Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence won her the 1921 Pulitzer Prize- the first to be presented to a woman. The work is a powerful description of love and desire amidst the glitz and glamor of New York’s Gilded Age. The story follows Newland Archer, who meets his fiancee’s cousin Ellen and subsequently begins to question his future. Ellen is strong-willed, witty, unpretentious, and unlike any woman he has ever met. Suddenly he is torn between his infatuation with Ellen, and his duty to marry May. Lauren Lefkow gives a tender and sympathetic reading here. Also, one may remember the 1993 film adaptation, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Daniel Day Lewis as Archer, Winona Ryder as May, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Ellen.