'Is it your idea, then, that I should live with you as your mistress - since I can't be your wife?' Ellen Olenska asks of Newland Archer in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. By this point in the novel, it has become obvious to us that Olenska and Archer are each other's only chance of what Newland calls 'a real life'. Newland's impending marriage to the terrifyingly girlish May Welland cannot be anything other than 'a sham'; it closes round him with all the stifling force of old, status-obsessed New York society. And yet, much as he wants her, Newland does not exactly want the married Countess Olenska to be his 'mistress'. We know that he has had a secret mistress in the past ('poor silly Mrs Thorley Rushworth'), before his relationship with May, and he knows what clandestine squalor it entails.

LRB 6 January 2011 | PDF Download