The Touchstone (Hesperus Classics) - Softcover

Edith Wharton

3.66

1,460 ratings by Goodreads

9781843910664: The Touchstone (Hesperus Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1843910667 ISBN 13: 9781843910664

Publisher: Hesperus Press Ltd, 2003

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Stephen Glennard, an impoverished lawyer in the glamorous and money-driven society of New York, has one valuable possession: the letters written to him by the eminent and now deceased author Margaret Aubyn. He has seldom read the letters - he took their writer for granted herself - but they assume an importance for Glennard when it becomes clear that their financial worth will ensure his future stability and pay for his marriage to the beautiful Alexa Trent. What he fails to realise is that Aubyn's ghost, once unleashed upon the reading public, will exercise an influence over his own life that reduces all his hopes and pleasures to ashes.

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Review:

'Every line is a joy' --The Guardian

'This is vintage Edith with a fascinating debate about some of the moral issues surrounding the publication of personal correspondence' --Dovegreyreader

From the Author:

Edith Wharton’s reputation stands in the shade of her more famous male contemporary and friend, Henry James, as a graceful larch might to a venerable yew. All intimacies involve a degree of reciprocity, and without question the two novelists informed and influenced each other’s work, not simply with respect to subject matter and outlook but also to style: the famously – or notoriously, according to your preferences – complex parenthetical rhythms of James resonate, if less taxingly, in the decorous prose of Edith Wharton, just as her colleague’s scrutinising focus on the discreet dance of consciousness and human interconnectedness echoes in her subtle themes.
Both Wharton and James were fascinated by the lurking, misty dangers that inevitably accompany the exercise of free will; in the diabolical traps we set ourselves through self-referential obtuseness and self-protective blindness. No theme is more compelling to either novelist than the human tendency to squander true freedom – the freedom of conscience or the unsullied soul – in the pursuit of the, seemingly wider, scope and vistas in which to play out fantasies of self-fulfilment. Any act of choice involves a necessary limitation, and the aetiology of moral choice, and its attendant unforeseen consequences, forms the root of high drama in the works of both novelists.
The Touchstone, first published in 1900, is a taut novella with reverberations of two of James’s finest late novels, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. Both the better-known novels and the novella examine the ways in which love, however authentic, can be vitiated through the violation of another’s affection and trust. - From the Foreword by Salley Vickers

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