tutorial commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Sweetheart of M. Briseux first appeared in The Galaxy magazine for June 1873. It was not reprinted until 1919 as part of Travelling Companions along with six other early Henry James stories, published by Boni and Liveright in New York.

Portrait of a Lady in a Yellow Shawl

The Sweetheart of M. Briseux – critical commentary

This is one of many stories James wrote about art and artists – particularly painters. The premise of the tale is simple enough, and represents a traditionally romantic view of art. Harold Staines is handsome and rich, but he lacks artistic talent. M. Briseux on the other hand is poor and unsuccessful – but he has both artistic insight and skill. Briseux is also a man of principle who turns down an offer of money in order to complete the portrait. The poor but talented artist is something of a cliché which has had a persistently vigorous life ever since it first came into being.

It is echoed here by the complementary cliché of the woman who chooses the poor hero over the rich wastrel. The woman in the portrait refuses Harold Staines when he challenges her, and throws her lot in with the poor Briseux instead. She thereby loses her comfortable position within the Staines family, and is forced to go back to her (poorer) home.

The Sweetheart of M. Briseux – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Sweetheart of M. Briseux – plot summary

An un-named narrator is looking at paintings in the museum of a French provincial town. The gallery has acquired The Lady with a Yellow Shawl, an impressive work by the best-known local artist, Briseux. The narrator sees a woman in the gallery looking at the picture very intently, and suspects her to be the original subject of the portrait. Later in the day he meets her in the town and she tells him her story, which forms the remainder of the narrative,

She has lived under the protection of Mrs Lucretia Staines, an old friend of her mother. Mrs Staines has a handsome but shiftless son Harold, who decides to become an artist. They all travel to Rome, where he makes copies of old masters. Then he proposes to her, which at first is a delight to her, but then becomes a burden. Mrs Staines however approves the match.

They move on to Paris, where Harold makes copies in the Louvre, The woman delays the marriage, but then challenges him to paint her portrait, after which she promises to settle a date. Harold struggles with the portrait, and one day whilst he is absent from his studio during a sitting, the young painter Briseux appears and denounces the painting as rubbish.

He is hungry and destitute, but very confident about his own talent. She offers to give him money, but instead he finishes off the portrait.

Harold returns and is angry at this interference with his ‘work’: He tells her to leave the studio, but she sees the shabby figure of Briseux as a positive saviour, and that of the handsome Harold as a negative life force. She refuses to move. Harold says she must chose between them: she chooses Briseux, who then finishes off the painting.

She parts from the Staines family and goes back home. Briseux exhibits the picture at the Paris salon and it is deemed a masterpiece which establishes his reputation.

.

The Sweetheart of M. Briseux – principal characters

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Further reading

Biographical

Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

F.W. Dupee, Henry James: Autobiography, Princeton University Press, 1983.

Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, HarperCollins, 1985.

Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

F.O. Matthieson (ed), The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Critical commentary

Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James London: Macmillan Press, 1983.

Ian F.A. Bell, Henry James and the Past, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.

Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993.

Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Views: Henry James, Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (eds), The Wings of the Dove, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.

Victoria Coulson, Henry James, Women and Realism, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Daniel Mark Fogel, A Companion to Henry James Studies, Greenwood Press, 1993.

Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas, Madison (Wis): University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Jonathan Freedman, The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976

Roger Gard (ed), Henry James: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1968.

Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Barbara Hardy, Henry James: The Later Writing (Writers & Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1996.

Richard A. Hocks, Henry James: A study of the short fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Donatella Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009

John Pearson (ed), The Prefaces of Henry James, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Richard Poirer, The Comic Sense of Henry James, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Merle A. Williams, Henry James and the Philosophical Novel, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Judith Woolf, Henry James: The Major Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.

Other works by Henry James

The Bostonians (1886) is a novel about the early feminist movement. The heroine Verena Tarrant is an ‘inspirational speaker’ who is taken under the wing of Olive Chancellor, a man-hating suffragette and radical feminist. Trying to pull her in the opposite direction is Basil Ransom, a vigorous young man from the South to whom Verena becomes more and more attracted. The dramatic contest to possess her is played out with some witty and often rather sardonic touches, and as usual James keeps the reader guessing about the outcome until the very last page.

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

What Masie Knew (1897) A young girl is caught between parents who are in the middle of personal conflict, adultery, and divorce. Can she survive without becoming corrupted? It’s touch and go – and not made easier for the reader by the attentions of an older man who decides to ‘look after’ her. This comes from the beginning of James’s ‘Late Phase’, so be prepared for longer and longer sentences. In fact it’s said that whilst composing this novel, James switched from writing longhand to using dictation – and it shows if you look carefully enough – part way through the book.
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The Ambassadors (1903) Lambert Strether is sent from America to Paris to recall Chadwick Newsome, a young man who is reported to be compromising himself by an entanglement with a wicked woman. However, Strether’s mission fails when he is seduced by the social pleasures of the European capital, and he takes Newsome’s side. So a second ambassador is dispatched in the form of the more determined Sarah Pocock. She delivers an ultimatum which is resisted by the two young men, but then an accident reveals unpleasant truths to Strether, who is faced by a test of loyalty between old Europe and the new USA. This edition presents the latest scholarship on James and includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

© Roy Johnson 2013

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Visits first appeared in Black and White weekly magazine in May 1892 It next appeared in the collection of tales The Private Life published in London by Osgood McIllvaine in 1893.

The Visits – critical commentary

On the face of it this tale is hardly more than a sketch or an anecdote. An elderly woman recounts her meetings with a young girl who is upset because she has revealed her feelings to a handsome young man, and dies of ‘shame’ as a result.

At his excellent web site The Ladder Adrian Dover claims that Henry James is here dealing with an issue which simply cannot be made explicit – because of the prudish nature of nineteenth century society at that period.

In fact so prudish was society that this tale, destined to appear in one of its periodicals, has to be reticent about the facts to the point almost of incomprehensibility. Fear not, as so often in James, the point, or one, at least, of the points, lies in what cannot be named. Louisa Chantry cannot speak of it, Henry James cannot speak of it – even his (surviving) notebooks are silent.

Unfortunately, this argument is undermined somewhat by the fact that Dover himself is unable to say what it is, whilst claiming that it is ‘central to the tale’.

The fact is that Louisa Chantry has only just met the poor (but handsome) nephew Jack Brandon, and has obviously been smitten by him. The narrator and Brandon are both aware of a ‘fever in her blood’ when they are dining at the house. She subsequently reveals her feelings to him openly, in defiance of the protocol that a young woman should not do so to a man.

In fact that seems to be the only possible unspoken feature here – that Louisa Chantry has possibly been sexually aroused by Jack Brandon, and feels overwhelmed by the emotions stirred in her. She says “I said strange things to him”.

It should be remembered that in the nineteenth century it was quite commonly believed that women were incapable of being sexually aroused, as such feelings were regarded as unwomanly and degrading. This might explain the profound sense of shame that Louisa feels. James was certainly a master of concealment, restraint, and understatement, but it does not seem altogether convincing that this was the subject he was trying to suggest here – in which case the mystery remains unresolved.

Narrative

This is yet another of James’s tales which is delivered by an outer-narrator relaying the account of events provided by an inner-narrator. And as is very often the case, the outer-narrator makes no further appearance or intervention after introducing the story. The outer-narrator has heard the story from the inner-narrator and has (slightly improbably) taken notes.

The tale occurs only a few years before James used the most elaborately complicated occurrence of the same narrative strategy for The Turn of the Screw (1898). In that tale there is both an inner and an outer-narrator, and the tale has been hand written by one of the characters (the governess) then given to one of the narrators, who makes a copy of it – which is then read out to an assembled company..

The Visits – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Visits – plot summary

An un-named elderly woman recollects visiting a house in the West Country where she meets Louisa Chantry, the daughter of a woman friend she is about to stay with. Louisa is full of mysterious anxiety, possibly to do with a Jack Brandon, a handsome young man who is the host’s nephew.

The narrator comes across Louisa in the garden, very distraught. Before leaving, Louisa begs the narrator not to tell her mother she has been upset.

The narrator goes on to visit Chantry Court, where Louisa is still upset. She tells the narrator that she is going to die. The girl tells her mother that she has done something bad, but will not reveal what it is. The girl falls ill, and a doctor reveals that she has a weak heart. Subsequent specialists are unable to diagnose anything specific.

Louisa eventually reveals to the narrator that at a recent house party she had revealed her feelings to Jack Brandon, who had acted in a gentlemanly manner towards her, though rejecting her advances. Shortly after making this revelation, she dies.

Principal characters

Further reading

Biographical

Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

F.W. Dupee, Henry James: Autobiography, Princeton University Press, 1983.

Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, HarperCollins, 1985.

Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

F.O. Matthieson (ed), The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Critical commentary

Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James London: Macmillan Press, 1983.

Ian F.A. Bell, Henry James and the Past, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.

Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993.

Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Views: Henry James, Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (eds), The Wings of the Dove, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.

Victoria Coulson, Henry James, Women and Realism, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Daniel Mark Fogel, A Companion to Henry James Studies, Greenwood Press, 1993.

Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas, Madison (Wis): University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Jonathan Freedman, The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976

Roger Gard (ed), Henry James: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1968.

Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Barbara Hardy, Henry James: The Later Writing (Writers & Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1996.

Richard A. Hocks, Henry James: A study of the short fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Donatella Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009

John Pearson (ed), The Prefaces of Henry James, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Richard Poirer, The Comic Sense of Henry James, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Merle A. Williams, Henry James and the Philosophical Novel, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Judith Woolf, Henry James: The Major Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.

Other works by Henry James

Daisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Daisy’s innocence and her audacity challenge social conventions, and she seems to be compromising her reputation by her independent behaviour. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. This novella is a great study in understatement and symbolic power.
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The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

The Ambassadors (1903) Lambert Strether is sent from America to Paris to recall Chadwick Newsome, a young man who is reported to be compromising himself by an entanglement with a wicked woman. However, Strether’s mission fails when he is seduced by the social pleasures of the European capital, and he takes Newsome’s side. So a second ambassador is dispatched in the form of the more determined Sarah Pocock. She delivers an ultimatum which is resisted by the two young men, but then an accident reveals unpleasant truths to Strether, who is faced by a test of loyalty between old Europe and the new USA. This edition presents the latest scholarship on James and includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

© Roy Johnson 2013

tutorial, commentary, synopsis, and study resources

The Wheel of Time (1892) first appeared in Cosmopolitan Magazine in December 1892 and January 1893. It later appeared in the collection of Henry James stories published by Osgood, McIlvaine later the same year. The other stories in the volume were The Private Life, Lord Beaupre, The Visits, Collaboration, and Owen Wingrave.

The Wheel of Time – critical commentary

The main point of interest in this story is the twinning, inversions, and parallels which are drawn between the two generations – together with the ironic reversal of Fanny’s appearance and Maurice’s reaction to her.

The young Maurice cannot bring himself to propose marriage, despite his mother’s encouragement, to the rich but plain Fanny Knocker – so he escapes the social expectations being made of him by fleeing abroad. Fanny falls seriously ill in a manner which suggests lovesickness.

Later, the older Maurice has a plain daughter of his own. The roles are reversed. He would like to marry off the plain Vera to Fanny’s handsome son Arthur – thus ‘correcting’ the mistake he now feels he has made regarding Fanny. But Arthur behaves in the same way – fleeing abroad rather than marrying a plain woman. Vera too falls ill, but she actually dies.

Fanny’s miraculous transformation from a plain young woman to spectacular mature beauty causes Maurice serious pangs of regret – so much so that he ends up reproaching her for not giving him sufficient warning when they first met. It is not quite clear from the text if this is to be taken as a faintly comic reaction or a more serious example of his essential egoism.

Eugene Onegin

This story is Henry James’s variation of Pushkin’s famous novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, but with an added twist. The centre of Pushkin’s narrative is that an unsophisticated country girl, Tatyana, falls in love with the romantic but bored hero, Onegin. She writes a letter declaring her feelings to him – to which he doesn’t even reply. Later he coldly rejects her, and makes matters worse by flirting with her sister.

Several years later Onegin meets Tatyana again at a ball in St Petersburg. She is now transformed into a mature and confident society beauty – completely unlike her younger self. Onegin becomes obsessed with her, even though she is now married to an ageing prince. He writes her several letters – to which she doe not reply. Eventually he confronts her and pleads to resume their former relationship. She admits that she still loves him, but refuses to be unfaithful to her husband. He is left bitterly regretting his lost opportunity.

The Wheel of Time – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Complete Tales of Henry James – Volume 8 – Digireads reprint – UK

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle eBook edition

The Wheel of Time – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Wheel of Time- principal characters

The Wheel of Time – plot summary

Part I.   General Knocker and his wife Jane have recently inherited money, and are on their way back from India to England. In Paris, Jane Knocker meets her old friend Lady Greyswood and seeks her help to find a husband for Fanny, her plain daughter.

A year later Lady Greyswood suggests the rich Fanny as a suitable match to her untalented but handsome son Maurice. He rejects the idea because Fanny is so plain: he wants an attractive wife. Lady Greyswood thinks it will be prudent to let the idea mature. However, when she invites the Knockers to dinner, Jane feigns a headache and sends Fanny in her place, so that she will meet Maurice. Following this, further social meetings take place.

Part II.   The two mothers plot and negotiate. Maurice has no money and no prospects, but is very handsome: Fanny is rich but plain. Lady Greyswood tries again to persuade Maurice to take an interest in Fanny, even revealing that Fanny is in love with him. He still rejects the idea because he thinks that Fanny is ‘awful’.

Lady Greyswood lies about Maurice’s feelings to Jane Knocker and tries to promote further meetings between the two younger people. Maurice then makes an effort to socialise with Fanny for the sake of his mother. He admits that she has talents, but eventually bolts for France when he cannot pretend any more. Fanny is taken ill – with the implication that she is sick with love for Maurice.

Part III.   Twenty years later Maurice is now a widower and is almost fifty years old. He has brought his daughter Vera to England to help launch her in society. But she is short and plain, and something of a disappointment to him. At a lunch party Vera meets a charming young man, and they all witness the unveiling of a portrait painting of a very beautiful woman, his mother, who turns out to be Fanny Knocker, now Mrs Trejant. The boy Arthur offers to introduce Maurice and Vera to his mother. Maurice reveals to Vera that the woman is an old friend.

Part IV.   Maurice waits impatiently for a dinner engagement with Mrs Trejant. He goes to see the portrait again and learns that she is popular, handsome, and is now a widow. He pays her a visit and is astonished to find that she is almost a different person than the one he knew. They compare notes about their respective lives, and are very amicable with each other. He asks her about the old agreement between their mothers – but she feigns ignorance.

Part V.   Maurice goes to see Mrs Trejant every day and feels he has never met such an interesting woman. She accommodates him warmly, but they do not discuss the nature of their previous relationship. Mrs Trejant takes an enthusiastic and protective interest in Vera. Her son Arthur suddenly goes to Ireland, and Maurice reflects on the similarities in their behaviour – bolting before the prospect of marrying a plain girl. Arthur however has good prospects, both financial and social.

Maurice patronisingly reproaches Mrs Trejant for not having warned him (a quarter of a century before) that she would not always be plain. Eventually, he convinces himself that she has always been in love with him, and that she now has a chance to show it.

Part VI.   Maurice realises that he is in love with Mrs Trejant. He arranges a formal dinner, and after everyone else has gone he asks her to marry him. But she refuses, and instead takes Vera to her estate in Derbyshire for six months. Maurice goes abroad alone, hoping that their two children will find the happiness that he and Fanny once missed.

But in Paris he bumps into Arthur, who is bolting from Derbyshire to Spain. Maurice goes to Derbyshire to find Mrs Trejant distraught with the failure of her plans, and Vera is critically ill. Like Fanny, she does recover, but a year later she dies in Rome.

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

F.W. Dupee, Henry James: Autobiography, Princeton University Press, 1983.

Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, HarperCollins, 1985.

Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

F.O. Matthieson (ed), The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Critical commentary

Ian F.A. Bell, Henry James and the Past, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.

Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993.

Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Views: Henry James, Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

Daniel Mark Fogel, A Companion to Henry James Studies, Greenwood Press, 1993.

Jonathan Freedman, The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Roger Gard (ed), Henry James: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1968.

Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Richard A. Hocks, Henry James: A study of the short fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009

John Pearson (ed), The Prefaces of Henry James, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Richard Poirer, The Comic Sense of Henry James, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.

Other works by Henry James

Washington Square (1880) is a superb early short novel, It’s the tale of a young girl whose future happiness is being controlled by her strict authoritarian (but rather witty) father. She is rather reserved, but has a handsome young suitor. However, her father disapproves of him, seeing him as an opportunist and a fortune hunter. There is a battle of wills – all conducted within the confines of their elegant New York town house. Who wins out in the end? You will probably be surprised by the outcome. This is a masterpiece of social commentary, offering a sensitive picture of a young woman’s life.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

© Roy Johnson 2013

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Theodolinde was first published in Lippincott’s Magazine in May 1878. Its next appearance in book form was as part of the collection Stories Revived, published in three volumes by Macmillan in London in 1885. It was later given the title Rose-Agathe.

Paris shop window

Theodolinde – critical commentary

This tale is not much more than an over-extended joke – the point of which is clearly visible from very near the beginning of the story. James can perhaps be forgiven, since the piece was written early in his career, at a time when he was writing what he himself regarded as pot-boilers for popular magazines.

Having said that, He had already produced tales such as Gabrielle de Bergerac (1869)and The Madonna of the Future (1873) which whilst not at the same level of achievement as late masterpieces such as The Altar of the Dead (1895) and The Beast in the Jungle (1903) show a serious and restrained side of James which seems hard to reconcile with the almost farcical premise of Theodolinde.

Theodolinde – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Theodolinde – plot summary

An un-named American narrator waits on his first floor Paris lodgings for his friend Sanguinetti, who is late arriving for dinner. The narrator admires the pretty wife of the hairdresser in a shop opposite. When Sanguinetti arrives in the street he too pauses to stare admiringly in the hairdresser’s window.

Over dinner they agree that the woman is a ‘Madonna’ type . Sanguinetti is from a family of Italian immigrants dealing in artistic objects, which he himself collects. He says his objective is to visit the shop, make a favourable impression. then offer money for the woman.

Next day the narrator visits the shop, but is served by a less attractive assistant. Sanguinetti then visits the shop and reports to the narrator that he has spoken to the hairdresser’s wife, and that he is completely in love.

Sanguinetti continues to mount his campaign, much to the amusement of the narrator, who chaffs him about his obsession. Sanguinetti starts to buy presents for his love object, though he buys imitation rather than real jewels.

The narrator notices that the jewels appear on the heads of the models in the hairdresser’s window. Sanguinetti arrives to say that he has succeeded in his plan. But when the narrator goes to Sanguinetti’s apartments, it is the shop window model Sanguinetti has fallen in love with and bought.

Theodolinde – principal characters

Further reading

Biographical

Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

F.W. Dupee, Henry James: Autobiography, Princeton University Press, 1983.

Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, HarperCollins, 1985.

Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

F.O. Matthieson (ed), The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Critical commentary

Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James London: Macmillan Press, 1983.

Ian F.A. Bell, Henry James and the Past, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.

Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993.

Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Views: Henry James, Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (eds), The Wings of the Dove, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.

Victoria Coulson, Henry James, Women and Realism, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Daniel Mark Fogel, A Companion to Henry James Studies, Greenwood Press, 1993.

Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas, Madison (Wis): University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Jonathan Freedman, The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976

Roger Gard (ed), Henry James: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1968.

Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Barbara Hardy, Henry James: The Later Writing (Writers & Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1996.

Richard A. Hocks, Henry James: A study of the short fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Donatella Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009

John Pearson (ed), The Prefaces of Henry James, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Richard Poirer, The Comic Sense of Henry James, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Merle A. Williams, Henry James and the Philosophical Novel, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Judith Woolf, Henry James: The Major Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.

Other works by Henry James

Washington Square (1880) is a superb early short novel, It’s the tale of a young girl whose future happiness is being controlled by her strict authoritarian (but rather witty) father. She is rather reserved, but has a handsome young suitor. However, her father disapproves of him, seeing him as an opportunist and a fortune hunter. There is a battle of wills – all conducted within the confines of their elegant New York town house. Who wins out in the end? You will probably be surprised by the outcome. This is a masterpiece of social commentary, offering a sensitive picture of a young woman’s life.
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The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
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The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
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Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

© Roy Johnson 2013