The intelligent and charming Newland Archer - a member of one of New York's most prominent families - is living the life that has always been expected of him: he is engaged to the beautiful and well-connected May Welland and understands the rarefied world of Fifth Avenue society inside out. However, with the arrival of May's cousin, the free-spirited and unconventional Countess Ellen Olenska, Newland begins to doubt all that once seemed so natural to him. An extraordinarily well-observed dissection of New York high society in the 1870s - the world in which Edith Wharton grew up - The Age of Innocence shines a critical light on the social mores and values of the old order.