Edith Wharton 
The Touchstone (Annotated) 

• This edition includes the following editor’s introduction: Edith Wharton, the feminism of a Pulitzer Prize winner

First published in 1900, ‘The Touchstone’ was American writer Edith Wharton’s first novella and also the first of her many stories describing life in old New York.



‘The Touchstone’ already shows off the skills Wharton became famous for in novels such as ‘
The House of Mirth’ (1905) and ‘
Ethan Frome’ (1911), particularly her piercing and delicious talent for satiric observation. But despite its masterly control, this startlingly modern tale is also a simmering, rebel
cri de coeur unleashed by a writer who was herself unappreciated in her own time. The combination of these attributes make this edgy novella a moving and suspenseful homage to the power of literature itself.



The basic requirements of the novella form are that it should be short, concentrated, centred on a single theme, with few characters, and tightly focused in terms of time scale, characters, and location. ‘The Touchstone’ fulfils all these requirements.



“The Touchstone” tells the story of Stephen Glennard, a man who finds himself suddenly impoverished and unable to marry the woman he loves. He decides to sell the private letters a former admirer had written to him, before she had become a famous author. He is later overcome by guilt for betraying one who had loved him.