The Dangerous Countess Olenska

Roxane Gay picks up Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence where New York has to decide what to do with Countess Olenska. First the families snub her. The snub sends Newland into action, partly for his in-laws and partly, Gay suspects, out of his contrarian streak. Then the van der Luydens invite her to dinner and the town warms, a little. Ellen still lives in the wrong neighborhood, sees the wrong people and says the wrong things, which Gay translates: she's one of the few people who mean what they say.

The turn is the divorce question. Everyone who claims to love Ellen wants her to stay married to a man who has only hurt her, and Gay calls that the Gilded Age in miniature: being married matters more than the marriage. Newland, sent to talk her out of it, knows what's right and what's expected and can't square them. Gay is glad he can't. She ends on why this young generation, unlike most, embraces its parents' conventions so willingly.