The Touchstone by Edith Wharton, Fiction, Literary, Classics - Softcover

"Small wonders"
--"Time Out London"
"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read."
--Ron Rosenbaum, "The New York Observer"

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