# The Age of Innocence — Character guide

> Key figures in The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.

- [Newland Archer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/newland_archer.md): Newland Archer moves through drawing rooms and opera boxes as a man who knows every rule and privately chafes at them. Engaged to May Welland, he feels the warm shelter of habit closing around him even as he is drawn tow
- [Ellen Olenska](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/ellen_olenska.md): Ellen Olenska arrives in New York trailing rumors of a broken marriage and a refusal to return to her husband, making her both an object of family pity and a quiet threat to its codes. She is lonely, direct, and unimpres
- [May Welland](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/may_welland.md): May Welland is the embodiment of everything old New York expects a young woman to be: beautiful, dutiful, and untroubled. Yet her letter asking Archer to be kind to Ellen, and her quiet insistence on giving her cousin a 
- [Mrs. Archer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/mrs_archer.md): Mrs. Archer presides over a household of faded Reynolds-portrait gentility, where ferns, macramé, and Ouida are cultivated and the grosser pleasures of the Mingotts are politely deplored. She shares with her daughter Jan
- [Janey Archer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/janey_archer.md): Janey Archer shares her mother's tall, pale Newland looks and her taste for scenery, glazed ware, and novels about people in society. Unmarried and settled into the narrow round of West Twenty-eighth Street, she is an ex
- [Sillerton Jackson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/sillerton_jackson.md): Sillerton Jackson dines at the Archers' not for the food but for the audience, trading anecdotes and weighing evidence that the ladies of the family never question. He is a true eclectic, moving between the Mingott table
- [Julius Beaufort](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/julius_beaufort.md): Beaufort is the flashy outsider whose money buys him a place in a society that privately discounts him, and whose looming 'smash' becomes the season's favorite whispered speculation. His taste for display and his rumored
- [Mrs. Julius Beaufort](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/mrs_beaufort.md): Mrs. Beaufort is woven into the Dallas and Mingott connections, which makes her husband's coming disgrace a family matter rather than a stranger's misfortune. She appears blind to his private weaknesses and steadfast at 
- [Mrs. Manson Mingott](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/mrs_manson_mingott.md): Old Mrs. Mingott is the Mingott clan's commanding center of gravity, a woman whose blameless life is staged in rooms that look, to Newland Archer's amused eye, like the setting for adultery. She champions the engagement 
- [Mrs. Welland](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/mrs_welland.md): Mrs. Welland is the guardian of Welland propriety, a woman who treats an unplanned afternoon as a moral hazard and adjusts her respect for her married children's independence around her husband's claims. She finds Newlan
- [Mr. Welland](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/mr_welland.md): Mr. Welland is a quiet fixture of the Welland routines, his afternoon drives and fragile constitution shaping the family's daily arrangements. He belongs to the older generation that dislikes 'Bohemian' quarters and the 
- [Lawrence Lefferts](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/lawrence_lefferts.md): Lefferts is the man who knows when to wear a black tie and when not, and whose opera-glass verdicts carry the weight of law among the white-waistcoated gentlemen of the club box. He embodies the masculine solidarity Newl
- [Henry van der Luyden](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/henry_van_der_luyden.md): Henry van der Luyden sits at the still center of old New York society, a tall, frock-coated man whose least gesture carries almost sacerdotal weight. He and his wife Louisa have merged into a single deliberative entity, 
- [Mrs. Henry van der Luyden](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/mrs_van_der_luyden.md): Mrs. van der Luyden's habitual reply—that she must first talk things over with Henry—has made her the quiet gatekeeper of New York's most exclusive circles. Yet when the Archer family brings her the scandal of the Lovell
- [Medora Manson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/medora_manson.md): Medora Manson swept her orphaned niece Ellen off to Europe at eighteen, raising her amid a series of enthusiasms that scandalized the family back home. Her influence explains why Ellen returns to New York already Europea
- [Letterblair](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/letterblair.md): The senior partner at the law firm where Newland works.
- [Regina Dallas](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/regina_dallas.md): A lively young woman from a less strict family.
- [M. Rivière](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/m_riviere.md): A French tutor and intellectual who befriends Newland.
- [Ned Winsett](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/ned_winsett.md): A journalist and friend of Newland with artistic aspirations.
- [Count Olenski](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/count_olenski.md): Ellen's estranged Polish husband.
- [Dr. Carver](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/dr_carver.md): A charismatic preacher followed by Medora Manson.
- [Duke of St. Austrey](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters/duke_of_st_austrey.md): An English duke visiting New York society.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_age_of_innocence_se/characters