this principle to literature, in its greatest generality, we should get as the basis of all critical theory the maxim that an author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty of wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom.

C. S. Lewis, from “Christianity and Literature”

Love in a Life

by Robert Browing

I
Room after room,
I hunt the house through
We inhabit together.
Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her—
Next time, herself!—not the trouble behind her
Left in the curtain, the couch's perfume!
As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew:
Yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather.

II
Yet the day wears,
And door succeeds door;
I try the fresh fortune—
Range the wide house from the wing to the centre.
Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter.
Spend my whole day in the quest,—who cares?
But 'tis twilight, you see,—with such suites to explore,
Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune!

Books and Links Mentioned:

Amazon affiliate links follow

Maxims and Reflections by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Christian Reflections by C. S. Lewis

Henry James

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters: 1900-1915 edited by Lyall Harris Powers

Hazard of New Fortunes by William Dean Howells

The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Age of Innocence painting by Joshua Reynolds

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