The Age of Innocence
The 1994 issue of Victoria magazine was dedicated to the splendor and the sensibilities of the age in time captured by Edith Wharton in her famous novel,
“The Age of Innocence"
“The Age of Innocence"
It seemed to me that Edith Wharton was a woman possessed of a clarity of the complexities of her time and was able to translate these things into words that touched hearts and souls ages ago and even today.
The age that Edith lived in was called the Gilded Age – or as she put it the Age of Innocence – the Victorian Era.
There are a great many impressions I have of Edith Wharton - I wish that I could be a time-traveler to step through the ages and to walk with those that have drawn my interest. There was a time when women were held in a different light than they are today. I think where we have come, there’s a bit lost in the art of feminity –
I would love not only to visit Edith, but to surreptitiously bring her here to our time and to have her observe – I’d love to know her impressions…
I think Edith’s own words speak volumes of the intensity of the woman – her passions and her thoughts.
I am thankful to Victoria magazine for heralding such wonderful women – for opening our scope of imagination to wonder and to want more…
I think I like the notion that you don’t have to be completely part of a time or era – I love the notion of walking through life with your own sensibilities – that can be timeless in their translation.
“A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.”
― Edith Wharton
“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
― Edith Wharton
“Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.”
― Edith Wharton
disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”
“Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.”
― Edith Wharton
“The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching searchlights.”
― Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance: An Autobiography
“...I have always lived on contrasts! To me the only death is monotony. Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.”
― Edith Wharton
I hope you found Edith Wharton as remarkable and interesting as I did. There is much to be learned from this lovely woman -
Wishing you a very Delightsome day!
