If You Loved The Great Gatsby, Try This Classic

If You Loved The Great Gatsby, Try The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" is a dazzling, tragic exploration of the American Dream, wealth, and social status in the Roaring Twenties. Its sharp critique of a decadent society, wrapped in beautiful prose, has made it a perennial favorite. If you were drawn to the intricate social webs, the doomed love, and the critique of high society, then Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence" should be next on your list.

Published in 1920, just a few years before Gatsby, Wharton's novel offers a look into the rigid, old-money society of 1870s New York. It follows Newland Archer, a young lawyer engaged to the perfect society belle, May Welland. His world is turned upside down by the arrival of May's cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, who has fled a disastrous marriage in Europe and brings with her a scandalous air of independence and worldliness.

Like Gatsby, "The Age of Innocence" is a story of a man caught between two worlds and two women, one representing safety and social acceptability, the other passion and personal freedom. Wharton, an insider to this world, dissects its suffocating conventions with surgical precision. The novel is a masterclass in subtlety and subtext, where what is *not* said is often more important than what is.

Where Gatsby's world is one of new money and extravagant parties, Archer's is one of old money and suffocating propriety. Both novels, however, explore the immense pressure society places on individuals and the tragic consequences of choosing convention over authentic love. If you want to see the roots of the world Gatsby tried so desperately to conquer, step back a few decades into Wharton's "The Age of Innocence."