English · Advanced
Read The Age of Innocence in Englishwith every sentence explained
Edith Wharton · 1920
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton was first published in 1920. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 101,200 words.
Old New York. A perfect engagement. And the one woman who could ruin everything.
New York, the 1870s. In the city's elegant upper class, every rule is unwritten and every mistake is remembered. Newland Archer, a wealthy young lawyer, is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a sweet, beautiful girl from one of the best families. His future seems settled and safe.
Then May's cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, returns from Europe. She has left her cruel husband, a Polish count, and society is shocked by her unconventional ways. Asked to help her family, Newland finds himself defending Ellen, and slowly falling for her freedom, her honesty and her sadness. Now he must choose between passion and duty, in a world that watches everything.
Edith Wharton's elegant, ironic novel won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, making her the first woman to receive it. Martin Scorsese turned it into an acclaimed film.
- Author
- Edith Wharton
- First published
- 1920
- Language
- English
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 101,200 words
How it opens
On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.
Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances "above the Forties," of a new Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy.
Reading The Age of Innocence in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate English book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
