American Classics PDF EPUB Audio

The Touchstone

Downloads: Under 100
First published: 1900
Pages: 61

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Read by Elizabeth Klett · 2 h 40 min · 14 parts

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01 - Chapter 01
10:34
02 - Chapter 02
17:23
03 - Chapter 03
7:38
04 - Chapter 04
16:05
05 - Chapter 05
11:21
06 - Chapter 06
15:03
07 - Chapter 07
12:05
08 - Chapter 08
14:05
09 - Chapter 09
6:59
10 - Chapter 10
9:56
11 - Chapter 11
4:26
12 - Chapter 12
11:33
13 - Chapter 13
14:28
14 - Chapter 14
8:55

The Touchstone (1900) is a public domain work.

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About this book

In a club overlooking a rain-streaked Fifth Avenue, Glennard reads a request for letters by the celebrated novelist Margaret Aubyn. Money worries have made marriage to Alexa Trent seem increasingly difficult, and the notice turns his thoughts toward a painful earlier attachment. He possesses hundreds of Aubyn's letters, reminders of her affection and of his own troubled response to it.

Published in 1900, Edith Wharton's psychological novel examines the tension between a writer's public reputation and the feelings entrusted to private correspondence. A later domestic scene finds Glennard uneasy as his wife takes up a published collection of Aubyn's letters. Her interest in the author brings his past into their conversation, while his retreat to the study leaves him absorbed in thoughts of her reading. Small social exchanges reveal pride, regret and uncertainty within a marriage. The book offers readers a study of conscience built around the intimate meaning of another person's words.

About the author

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones into the New York society she spent a career anatomising, and her first book was about interior decoration rather than fiction: The Decoration of Houses, written in 1897 with the architect Ogden Codman Jr.