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

Crawford’s Consistency first appeared in magazine form in Scribner’s Monthly for August 1876. Featured in the same issue were stories by popular American writer Bret Harte and Anglo-American novelist Frances Hodgson Burnett (who was born in Manchester) as well as a story The Living Mummy by Ivan Turgenev.

Crawford’s Consistency – critical commentary

This is one of the many tales by Henry James which explores the ‘dangers’ of marriage. In fact of all the cautionary studies he produced on the subject, this is possibly the most virulent and dramatic. James gave repeated thought to the matter on his own behalf, but always came down on the side of remaining a bachelor.

Crawford is a character who has everything, but ends up with nothing. At the outset of the tale he is popular, wealthy, and single by conviction. He has rationalised his state of being, and has no reason to change.

But then he is smitten by a woman’s good looks. Elizabeth Ingram is pretty – but cold and unresponsive. Nevertheless, he is desperately in love with her surface charm – and is rewarded by being suddenly rejected, almost with no reason. Only later do we learn that the reason is financial caution on her mother’s part and preference for a wealthier suitor.

In fact it is interesting to note that she is later disfigured – so even if the marriage had gone ahead, Crawford would have ended up with the loss of the very thing he had chosen – a pretty woman.

But there is worse to come. He repeats the same mistake by giving way to an impulsive and very superficial attraction. And true to the formula, the woman who becomes Mrs Crawford is interested only in his money. He generously gives her more than half his wealth, and even when that evaporates due to the bank’s collapse, he feels obliged to give her what he has left, because he wishes to honour his original offer of support through marriage.

If these warnings again the possible dangers of marriage were not enough, James then underscores (and possibly overplays) his message by having this vulgar termagant become an alcoholic .with violent tendencies. Having already impoverished him, she then renders Crawford a cripple and makes his life a misery for another decade before expiring – leaving him with nothing but his ‘consistent’ temperament.

To quote the much-used adage, you do not need a brass plaque on your front door to realise that this reveals a profound psychological mistrust of women (to put it mildly) on James’s part. Crawford may have retained ‘consistency’ throughout his ordeals, but the lessons James offers here are that to remain single is a state of potential bliss, whereas the experience of giving way to heterosexual impulses leads to humiliation, rejection, disappointment, misery, personal injury, and financial ruin.

Crawford’s Consistency – 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

Crawford’s Consistency – Paperback edition

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Crawford’s Consistency – plot summary

The narrator’s friend Crawford is a wealthy, personable, and eligible bachelor who has made it a personal philosophy to avoid marriage. But when he meets the beautiful Elizabeth Ingram he falls in love with her and immediately proposes. Her strict mother thinks that Crawford isn’t really rich enough, but he is eventually accepted by the family. He immediately becomes abundantly happy, and reverses all his previous opinions on the subject of marriage.

However, when the narrator goes to present his good wishes to the Ingrams, they reveal that they have suddenly broken off the engagement. Crawford arrives and is shocked at this news. He demands to speak to Elizabeth. She tells him that she does not love him any more. Crawford is mortified by the insult and the emotional blow. There is widespread social sympathy for him, and the Ingrams go off early to spend the summer in Newport under public disapprobation.

Subsequently, Crawford meets a woman in a park to whom he is instantly attracted, even though she is rather commonplace. The narrator reflects wistfully on the frailty of human nature, which can be so inconsistent. Later in the summer he discovers that Crawford has actually married the woman, who is even more vulgar that she appeared at first. The two men remain friends, but the marriage is never discussed between them. Crawford throws a lavish party which attracts the curiosity of all his friends, but they are shocked by the obvious vulgarity of his wife.

Elizabeth Ingram meanwhile becomes engaged to a rich southern plantation owner. Then suddenly the narrator receives news that Crawford’s bank has gone into liquidation, wiping out his fortune. The signs of this collapse were visible to the initiated six months previously, and the narrator suspects that this might have been the reason for the Ingrams’ sudden decision – because Mrs Ingram keeps a close watch on the financial markets. The new Mrs Crawford is incandescent with rage and disappointment, and Crawford asks the narrator not to visit him at home any more, to spear them both embarrassment.

Crawford goes to live on one floor of a small house and gets a job as a clerk. He feels obliged to give his vulgar wife all his remaining money. The two friends meet in public at weekends. It is reported that Elizabeth Ingram gets small-pox and is horribly disfigured by the disease – at which her fiancé cancels their engagement and goes back to Alabama.

Mrs Crawford turns to drink, and Crawford has long bouts of depression. His wife then pushes him down a flight of steps, causing him to fracture his knee, which renders him lame. He endures misery and poverty for another ten years, until finally Mrs Crawford dies of delirium tremens.

Principal characters

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

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 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.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at 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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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.

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

De Grey: A Romance first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly for July 1868. It was not reprinted during James’s lifetime, and next appeared in the collection Travelling Companions published in New York by Boni and Liveright in 1919.

De Grey – critical commentary

This tale is not much more than a sentimental anecdote, told in very general terms with very little attempt to provide concrete historical detail or even a realistic setting. James was only twenty-five years old and in his apprenticeship phase, writing for popular magazines such as The Galaxy. Even he seemed to be aware of the shortcomings in his work at that time:

I write little & only tales, which I think it likely I shall continue to manufacture in a hackish manner, for that which is bread. They cannot of necessity be very good; but they shall not be very bad.

The only points of interest in this particular tale are buried deep within its chronology. Mr De Grey has been great friends with Father Herbert, but they quarrelled – possibly ‘over a woman’. There is also an implication that Mr De Grey’s life had been ‘blighted by an unhappy love affair’ with the woman in the small portrait who died thirty-four year previously. “George De Grey met and loved, September 1786, Antonietta Gambini, of Milan”. This is the same period in which De Grey travelled in Italy with his close friend Herbert, so Miss Gambini might be the woman over whom they quarrelled.

Both Paul and his father appear to be victims of the family curse: their first loves die (both Italian girls). Whilst touring Europe Paul formed a relationship with Miss L, who died in Naples – so Paul is following in the family tradition. But then Paul’s father dies within one year of marrying Paul’s mother, and Paul dies shortly before his marriage to Margaret.

It is interesting to note that if Mrs De Grey is sixty-seven and Paul is (say) in his twenties, he was conceived when she was in her early forties.. And yet Mr De Grey dies (from ‘repeated sensual excesses’) by the time he is thirty-five, and he must therefore have been much younger than his wife.

De Grey: A Romance – 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

De Grey: A Romance – see the original text

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

De Grey: A Romance – plot summary

Mrs De Grey is a rich sixty-seven year old widow who lives a socially isolated life. Her catholic priest Father Herbert is tutor to her son Paul, who has no profession or ambition but is idolised by his mother. Whilst Paul is away touring Europe Mrs De Grey begins to feel lonely. She takes a poor girl Margaret Aldis as a companion, who blossoms under her patronage. Father Herbert is deeply smitten with the girl.

Margaret becomes enchanted by the very idea of Paul. She reads his letters to Mrs De Grey, closely watched by Father Herbert. Paul writes telling them that his engagement to an Italian girl has been broken off, and the girl later dies.

When Paul returns everyone is very impressed with his development. Paul and Margaret spend a lot of time together, talking about each other’s lives, and eventually falling in love. However, Father Herbert reveals to her that the family has a long tradition of male heirs forming relationships with women who die within a year. Margaret decides to defy the curse, throwing herself enthusiastically into preparations for the marriage.

But one day she suddenly collapses in pain. She recovers, but then Paul falls ill. She feels as if she is taking her life from him. He goes out riding and falls from his horse. Margaret finds him, and he admits that she is killing him. He dies, and she becomes distracted.

De Grey – 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.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013

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.

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

Eugene Pickering first appeared in magazine form in The Atlantic Monthly for October—November 1874. Stories by popular writers William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Oliver Wendell Holmes appeared in the same magazine, as well as poetry by Bret Harte and Henry W, Longfellow, The tale was then reprinted in book form amongst A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales the following year.

Bad Homburg – Germany

Eugene Pickering – critical commentary

Eugene is not only naive in the ways of the world, having been isolated and cosseted by his father for twenty-seven years, but he is also symbolically short-sighted. He is unable to ‘see’ Madam Blumenthal as the rogue female seductress. She is glamorous, experienced, bohemian, an author, and (according to Niedermeyer) something of an adventuress. What this tale represents then is yet another warning to men about the dangers of forming romantic relationships with women.

Reinforcing this ‘fear of engagement’ element in the first part of the story is the pre-arranged contract of marriage which has been created by Pickering’s father. Eugene Eugene refuses to open the letter (thinking it is a summons to the altar) and wishes to ‘live’ freely before he submits himself to what he clearly sees as the negative experience of Matrimony. This ‘fear of marriage’ motif is a theme to which James turned again and again in his tales – from The Path of Duty to Owen Wingrave

Eugene Pickering – 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

Eugene Pickering – Kindle edition

Eugene Pickering – Paperback edition – Amazon UK

Eugene Pickering – eBook versions at Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Eugene Pickering – plot summary

Part I   At Bad Homburg in Germany an un-named narrator sees an old acquaintance Eugene Pickering rather shyly gambling at the tables with an attractive woman who wins money. The two men meet next day, and the narrator recalls how they were schoolboy friends. Pickering has been sheltered and cosseted by an over-protective father who has recently died. He now feels liberated and full of potential, but lacking in strength.

Shortly before his death, his father has made him promise to marry Isabel Vernon, the daughter of an old business associate – a promise he feels obliged to honour. He has received a letter he has not opened, believing it to be a summons to the altar: he asks the narrator to keep it for him for a month whilst he explores his desire to live freely. He also reveals that he has an appointment to meet the glamorous Madam Blumenthal. The narrator advises him to leave Homburg immediately, but he refuses. The next day Pickering has been bowled over with enthusiasm for Madam Blumenthal and feels he has dispelled all his previous diffidence.

Part II   The narrator’s friend Niedermeyer warns him against Madam Blumenthal, saying that she is bohemian, raffish, is critical of marriage, and has been left with little money by her deceased husband. He recounts the story of a strict officer who fell in love with her , but was rejected when he asked her to give up writing novels. She claimed motives of pure art, flings her manuscript into the fire, but publishes it shortly afterwards nevertheless.

The narrator meets her at a concert and finds her very attractive. She claims to be a democrat and a ‘revolutionist’. She asks him to tell her all about Pickering. The narrator realises that Pickering is hopelessly in love with her. He has made a full declaration of love to her, but she says she will respond to him after he has more experience of life and women.

The narrator visits Madam Blumenthal in order to assess her motives and her sincerity. She asks him again about Pickering, because she fears that he is holding something back. The ‘something’ is his engagement to Isabel Vernon, which the narrator then reveals to Madam Blumenthal.

When the two men meet next day, Pickering reveals that he has renounced the promise made to his father, has told Madam Blumenthal about it, and asked her to marry him. She wants three days to decide, and goes to Wiesbaden. Niedermeyer predicts that she will turn the episode into a little romance and then drop Pickering. But Pickering sends a note from Wiesbaden saying that she has accepted him

Some days later however, the narrator visits Pickering in Cologne, where he reveals that Madam Blumenthal has gone back on her word. She was merely testing him to see how far he would go. The narrator then returns the sealed letter he has been keeping for Pickering. It turns out not to be a summons but a dismissal: the girl refused to be bound by her father’s arrangement.

The two men then travel on in Europe, Pickering recovers his spirits, and when they finally reach Venice he is planning to visit Isabel in Smyrna. Six months later he reports that she is a very charming woman.

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.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at 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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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.

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

Europe first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine for June 1899, and later the following year in the collection of stories The Soft Side published by Methuen.

Europe – critical commentary

This is a black comedy, in a somewhat similar spirit to James’s earlier story Four Meetings (1877) where the magnetic draw of European culture for Americans proves to be beyond the reach of Caroline Spencer, a New England schoolteacher. In her case she is defrauded of her life’s dream by her unscrupulous cousin.

Here too there is a family connection – but one much closer, of mother and daughters. Old Mrs Rimmel has had a successful earlier life with her celebrated husband, enjoyed her own European tour, and only had her three daughters late in life.

Now the implication is that the puritanical sense of duty that rules in their Boston household grinds the lives of the daughters into prematurely aged drudges, attending to the needs of their increasingly disoriented mother.

Europe as symbol

Europe functions as an idea, a dream of cultural riches – perhaps like some atavistic draw for the American descendents of European settlers for what might be, what could be. Certainly as someone who had lived on both contents throughout his life, James was very conscious of the European—American polarity and what it meant for both groups of people, and he frequently contrasted Europe with all types of Americans – sophisticated New Yorkers, puritannical Bostonians, gentlemanly southerners, and robust Californians.

The more suave New York narrator is able to pass between the two continents with ease, whereas the group of four Bostonian ladies are locked in an ethos of self-denying austerity. This is a strain of American culture which James had explored in greater depth before in works such as The Bostonians.

It is emphasised that the Rimmels are typical New Englanders – old Puritan stock – whereas the narrator is from New York. They have become trapped in a life-denying cycle of emotional inter-dependency. The narrator is particularly scathing about the old woman’s psychological grip on her daughters. She has had the pleasures and benefits of a European tour of her own when (much) younger, but is denying them the chance of the same experience. Only one of her daughters is able to make the break – and she never goes back

Europe – study resources

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

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

Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

Europe – HTML New York edition

Europe – HTML version at Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Europe – plot summary

Part I. After many years living in Boston as spinster ladies, Becky and Jane Rimmel are finally due to visit Europe, leaving their elderly widowed mother to be looked after by their sister Maria. Old Mrs Rimmel visited Europe many years before (in the early nineteenth century, it would seem) and the continent has been held up to the three daughters ever since as a sort of cultural Nirvanah. The ‘girls’ (who are in fact elderly) tease the story’s narrator about his knowledge of Europe and discuss the possibility of meeting up there.

Part II. However, just before their departure, their mother has a seizure, and the trip is postponed. The narrator discusses Mrs Rimmel’s immense age with his sister-in-law who is a friend of the family. Years pass by in which the narrator himself twice visits Europe, which the Rimmels claim is ‘waiting’ for them. The narrator feels angry that the three sisters are growing old, and that their mother is selfishly denying them valuable life experiences. Then suddenly Jane, the youngest daughter makes the break and travels to Europe with some friends the Hathaways. Old Mrs Rimmel begins to lose sense of time.

Part III. The Hathaways return from the European tour later that year – but they have left Jane behind, because she insists on seeing more of Europe. She has become self-assertive and rebellious, refuses to be chaperoned, and has taken to ‘flirting’. Her sister Becky is supporting her financially. The narrator is delighted by what he sees as the development of the sisters’ potential. When the narrator next visits Boston he is amazed to find Becky at his sister-in-law’s house, looking as old as her mother. He opines that Jane will never return from Europe, and Becky tells him that their mother is no longer alive.

Part IV. But when the narrator visits their home next day old Mrs Rimmel is corpse-like, but still living. She has persuaded herself that Jane has died in Europe. Becky then dies, having worn herself out with looking after her mother. The narrator visits the house again and finds Maria looking even older than her mother. She ruefully observes that she will now never visit Europe. Then old Mrs Rimmel, in what appears to be her last gasp of life, announces that Becky has gone to Europe – and the narrator agrees with her.

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

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 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.

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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.
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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

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

Gabrielle de Bergerac first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly over three issues, between July and September 1869. Its next appearance in book form was when published by Boni and Liveright in New York, 1919.

Bergerac – the old town

Gabrielle de Bergerac – critical commentary

This is a story from the early part of James’s oeuvre as a writer of stories – or ‘tales’ as he preferred to call them. It is serious, well orchestrated, and deals with some serious political issues as part of its narrative. But it is a story clearly not composed from any elements of personal experience, so much as reading and the world of the active imagination. It has a distinctly Balzacian flavour beneath the rather more romantic story of a vulnerable young woman under siege from an unwanted suitor

It is also, rather unusually for James, set roughly a century prior to its composition, and contains many elements of political and social history. The most striking element of course is the materialist and almost Marxist interpretation of the ruined chateau at Fossy given by Coquelin. He is aware of its former splendour, but realises the social cost at which it has been built and maintained – on the labours of people of the lower classes to which he belongs.

It is his passionate articulation of these beliefs that wins over Gabrielle to admire him so much – even though on the occasion of their visit she presents a different, more romantic interpretation. But she has the honesty to later reveal that she didn’t really believe the case she was making.

And if the story has certain romantic elements – the poor but brave hero; the scheming villain; the vulnerable motherless heroine; the dramatic confrontation in Coquelin’s room – it certainly doesn’t have a romantic outcome. The hero and heroine do eventually marry, but they lose their children in straightened social circumstances in Paris, and are then both executed as Girondistes as part of the revolution.

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

Gabrielle de Bergerac – read the text of the story on line

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Gabrielle de Bergerac – plot summary

Part I.   The outer narrator receives a painting in lieu of a debt from Baron de Bergerac. It is a portrait of his aunt, who was executed during the French revolution. The Baron recounts his family history, mainly from the point of view of his childhood – which forms the remainder of the narrative.

When he is a child (‘the Chevalier’) the Baron’s father appoints Pierre Coquelin as his tutor. Coquelin is a poor would-be writer who has fought in the French colonies in America and been wounded. He is a follower of Rousseau, and teaches the boy Greek and Roman classics.

The father also has a scheme to marry a somewhat dissolute family friend Viscount Gaston de Treuil to his sister Gabrielle, because neither of them have any money, and it will save the expense of her becoming a spinster, financially dependent on the family. Gabrielle has lived a very sheltered life, but she is attracted to Coquelin who is younger and more romantic than the Viscount.

She is told that the Viscount is waiting to inherit money from an elderly relative before he proposes marriage to her, but he does propose before leaving to curry favour with the relative. The offer of marriage is expressed in a patronising manner, full of self-aggrandisement. Her response is noncommittal. He promises to return in three months with more money. Afterwards they visit Coquelin in his cottage where he shows them some sketches, including a portrait of Gabrielle. She agrees to ‘wait’ for three months before deciding on the Viscount’s offer.

Part II.   The summer period is a countryside idyll for the boy and his tutorOne day they come across Gabrielle and her friend in the house of a dying peasant. The boy realises that Coquelin is in love with his aunt. The tree of them visit a ruined chateau in the region. Coquelin takes a materialist and class-conscious view of its history, whereas Gabrielle argues for a romantic view of its past glories. Then Coquelin climbs to the highest point of the building (at great personal risk) and has difficulty getting down again.

Part III.   Back home, the boy imitates his tutor’s daring, and ends up falling in a river. He becomes ill, and whilst recovering overhears his aunt Gabrielle and Coquelin talk about their love for each other. The relationship is made problematic by their differences in social class. It becomes apparent that she has been deeply moved by his class critique of the ruined chateau, and didn’t really believe in her own argument. Coquelin knows that she is supposed to be ‘waiting’ for the Viscount’s return – though she says she will never marry him. In fact she feels that she cannot marry anyone – so Coquelin decides to leave.

The Viscount arrives, having inherited from his now-deceased relative. But Gabrielle refuses his offer – much to her brother’s anger. The Baron and the Viscount get the story of what has happened out of the young boy, who immediately tells his aunt. They go to the cottage where Coquelin is preparing to leave. The Baron and the Viscount arrive, and there is a violent show down, during which the Viscount attacks Gabrielle with his sword. She immediately reverses her decision of renunciation and announces that she will leave with Coquelin.

The aftermath of the story is that Gabrielle and Coquelin were married, had children (who died) and lived off his painting and writing in Paris. But during the revolution, they were both executed as Girondists

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

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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Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013

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.

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

Georgina’s Reasons first appeared in serial form in the New York newspaper The Sun for July—August 1884. This was a serious newspaper which ranked alongside the more famous broadsheets The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. The story was then reprinted in book form amongst Stories Revived published in England and America in 1885.

Georgina’s Reasons – critical commentary

There only seem to be three points to be made about this tale. The first is obvious and explicit; the second less so; and the third only emerges in the light of reading James’s other stories with a similar theme.

The first is that whatever Georgina’s reasons are, she keeps them to herself. Obviously she is wilful and defiant towards her parents. She disobeys them and thwarts their ambitions. But she gains nothing from marrying Raymond in secret then going back to live at home. She has not gained any independence.

Obviously she deceives Raymond, mistreats him, and behaves even more outrageously towards her own child. Then – although we are not shown how she does it – she claws her way into higher society via a bigamous marriage to Mr Roy.

In other words she is a completely unscrupulous status seeker with no moral framework other than rampant self-interest and a total disregard for the feelings of others. She is like the precursor of an ambitious bitch from some television soap opera.

In contrast (the second point) Raymond Benyon appears to be the model of high-principled moral integrity. He agrees to keep their marriage secret, despite having no earthly motive for doing so. And he sticks to this absurd agreement even when attractive alternatives are on offer.

But is he so honourable? He realises that because he is technically married, he ought not to become entangled with unmarried women, but he does so nevertheless. So far, so understandable. But then he cannot bring himself to explain to Kate Theory why he is so reluctant to develop their relationship – and at the end of the tale he makes quite a cruel suggestion that they ‘wait’ before marrying – at the same time as applying for another commission at sea.

His excuse to himself is that the ‘wait’ is only until the death of his wife, to whom he is still legally married. But she is only thirty years old at the time. He is prevaricating wimpishly at the expense of Kate’s feelings for him.

If these two observations are put together, they form the basis for the third point of argument – that this story is yet another of the many James wrote which offer a cautionary tale against emotional entanglements with women, and the perilous consequences of being married. Read alongside other tales such as Benvolio, , and The Path of Duty there is every reason to believe that James was giving expression (whether consciously or unconsciously) to the dilemma he faced in his own relations with women, marriage, and sexuality. He would not resolve this dilemma until quite late in his own life.

Geotgina’s Reasons – study resources

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

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

Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon US

Georgina’s Reasons – paperback edition – Amazon UK

Georgina’s Reasons – paperback edition [$5.84] Amazon US

Georgina’s Reasons – Kindle edition

Georgina’s Reasons – eBook formats at Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Georgina’s Reasons – plot summary

Part I.   Georgina Gressie causes distress to her successful family when she announces that she wishes to marry Raymond Benyon, a humble lieutenant in the navy. She acts in a contradictory manner with Raymond, and argues that they should see less of each other, but marry as quickly as possible. She argues for marrying in secret and continuing to live with her parents.

Part II.   Georgina announces to Mrs Portico that she has been married for a year, and wishes to go to Europe. She has pretended to her family that her relationship with Raymond Benyon is over. He is away at sea, and she is pregnant. She has sworn Raymond to permanent secrecy regarding their marriage. Mrs Portico suggests that she should tell her parents, but Georgina refuses indignantly.

Part III.   However, Mrs Portico consents to the trip and they go to Genoa, where Georgina gives birth to a son, who she immediately gives away to an Italian surrogate mother. Mrs Portico feels guilty about conspiring in this sort of conduct, and thinks of adopting the child herself. She is increasingly critical of Georgina, and secretly writes to Raymond to tell him about his son, offering to bring him up herself. However, shortly afterwards she dies of malarial fever. Georgina returns to New York.

Part IV.   Ten years later Kate Theory is looking after her consumptive sister Mildred in Naples. They have been visited by Captain Benyon, who Kate thinks has a ‘lost love’ in his past. His commodore has left him in charge of the Louisiana whilst away. They have met via the US consul, and Raymond is attracted to them, despite his self-imposed rule of staying away from unmarried women.

Mildred reveals privately to Raymond their fear that they will not like their brother’s wife Agnes, who is due to visit. Raymond also worries that Mildred seems to be pushing her sister Kate at him, because he is falling for her despite himself. He leaves abruptly, and when Kate returns she is devastated.

Part V.   Ten days later Raymond has admitted to himself that he is in love with Kate, but feels he must renounce their relationship because technically he is still married. Agnes Theory has turned out to be an empty-headed bore. Raymond half declares himself to Kate, and then is shown a portrait of Georgina, who has married a rich New York businessman. He thinks back in great anger about the manner in which Georgina has deceived him, particularly with regard to their child, for whom he has searched, fruitlessly. He now feels that Georgina has put herself within his power.

Part VI.   Back in New York, Raymond visits Georgina and finds her beautiful and completely unrepentant. He wants a divorce, but she refuses. Instead she introduces him to her husband Mr Roy. Raymond could reveal her bigamous status, but doesn’t. She sends him off with the suggestion that he should marry again without getting a divorce. He feels constrained by the promise he originally made to her, and cannot find a way out of this dilemma. Finally, he decides to renounce Kate. He tells her they must wait to get married and asks the navy for a new commission.

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 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.

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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.
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© Roy Johnson 2013

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.