A review by missapples
The Touchstone by Edith Wharton

5.0

The nature of the conflict and the way the main characters acted upon it, seemed completely archaic to me, a contemporary reader, but Wharton managed to keep the story interesting. Her observations of a human character are acute and though her prose is dense, it runs smoothly. I especially enjoy her descriptions of everyday life. The Gilded Age novels written today can never capture all details in full, since the authors live in a completely different world. Wharton knows her world. Take a ride in a hansom (the 19th century version of a taxi) for example: if you lifted the lid, the cabby automatically assumed you had something to tell him and slowed down in order to hear you. Details like that make Wharton's novels a real treasure for anyone interested in this period.