Gilded Age 1900 novella from first woman winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Edith Wharton: the quintessential New York novelist; few capture the Gilded Age as sharply as she does. It’s easy to forget with her fame just how psychologically astute her writing is…. and that she was also the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921.
The Touchstone is a novella from 1900: it’s more complex than its brevity initially suggests.
A man with a dreadful choice? a.k.a the intelligent woman problem
So, here we have it: an ambitious but impoverished young man, our protagonist, sits resentfully in his New York city club, painfully aware of the wealth surrounding him. He’s desperate for a dinner invite.
He loves a woman and wants to marry, but lacks the necessary funds to establish a respectable life. At the same time, he reflects on another woman from his past: a brilliant, unconventional writer with whom he shared a deep but ambiguous bond. Though we only see her indirectly, she feels startlingly alive in her vulnerability and contradictions.
The narrator admired this writer friend, but she did not fit his ideal of womanhood. She was too intellectually independent, too socially unconventional, insufficiently “gracious” by the standards he valued. Yet she clearly loved him with extraordinary sincerity, showering him with her unrequited, exquisite feelings.
But now that she’s a famous author, sadly dead, could her love letters to him be worth something and help him get started in life? The moral dilemma at the centre of the novella emerges from that betrayal.
The woman question?
What follows is psychological torture, as he attempts to live with a secret that increasingly corrodes his relationships and sense of self.
The novella is perceptive about femininity, emotional intimacy, ambition, and the ways people rationalise their own actions. It’s also preoccupied with the tension between admiration and sexual love.
A very clever and unsettling book that also speaks to the “woman question” of the time. There’s a criticism and cynicism about marriage and men’s appreciation of women’s individuality and intellect here.
Read if you’re a Wharton fan or love an intelligent novella.
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