Mapped
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
Gilded Age Manhattan, where an address is a verdict. Wharton is exact about which streets are respectable and which are not: the shabby old opera house on Fourteenth Street, the chocolate-coloured brownstones, and the bold new houses creeping up towards the Park. Half of these buildings are gone.
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The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton
Lily Bart falls through New York one address at a time. The novel opens in the crowd at Grand Central and follows her down: the bachelor flats of the Benedick, the Trenors' great estate up the Hudson, the marble mansions creeping up Fifth Avenue, and, at the end, a milliner's workroom, a West Side boarding-house, and a bench in Bryant Park. The plot is a map, read downwards.
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