The Age of Innocence, which was set in the time of Wharton's childhood,
was a softer and gentler work than The House of Mirth, which Wharton had
published in 1905. In her autobiography, Wharton wrote of The Age of
Innocence that it had allowed her to find "a momentary escape in going
back to my childish memories of a long-vanished America... it was
growing more and more evident that the world I had grown up in and been
formed by had been destroyed in 1914." Scholars and readers alike agree
that The Age of Innocence is fundamentally a story which struggles to
reconcile the old with the new. The title is an ironic comment on the
polished outward manners of New York society when compared to its inward
machinations. It is believed to have been drawn from the popular
painting A Little Girl by Sir Joshua Reynolds that later became known as
The Age of Innocence and was widely reproduced as the commercial face of
childhood in the later half of the 18th century.