The Touchstone (Hesperus Classics) - Softcover

Wharton, Edith

3.66

1,460 ratings by Goodreads

9781843910664: The Touchstone (Hesperus Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1843910667 ISBN 13: 9781843910664

Publisher: Hesperus Press, 2003

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An early but accomplished work by Edith Wharton, The Touchstone is a tale of money and moral compromise, and foreshadows some of the best novels of her later life. Stephen Glennard, an impoverished lawyer in the glamorous, 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—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 realize 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 pleasure to ashes. American novelist Edith Wharton is known for her finely crafted stories of New York mores, including her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Age of Innocence.

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About the Author:

Edith Wharton (1862-1937), American novelist and short-story writer, was born in New York City. Strongly influenced by Henry James, she is best known for her subtle and su-perbly crafted studies of the tragedies and ironies in the lives of members of middle-class and artistocratic New York soci-ety in the the nineteenth century. She was educated in New York and Europe, and married Edward Wharton, a Boston banker, in 1885. When her husband became mentally ill, she cared for him until 1913, when she settled permanently in France and divorced him. Among her best and most characteristic works are The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she received a Pultizer prize.

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"'Every line is a joy.' - The Guardian"

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