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Content snapshot
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Violence
None
No violence
Language
None
No profanity; Wharton's elegant prose
Sexual Content
Barely any
Romantic longing and an almost-affair; entirely non-explicit
Substance Use
None
Social drinking in Gilded Age settings
Emotional Intensity
Some
A quietly devastating portrait of psychological entrapment by social convention
What this book is about
Newland Archer, a respectable New York lawyer engaged to the sweet May Welland, falls in love with May's unconventional cousin Ellen Olenska, who has fled a disastrous European marriage. Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a precise dissection of how upper-class social convention destroys individual happiness while presenting a shining surface of propriety.
Notes for sensitive readers
Reader-flagged moments and themes that may affect your experience.
Themes of love sacrificed to social propriety
The psychological cost of a life unlived
Reader Verification
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