The Touchstone (Annotated) E-Book

Edith Wharton

• Herausgeber: ePembaBooks
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

• 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.

Leseprobe

Table of contents

Edith Wharton, the feminism of a Pulitzer Prize winner

THE TOUCHSTONE

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

Edith Wharton, the feminism of a Pulitzer Prize winner

Literature has been consolidated over time as a small oasis for many writers and readers. Many saw and see in the pages of a book an escape from the routine and boredom characteristic of the society that surrounds them. Edith Wharton was also aware of this.

Edith Wharton, a well-known figure in American literature, received the call of writing from childhood. The writer's childhood and youth clearly marked her literary repertoire. These periods were characterized by the writer's loneliness, with an artificial mother, a distant father and a subsequent marriage of convenience that was defined by the author as one of her greatest mistakes and that would end in divorce years later. It was not until her encounter with the opera singer Camilla, when Wharton met true love. Her life, like that of many women of the time and later, was divided between her literary ambitions and the demands she encountered in the private sphere. Her fierce character made her a woman too different for her time, in the eyes not only of her husband, but also in the eyes of acquaintances and colleagues. The patrician New York in which she was born, raised and educated, was the main framework that inspired the criticism present in her novels, as well as her personal experiences and misfortunes were the basis of all her works. Undoubtedly, Edith Wharton's work marked a fundamental time in the transition to the European genre novel in American literature. In her novels we find a fierce criticism of the hostile economic and social laws that only generated benefits for a privileged few, as well as a clear social and sexual confinement characteristic of her protagonists. Thus, we observe in the same all kinds of issues related to the private sphere between men and women, whether adultery, restricted passion or marital conflicts. The work that brought Wharton the most fame and recognition in 1920 was "The Age of Innocence", which received a warm welcome. The Times Book Review itself dedicated an article to this work "a brilliant panorama of the New York of 45 years ago. The most requested novel in public libraries and a best seller in bookstores". In addition to this masterpiece, five earlier novels that tell the stories of women of her time are considered by many to be Wharton's true masterpieces, “The Greater Inclination” (1899), " The Touchstone" (1900), "Sanctuary" (1903), "The House of Mirth" (1905), “The Reef” (1912) and “Bunner Sisters” (1916).

Another significant and indispensable work of Wharton's for its maturity and masterful depiction of human feelings, "The Glimpses of the Moon" (1922), would come within a year after receiving the Pulitzer Prize in May 1921 for "The Age of Innocence." In later years Wharton would still be able to produce wonderful literary gems not so well known to the public such as "The Mother's Recompense" (1925). Edith Wharton's style had little or nothing to do with that of Henry James, her great friend, since it was characterized above all by a more realistic attitude in relation to the meticulous description of the chores and social changes of American life and society. One of the main characteristics of her work is the frequent use of irony. Born into the upper class of pre-war society, Wharton became one of the most astute critics of this social group. As a result of her great work, Edith Wharton won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 1921, and in 1923 she was named Doctor honoris causa by Yale University. Leaving the novel "The Buccaneers" unfinished, Wharton died in 1937. Her last work was finished by Marion Mainwaring who found the synopsis and notes that the author left written. Wharton became with the passage of time an essential in the world of literature and a passionate critic of injustice and social inequality.

The Editor, P.C. 2022

THE TOUCHSTONE

Edith Wharton

I

Professor Joslin, who, as our readers are doubtless aware, is engaged in writing the life of Mrs. Aubyn, asks us to state that he will be greatly indebted to any of the famous novelist's friends who will furnish him with information concerning the period previous to her coming to England. Mrs. Aubyn had so few intimate friends, and consequently so few regular correspondents, that letters will be of special value. Professor Joslin's address is 10 Augusta Gardens, Kensington, and he begs us to say that he "will promptly return any documents entrusted to him."

Glennard dropped the Spectator and sat looking into the fire. The club was filling up, but he still had to himself the small inner room, with its darkening outlook down the rain–streaked prospect of Fifth Avenue. It was all dull and dismal enough, yet a moment earlier his boredom had been perversely tinged by a sense of resentment at the thought that, as things were going, he might in time have to surrender even the despised privilege of boring himself within those particular four walls. It was not that he cared much for the club, but that the remote contingency of having to give it up stood to him, just then, perhaps by very reason of its insignificance and remoteness, for the symbol of his increasing abnegations; of that perpetual paring–off that was gradually reducing existence to the naked business of keeping himself alive. It was the futility of his multiplied shifts and privations that made them seem unworthy of a high attitude; the sense that, however rapidly he eliminated the superfluous, his cleared horizon was likely to offer no nearer view of the one prospect toward which he strained. To give up things in order to marry the woman one loves is easier than to give them up without being brought appreciably nearer to such a conclusion.

Through the open door he saw young Hollingsworth rise with a yawn from the ineffectual solace of a brandy–and–soda and transport his purposeless person to the window. Glennard measured his course with a contemptuous eye. It was so like Hollingsworth to get up and look out of the window just as it was growing too dark to see anything! There was a man rich enough to do what he pleased—had he been capable of being pleased—yet barred from all conceivable achievement by his own impervious dulness; while, a few feet off, Glennard, who wanted only enough to keep a decent coat on his back and a roof over the head of the woman he loved, Glennard, who had sweated, toiled, denied himself for the scant measure of opportunity that his zeal would have converted into a kingdom—sat wretchedly calculating that, even when he had resigned from the club, and knocked off his cigars, and given up his Sundays out of town, he would still be no nearer attainment.

The Spectator had slipped to his feet and as he picked it up his eye fell again on the paragraph addressed to the friends of Mrs. Aubyn. He had read it for the first time with a scarcely perceptible quickening of attention: her name had so long been public property that his eye passed it unseeingly, as the crowd in the street hurries without a glance by some familiar monument.

"Information concerning the period previous to her coming to England…." The words were an evocation. He saw her again as she had looked at their first meeting, the poor woman of genius with her long pale face and short–sighted eyes, softened a little by the grace of youth and inexperience, but so incapable even then of any hold upon the pulses. When she spoke, indeed, she was wonderful, more wonderful, perhaps, than when later, to Glennard's fancy at least, the conscious of memorable things uttered seemed to take from even her most intimate speech the perfect bloom of privacy. It was in those earliest days, if ever, that he had come near loving her; though even then his sentiment had lived only in the intervals of its expression. Later, when to be loved by her had been a state to touch any man's imagination, the physical reluctance had, inexplicably, so overborne the intellectual attraction, that the last years had been, to both of them, an agony of conflicting impulses. Even now, if, in turning over old papers, his hand lit on her letters, the touch filled him with inarticulate misery….

"She had so few intimate friends…that letters will be of special value." So few intimate friends! For years she had had but one; one who in the last years had requited her wonderful pages, her tragic outpourings of love, humility, and pardon, with the scant phrases by which a man evades the vulgarest of sentimental importunities. He had been a brute in spite of himself, and sometimes, now that the remembrance of her face had faded, and only her voice and words remained with him, he chafed at his own inadequacy, his stupid inability to rise to the height of her passion. His egoism was not of a kind to mirror its complacency in the adventure. To have been loved by the most brilliant woman of her day, and to have been incapable of loving her, seemed to him, in looking back, the most derisive evidence of his limitations; and his remorseful tenderness for her memory was complicated with a sense of irritation against her for having given him once for all the measure of his emotional capacity. It was not often, however, that he thus probed the past. The public, in taking possession of Mrs. Aubyn, had eased his shoulders of their burden. There was something fatuous in an attitude of sentimental apology toward a memory already classic: to reproach one's self for not having loved Margaret Aubyn was a good deal like being disturbed by an inability to admire the Venus of Milo. From her cold niche of fame she looked down ironically enough on his self–flagellations…. It was only when he came on something that belonged to her that he felt a sudden renewal of the old feeling, the strange dual impulse that drew him to her voice but drove him from her hand, so that even now, at sight of anything she had touched, his heart contracted painfully. It happened seldom nowadays. Her little presents, one by one, had disappeared from his rooms, and her letters, kept from some unacknowledged puerile vanity in the possession of such treasures, seldom came beneath his hand….

"Her letters will be of special value—" Her letters! Why, he must have hundreds of them—enough to fill a volume. Sometimes it used to seem to him that they came with every post—he used to avoid looking in his letter–box when he came home to his rooms—but her writing seemed to spring out at him as he put his key in the door—.