Joy Jeffrey read and liked Eleanor's review of The Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics):

"I started this, and thought I was going to hate it. Then the book ended up in my bag on a trip into the mountains a week and a half ago, and I spent a couple hours in the hottub with it and a Negro Modelo. Now I must finish. I think it's going to tur...more I started this, and thought I was going to hate it. Then the book ended up in my bag on a trip into the mountains a week and a half ago, and I spent a couple hours in the hottub with it and a Negro Modelo. Now I must finish. I think it's going to turn out like an American Jane Eyre -- the sexual tension is making me crazy; everyone's so proper that I'm 200 pages in and there's only been ONE KISS between the protagonist and the woman he loves (who is not, as it happens, his wife). Now I have to finish it to find out if he ends up a homewrecker and to see if they run off to Europe together (which I hope they do). Knowing what I know so far, I shouldn't get my hopes up.
[Three days later...] Oh, I cried. So much love, so little loving.
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Joy Jeffrey read and liked David Cohen's review of The Age of Innocence:

"This book is my favorite Edith Wharton novel. This book was so well written I couldnt even take it. I read this one for an AP Lit class and we analyzed each and every fiber from the book's binding. No book better than this once has come out of Wharto...more This book is my favorite Edith Wharton novel. This book was so well written I couldnt even take it. I read this one for an AP Lit class and we analyzed each and every fiber from the book's binding. No book better than this once has come out of Wharton's hands. The ending is so passionate I can't even bear it. The movie was something else, too. Daniel Day Lewis as Newland Archer? Fuck yes.(less) "

Joy Jeffrey read and liked Matthew's review of The Age of Innocence (Oxford World's Classics):

"This is a gorgeous book with some great characters and a special ambience that I haven't experienced in any other novel. Edith Wharton takes the reader deep inside the strange little world of upper-class late 19th century New York, detailing the man...more This is a gorgeous book with some great characters and a special ambience that I haven't experienced in any other novel. Edith Wharton takes the reader deep inside the strange little world of upper-class late 19th century New York, detailing the manners, the attitudes, the rules, the institutionalized hypocrisy, the spectacular beauty and superficiality, and most of all, the lies that everyone must tell themselves and those around them to survive in a tightly regimented culture that has just barely reached its zenith and is already in decline.

Wharton's protagonist, Newland Archer, is one of the best written male characters I've ever come across. Her insightful portrayal is so steeped in the nuances of the masculine dilemma that it's hard to believe she was never a man. At the same time, her writing is effortlessly sensual and poetic without any of the arrhythmia or excessive floweriness that I find often characterizes Victorian writing.

Both times I read this book (at 17 & 26) it affected me profoundly. It was a very different experience each time, but the familiarity I had with the characters and situations (enchanced by multiple viewings of Martin Scorsese's pitch-perfect film adaptation) made the second reading particularly rewarding. I have a strong suspicion that I'll be returning to it quite a number of times in my life. I love to know that a book of such quality is always there for me to reunite with whenever I get the hankering.(less) "