<ul> <li>This edition includes the following editor&#39;s introduction:<i> Edith Wharton, the feminism of a Pulitzer Prize winner</i></li></ul><br />First published in 1900, &quot;The Touchstone&quot; was American writer Edith Wharton&rsquo;s first novella and also the first of her many stories describing life in old New York.<br /><br />&quot;The Touchstone&quot; already shows off the skills Wharton became famous for in novels such as &quot;<i>The House of Mirth</i>&quot; (1905) and &quot;<i>Ethan Frome</i>&quot; (1911), particularly her piercing and delicious talent for satiric observation. But despite its masterly control, this startlingly modern tale is also a simmering, rebel <i>cri de coeur </i>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.<br /><br />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. &quot;The Touchstone&quot; fulfils all these requirements.<br /><br />&ldquo;The Touchstone&rdquo; 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.