内容简介
Edith Wharton's masterpiece,first published in 1920,brings to life the grandeur and hypocrisy of a gilded age.Set among the very rich in 1870s New York,it tells the mesmerizing story of a man caught between his passion and society's demands.Newland Archer is a young lawyer engaged to marry virginal socialite May Welland,when he meets her cousin,Countess Ellen Olenska,a woman unbound by convention and surrounded by scandal.Archer considers his fiancee an innocent ,her worldly cousin a femme fatale.As all three are arawn into a love triangle filled with sensuality,subtlety,and betrayal,Archer faces a harrowing choice between happiness and the social code that has ruled his entire life,The result ia a tale of thwarted love filled with irony and surprise,struggle and acceptance,Recipient of the first pulitzer Prizefor fiction ever awarded to a woman,this gregt novel of manners paints a timeless portrait of "society"still unmatched in American literature-an arbitrary,capricious social elite that professes inviolable standards,but will readily abolish them for money,or abandon them for desire.