Wharton’s first novella (longer than a short story, shorter than a novel), tells of the young lover of a recently deceased, famous female author. He decides to sell her letters to earn money, pretending they were written to a friend of his, so he can marry the woman he loves. In England it was published as A Gift from the Grave.
The book would later have an eerie relevance to Wharton herself. Nearly a decade later, Wharton would have an affair with Morton Fullerton, an American journalist working for the London Times and living in Paris. When the affair ended, she asked him to burn her letters. He didn’t and they later were discovered and published.
Published in April 1900