"Each time you happen to me all over again"
Overflowing love connets Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska, still keeping them far away from each other. A married man and a separated woman... Passion and duty...
The breathtaking story of their love and tenderness filled me with meloncholy and kept my attention til the last page. Edith Wharton enlivens the eternal drama of people's characters on the background of the New York society in 1870s. With the help of precise detailes, ironical descriptions and vivid dialogues she unfolds in front of us a picturesque panorama of human feelings and longings, struggles between freedom and tradition, honour and treachery, love and duty... Overwhelming love predestined to surrender to conventionalities of the demanding society and personal responsibility...
Could Archer and Ellen ever be together? Hardly ever...
Don't let us be like all the others! she protested"
And they weren't like conventional people around them. Their honesty, moral principles, personal code of honour didn't allow them to go agaist their familiesm against the laws of society. After all, both were children of that very sociery, however open-minded their own views were, however strong the desire to escape from hypocrisy was.
Edith Wharton majestically shows the difficulty and sacrifising nature of remaining true to yourself and becoming a self-suffiecient personality.
The novel left me with tender sadness and a bittersweet belief that life never fulfills all our desires, and we need to find happiness in simple things life gives us, to appreciate what we have. And there lays the majesty of the novel.
However, Ellen always was a dream he was striving for but never was able to grasp... She became an epitome of
"something he knew he had missed: the flower of life".
