In Part 2 of our discussion on Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, editor Sheila Liming returns to discuss challenges for first-time readers, the correlation between fluctuations in Wharton's reputation and historical literary (and political) trends, and whether or not The Age of Innocence is truly a love story.

Sheila Liming is Associate Professor at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. She is the author of What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and creator of the web database EdithWhartonsLibrary.org. Her other books include Office (2020), published through Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series, and a scholarly edition of Wharton's novel Twilight Sleep (forthcoming through Oxford University Press). Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Lapham's Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, McSweeney’s, and The Chronicle Review.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of The Age of Innocence, go to https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393870770.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

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