Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was an American author best known for the novel The Age of Innocence, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921, making her the first female winner of the award.

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.

There is no woman in American literature as fascinating as. Madame Olenska.