The Age of Desire by Jennie Fields Review for Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours!!

About THE AGE OF DESIRE

Paperback Publication Date: May 28, 2013
Penguin Publishing
Paperback; 384p
ISBN: 978-0143123286

For fans of The Paris Wife, a sparkling glimpse into the life of Edith Wharton and the scandalous love affair that threatened her closest friendship.

They say that behind every great man is a great woman. Behind Edith Wharton, there was Anna Bahlmann—her governess turned literary secretary and confidante. At the age of forty-five, despite her growing fame, Edith remains unfulfilled in a lonely, sexless marriage. Against all the rules of Gilded Age society, she falls in love with Morton Fullerton, a dashing young journalist. But their scandalous affair threatens everything in Edith’s life—especially her abiding ties to Anna.

At a moment of regained popularity for Wharton, Jennie Fields brilliantly interweaves Wharton’s real letters and diary entries with her fascinating, untold love story. Told through the points of view of both Edith and Anna, The Age of Desire transports readers to the golden days of Wharton’s turn-of-the century world and—like the recent bestseller The Chaperone—effortlessly re-creates the life of an unforgettable woman.
Praise for The Age of Desire

“Somewhere between the repressiveness of Edith Wharton’s early-20th-century Age of Innocence and our own libertine Shades of Grey era lies the absorbingly sensuous world of Jennie Fields’s The Age of Desire . . . along with the overheated romance and the middle-age passion it so accurately describes, The Age of Desire also offers something simpler and quieter: a tribute to the enduring power of female friendship.” —Boston Globe

“One doesn’t have to be an Edith Wharton fan to luxuriate in the Wharton-esque plotting and prose Fields so elegantly conjures.” —Kirkus

“Delicate and imaginative . . . Fields’s love and respect for all her characters and her care in telling their stories shines through." —Publishers Weekly

Beautiful ... an imaginative tour-de-force with the best-written naughty bits I have ever read." —UK Daily Mail

Inspired by Wharton’s letters, The Age of Desire is by turns sensuous . . . and sweetly melancholy.  It’s also a moving examination of a friendship between two women. —Bookpage

“A fascinating insight into the life of my favorite novelist. Fields brings a secret side of Wharton to life, and shows us a woman whose elegant façade concealed a turbulent sensuality.” —Daisy Goodwin, author of The American Heiress

“With astonishing tenderness and immediacy, The Age of Desire portrays the interwoven lives of Edith Wharton and Anna Bahlmann, her governess, secretary, and close friend.  By focusing on these two women from vastly different backgrounds, Jennie Fields miraculously illuminates an entire era. . . . I gained insight into both Wharton’s monumental work and her personal struggles—and I was filled with regret that I’d finished reading so soon.” —Lauren Belfer, author of City of Light and A Fierce Radiance

“In the vein of Loving Frank or The Paris Wife, Jennie Fields has created a page-turning period piece. Fields portrays a woman whose life was hardly innocence and mirth, but passionate, complex, and more mysterious than one might ever imagine.” —Mary Morris, author of Nothing to Declare and Revenge

About the Author

Born in the heart of the heart of the country – Chicago -- Jennie Fields decided to become a writer at the age of six and produced her first (365 page!) novel when she was eleven.  She received her MFA at the Iowa Writers Workshop and published her first short stories while spending a postgraduate year at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.  But needing to feed her family  in the era just post-Mad Men, she became an early female copywriter at an advertising agency, soon rising to creative director and moving to New York.  In her 32-year advertising career, she wrote and produced many well-known and award-winning commercials.  People even now can embarrass her by telling her they grew up dancing to one of her McDonalds’ jingles.

Still, fiction was her great love.  Writing during her lunch hour and after her daughter’s bedtime she penned her first novel, Lily Beach, which was published by Atheneum in 1993 to much acclaim.  Since then, she’s written three more novels including Crossing Brooklyn Ferry and The Middle Ages. Her latest, The

 Age of Desire, is a biographical novel based on the life of the author dearest to her heart, Edith Wharton.  An Editor’s Choice of the New York Times Book Review, it describes Wharton’s mid-life love affair with a you

nger, manipulative man.  Why the affinity to Wharton?  Because she wrote about people attempting to break society’s expectations for them – which is something Fields has been yearning to do all her life.

For more information, please visit Jennie's website.

   You can also follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

My Thoughts

Age of Desire is a fictional story about author Edith Wharton who was a novelist, short story writer and designer. Edith was married to Teddy Wharton who suffers from acute depression, causing their marriage to be a dismal one for Edith. They do a lot of traveling but their favorite place is Paris where they spend a lot of time and hobnob with Parisian society 

Anna Bahlman was Edith's governess and tutor, then became companion, chaperone and then personal secretary. Anna was privy to Edith's intimate life and was not always pleased with how Edith chose to live her life but was still her faithful companion and assistant for many years. Edith's unhappiness eventually leads her to have an affair with Morton Fullerton, a journalist with The Times. Edith tries hard to conform to society and its requirements as a young woman born into wealth and privilege but is able to put her frustrations to paper. Still she finds herself falling in love with Morton and spends a lot of time with him. Edith, with Morton's help was able to get her novel The House of Mirth serialized in a magazine. Edith's relationship with Morton was tempestuous, as one minute he was loving and the next he could be cruel. I didn't care for his attitude and how he treated Edith, I agreed with Anna's perception of him, a cad for sure.  

This novel gives us an intimate look into life in the early 1900's among the literary circle,and what life was like among the 'old' New York families in the Gilded Age. At times I found the novel going slow but after awhile it did pick up and I found that I enjoyed it. I had heard of Edith Wharton, but had never read any of her books. I did find her to be an interesting woman, definitely a woman ahead of her time. It appears that a lot of research went into the writing of this book and it shows in the writing.

I received this book for review and was not monetarily copensated for my review.