A new biography of Edith Wharton reveals that she contemplated a sort of sequel to The Age of Innocence, still a favorite in many college classes for a variety of reasons. In the sequel she planned to show that protagonist Newland Archer’s voluble, confident, full-of-himself son, who practically throws his own freer life in his father’s face at the end of the novel, winds up no happier. As The Age of Innocence ends, the son presents a contrast to Archer’s restricted life. Unlike his father, the younger man is able to marry the woman he loves, a woman who in his father’s generation would have been taboo in the upper crust set to which they belong. Unlike his father, he will not be compelled to stick to a conventional, passionless, and rather loveless, if reasonably workable, marriage, and the novel practically shouts at us that Archer sacrificed himself to mores that are no longer even honored in the newer atmosphere of the turn of the century as they were in the 1870s. Now we learn that Wharton planned a sequel to show that even the son with all his freedom to do as he likes and as his passions direct does not escape the unhappiness attendant on the human condition. That is most interesting and addresses what I have always felt was a big flaw in the novel — that is, that Wharton seems to recognize that cultural norms are important, that individual freedom is not sacrosanct, that passion cannot always be indulged, that life requires some sacrifice for a larger good, and so on, even while the tone of the novel seems to disdain the very society she otherwise grudgingly admits is necessary. (Listen to Joann Woodward’s mocking voiceover in the Martin Scorsese film.) Then at the end, when she shows that Archer has become so shriveled that he cannot even speak years later to the woman who was the love of his youth, it seems to suggest that his spirit has been stifled by adherence to social norms and that all he has now is the remembrance of his sacrifice and the extremely belated knowledge that his wife at least knew about it. Then when his son chatters alongside him, resplendent in his freedom to marry whom he chooses without regard for the mores that constricted Archer and that no longer even hold in Archer’s set, it sends a chill over the whole novel. So now we hear that Wharton seemed aware of the implications of the son’s situation and planned a sequel. But she never got around to writing it. Moral: writers should do justice to the full vision of the novel at hand, and not put off the reckoning for sequels. I know that John Miller likes what appears to be the kind of tragic ending of The Age of Innocence, in which Archer no longer feels the need to reacquaint himself with his old love, but I think many readers see that as a shrivelling of soul. At that point, they are both in Europe, Archer is a widower, neither of them is attached in any way, and the possibility of a December romance is there. It seems Wharton turns from this potential flourishing with the part of her soul that hated the conventions that she nevertheless saw necessary to life. It would be too much of an affirmation that one might find happiness after all, even after surrendering it for the sake of others.