The Age of Innocence, the old Academy

Edith Wharton published The Age of Innocence in 1920 and won the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1921, the first woman to take that award for fiction. She set the story in the New York of the 1870s, among the families she knew as a child. She wrote the book in France, where she had settled years earlier. Project Gutenberg carries the full novel.

Where this text comes fromThe phrase in quotation marks is the point of the sentence. Above the Forties was how New Yorkers of the 1870s referred to the empty blocks north of the built city, a shorthand for somewhere too remote to be taken seriously, and Wharton puts it in quotes because it was a piece of contemporary talk rather than a name. She was writing in 1920 about a city that had swallowed those distances long before, so the quotation marks carry fifty years of irony.

What you might not noticeThe quotation marks in this passage are straight rather than curly, which is unusual among the editions on this site and means the punctuation matches what your keyboard actually produces. Source

What it trainsOne sentence, fifty-seven words, three commas and a pair of straight double quotation marks. Those quotes are worth noticing because almost every other passage on this shelf uses curly ones, so this is the rare case where the mark on screen is the mark on your key. Six capitals, five of them inside the sentence, place names and institutions. The longest word is metropolitan, twelve letters, arriving in the middle of the quoted phrase where the punctuation is already demanding attention.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg