tutorial, commentary, web links, and study resources

Osborne’s Revenge first appeared in The Galaxy magazine for July 1868. Its next appearance was many years later as part of Eight Uncollected Tales of Henry James published by Rutgers University Press in 1950.

Newport Rhode Island – 19th century

Osborne’s Revenge – plot summary

Part I.   Philip Osborne’s friend Robert Graham has fallen in love with Henrietta Congreve who then rejected him for someone else. To take his mind off the pain of rejectionOsborne sends him on a business errand to Minnesota, but when he gets there Graham shoots himself. Osborne is very distressed by the loss of his close friend, and he feels that Henrietta ought to be taught a lesson for what she has done. He follows her to Newport for the summer holidays.

Part II.   Osborne rescues Henrietta’s nephew from a rock on the shore, and thereby meets Henrietta, who he finds very charming, despite the nature of his mission to avenge Graham’s hurt feelings. Yet he somehow feels that his friend is more of a positive presence than he was when alive. Osborne is enjoying his holiday, and he drops his plan of revenge.

He sees Henrietta acting successfully in a play she has herself translated from the French. Then he meets her on a boating party outing, and finally broaches the subject of his friend Graham. Henrietta asks him not to talk about the subject, and Osborne returns to feeling hostile towards her. He discusses her talents with an admirer Reverend Stone. He tries once again to engage Henrietta on the subject of Graham, but she rebuffs him.

Part III.   Mrs Dodd arrives at Newport, supporting the cause for Graham’s memory – but Osborne finds her silly. However, she guesses correctly that Osborne is infatuated with Henrietta. Osborne feels deeply conflicted, torn between loyalty to his dead friend and his accelerating appreciation of Henrietta’s talents and virtues. He nevertheless believes that he is attracting Henrietta with a view to rejecting her as a punishment for what she did to Graham. Hoping to make her jealous, h acquires a photograph of a pretty girl he doesn’t know, and invents an identity for her when Henrietta sees the photograph.

When he is called back to his office in New York, he regrets all the time he has spent on his fruitless campaign. He goes to say goodbye to Henrietta, and at that very moment Mr Holland (Henrietta’s lover) arrives. The two men discuss Graham, and Holland reveals that his death was suicide (though Henrietta that it was a natural death).

On the ship back to New York, Osborne talks with Mrs Dodd’s cousin Major Dodd, who knew Graham. The major claims that Graham had become deranged, and that Henrietta hardly knew him. Osborne later marries – to a girl who looks exactly like the girl in the photograph.

Principal characters

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

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.
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.

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

Paste first appeared in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly in December 1899. It was then reprinted in the collection of tales The Soft Side published by Methuen in 1900.

The Necklace

Paste – critical commentary

Historical background

The crux of this story is based on a social factor which might seem rather obscure in the twenty-first century. It’s the fact that actresses (and any women associated with the stage) were regarded from the Renaissance right up to the twentieth century as synonymous with loose morals and even prostitution.

It was very common for upper class males (and even royalty) to have mistresses who were singers or actresses. These women were either set up in premises or showered with gifts by their suitors – who were often described in euphemistic terms such as ‘protector’ or ‘admirer’.

It was a form of prostitution – and was tolerated because it did not threaten the established order. The procuring male bought the sexual favours of the female, and his place in society as either a bachelor or a man who had married within his own class remained unthreatened.

Why was it the stage rather than other occupations which should have given rise to this practice? Presumably because as singers or performers, the women would be more socially mobile, and would operate in a zone which was close to but not part of polite society.

The occupation of singer or actress was regarded as declasse. Arthur’s father (as a vicar) has courted social danger in marrying an actress, and the explanation for Arthur’s priggishness (and lies) is that he wishes to protect his family’s (and his own) reputation.

Literary tradition

This story is a variation on a tale made famous by Guy de Maupassant in 1884 called The Necklace (La Parure). Henry James was a personal friend of Maupassant, and wrote a critical study of his work in French Writers.

In Maupassant’s story a socially ambitious married woman borrows a diamond necklace to attend a grand public event. She loses the necklace and is forced to replace it, putting herself and husband in crippling debt. It takes them more than ten years of privation to repay the loan – at which point she discovers that the diamonds were only fakes, worth next to nothing.

The same theme was given a further twist by Somerset Maugham in his story A String of Beads (1927). In this version a young governess appears at a dinner party wearing a string of pearls which a fellow guest says are real and worth a small fortune. She says she paid fifteen shillings for them in a department store. Then two representatives from the store arrive and explain that she has been given the wrong pearls by mistake. They present her with three hundred pounds as compensation – which she lavishes on an expensive holiday in Deauville, mixing with rich men. She eventually becomes a courtesan, living in high style in Paris.

This story was itself a second variation on this theme, to which Maugham makes inter-textual reference. In Mr Know-All a young woman appears at dinner on a cruise ship wearing a set of pearls. A rather annoying guest claims he knows all about pearls and that they are worth a lot of money. The woman’s husband says she bought them for eighteen dollars. The two men have a one hundred dollar bet on who is right. But then Mr Know-All, seeing the woman’s discomfort, suddenly backs down, realising they must have been a gift from another man, presumably her lover. Next day she returns to him the one hundred dollars he gallantly forfeited to her husband.

Paste – 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

Paste – 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

Paste – plot summary

Arthur Prime’s father and stepmother die within two weeks of each other. Mr Prime senior was a vicar, and his second wife was a former actress. Arthur’s cousin Charlotte is presented with a box of her old theatrical costume jewellery as a memento of her aunt. Arthur and Charlotte wonder if some of the items might be real rather than fake, and if they turn out to be real, were possibly a present from an admirer. But Arthur priggishly denies this suggestion, claiming that his stepmother’s reputation was above reproach.

When a party is being organised by Charlotte’s employer, her associate Mrs Guy borrows the jewellery for a tableau vivant and reveals that a string of pearls are real, not fake. Charlotte thinks she is obliged to return them, but realises that to do so would reveal to Arthur their origin as a ‘gift’ from an actress’s ‘admirer’.

Mrs Guy wears the pearls to dinner and they are much admired. She even offers to buy them. Charlotte still thinks she ought to return them, but starts wearing them in private. Some months later she confronts Arthur with the truth about the pearls. He refuses to believe that they are real, and says he will seek a professional opinion.

He later writes to Charlotte telling her that the pearls are fake, but Charlotte meets Mrs Guy wearing them. She has bought them in Bond Street from a jeweller. Charlotte knows that Arthur has lied, but she also wonders if Mrs Guy has bought them directly from Arthur, since she knew his address.

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 and 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.

© Roy Johnson 2013

More tales by James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

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

Poor Richard first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly magazine over three issues in June—August 1867. Its next appearance in book form was as part of the collection Stories Revived published in London by Macmillan 1885. This is the one of four stories James wrote with the American Civil War as a background. The other stories are The Story of a Year (1865), A Most Extraordinary Case (1868), and The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868).

The American Civil War – 1861-1865

Poor Richard – critical commentary

The title

The term Poor Richard is taken from a famous American publication, Poor Richard’s Almanack which was written and published each year in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin between 1732 and 1758. It was a very popular compilation of weather forecasts, practical household hints, and puzzles, and was padded out with aphorisms and proverbs related to thrift, industry, and frugality. Hence the link to Richard Maule’s progress via work, abstinence, and honesty.

Interpretation

It is difficult to see this story as anything but a warning against the fickleness of women. Gertrude ‘encourages’ Richard; she is in love with Captain Severn; and when Severn is killed in the war she is prepared to marry Major Lutterel, even though she does not love him. She is only twenty-four; she is rich, and she’s good-looking. There is no reason for her to accept an offer from a much older man for whom she feels no affection. Lutterel is thirty-six and he has no money.

Another way to see the story is as a short Bildungsroman – a narrative of growth and education into wisdom. Richard starts out as a drunken wastrel, and then propelled by his love for Gertrude manages to give some clarity and purpose to his life. He does not get the girl, but in the end he tells the truth, he sells the farm, does the honourable social thing by joining in the war, and on return takes up paid employment. That is a success of sorts.

Poor Richard – 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

Poor Richard – plot summary

Part I.   Wastrel and poor orphan Richard Maule is in love with rich Gertrude Whittaker. He tries to persuade her to love him, and even proposes marriage. But she offers him only friendship in return, plus a willingness to help him ‘improve’.

Part II.   Richard and Gertrude are old school friends. She has inherited a lot of money from her father. Richard has done virtually nothing except work on the farm he has inherited and allowed to run down. But the prospect of winning Gertrude inspires him to reform his life. Gertrude meanwhile decides it will help Richard if she introduces him to Captain Severn.

Part III.   Severn is a serious, honourable, but poor man who accepts Gertrude’s comforts when he is injured in the Civil War. But he hasn’t enough money to marry, so they remain just good friends.

Gertrude invites Richard and Severn to meet each other – but they are joined unexpectedly by Major Lutterel and the event is ruined. Richard feels ill at ease in this more sophisticated company.

Part IV.   After tea, they all go for a walk, during which Richard and Severn exchange opinions on Gertrude, and realise that they are rivals for her favour. Richard gauchely tries to impress everyone with his knowledge of the local river. There is a complex tension of competition between all three men for Gertrude’s attention.

Part V.   Richard cultivates a regime of hard work and self-denial, hoping to overcome his obsession with Gertrude. One day he rides over to see her, only to discover Captain Severn just leaving and Gertrude very upset. Richard accuses her of being in love with Severn.

She is in fact holding out against both Severn and Richard, and it brings her little joy. But on mature reflection, she begins to see positives in Richard’s simplicity She drives over to his farm where he is apologetic for his behaviour. His courtesy and simple behaviour win her over.

News arrives of a defeat for the Unionists in the Civil War in Virginia. Richard and Major Lutterel leave Gertrude’s house, only to meet Captain Severn on his way to pay her his last respects before re-joining his regiment. Richard lies to Severn about Gertrude being away from home, and Major Lutterel is complicit in the deception, because he wishes to keep away all rivals, having decided that he wishes to marry Gertrude himself.

Richard wishes to reveal his guilt to Gertrude about the deception, but fails to do so because she receives him in a very neutral manner. He goes home with Major Lutterel, gets drunk, and by next day he is very ill with typhoid fever.

Part VI.   Colonel Lutterel arrives at Gertrude’s house with the news of Richard’s illness. They drive over to see him, and Gertrude arranges nursing support for him. Whilst Richard is ill, Colonel Lutterel increases the intensity of his attentions to Gertrude, who although she is not in love with him is prepared to countenance a possible alliance.

The Major arrives at Gertrude’s house with the news that Richard is getting better and Captain Severn has been killed. He asks her to marry him, and although she tells him she does not love him, she is prepared to accept the offer.

Part VII.   Gertrude makes her preparations for the marriage in secret, with a heavy heart. Major Lutterel visits Richard, where he denies having any news of Captain Severn, and reveals that he is engaged to Gertrude. Richard takes a stoical view, and hopes that his disappointment will help him recover. When he meets Gertrude she is pale and unhappy: he implores her to give up the plan to marry Major Lutterel. Suddenly Major Lutterel arrives, and Richard reveals the truth about Captain Severn’s last failed visit to see Gertrude. Gertrude breaks off her engagement with Lutterel and forgives Richard.

Richard sells the farm, pays off his debts, and joins the war. When he returns at the end of the war he finds employment in his old neighbourhood. Gertrude also sells up, and goes to live in Florence.

Poor Richard – 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.
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.

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

Professor Fargo first appeared in The Galaxy magazine for August 1874. Its next appearance in book form was in the collection of stories Travelling Companions published in New York by Boni and Liveright in 1919.

Phineas Taylor Barnum 1810-1891

Professor Fargo – critical commentary

The story seems to combine elements of comic burlesque with a savage criticism of the shabby fraudulence in the ‘spiritual’ showman – something which would surface again in the character of Selah Tarrant in The Bostonians (1886). Its subject appears to be aimed at the market for popular fiction for which James was writing around this time, but there are two issues worthy of note in artistic terms.

The first of these is that all three male characters in the story do the same thing: they attempt to persuade their audiences with the power of rhetoric. The narrator is a travelling salesman whose livelihood rests on persuading other people to purchase the goods he sells – which remain unspecified. The Colonel claims to have ‘inventions’ and mathematical formulae which he thinks will be of great benefit to society. Perhaps because he doesn’t follow the conventional method of writing down his ideas, he is forced to describe them orally. But nobody in the audiences can understand what he is talking about, and his ‘inventions’ have all failed – which has led him to be dependent upon the Professor.

The Professor himself is an out-and-out fraud. He claims he can communicate with people who are dead, and that he has special powers of ‘spiritual’ and personal ‘magnetism’ which he singularly fails to demonstrate during his performances. However, the second detail worthy of note is that the Professor does eventually wield some sort of personal persuasiveness on Miss Gifford – who abandons her own father and takes up with the florid mountebank Fargo.

This sudden reversal of allegiance is not unlike that demonstrated by the young girl in James’s story Adina written earlier in the same year. Adina is engaged to marry a somewhat unattractive classical scholar, but she suddenly elopes with a handsome young Italian man to whom she has hardly even spoken. The common element of lack of speech is perhaps telling. James obviously believed that some people were susceptible to being attracted by sheer animal magnetism, even if they did leave behind them a distinct trace of ‘Frailty, thy name is woman’.

Professor Fargo – 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

Professor Fargo – plot summary

Part I. An un-named narrator decides to wait for three days in a sleepy little American town for a business contact to return. In the town hall he encounters Professor Fargo, who is preparing the evening’s demonstration of spiritualism and mental magnetism. They exchange opinions regarding spiritualism – the narrator being firmly sceptical. Later the same day he sees the Professor again, engaged with a pretty deaf-mute girl in the public cemetery.

Part II. The narrator attends the evening show. The Professor’s performance is poor and without any results. Then his partner Colonel Gifford presents a new mathematical method, which nobody in the audience understands. Then his daughter the deaf-mute girl presents miracles of multiplication on a blackboard.

Next day the narrator meets all three performers at breakfast at the inn where they are all staying. He compliments the Colonel on his mathematical theories. The sombre Colonel reveals that he does not subscribe to the Professor’s quack claims. He himself has practical inventions which he hopes will benefit society; he has lost his wife; and he resents being dependent on the Professor, who he thinks a vulgar fraud. Because all the Colonel’s experiments have so far failed, the Professor has persuaded him to feature his gifted daughter in their act.

Later the same day, the Colonel unburdens himself further to the narrator. The Professor drinks heavily and treats visitors at the inn to his philosophy of ‘spiritual magnetism’. The Colonel then denounces these claims publicly, following which the Professor proposes to prove his powers with a practical demonstration.

Part III. Six weeks later the narrator sees another of their performances in New York. Their fortunes have sunk even lower than before. The Colonel has let the Professor off his challenge (because it was made whilst drunk). Whilst out walking with the narrator, the Colonel has a sudden inspiration for a major new idea. But when they arrive at the Colonel’s lodging they find the Professor is there: he offers the narrator a free ticket for the evening’s performance.

However, there is no audience at all, and when the manager demands rent for the hall, the Professor is unable to pay. The narrator offers to pay the Colonel’s half of the bill. The Professor proposes to form a new act featuring the girl – but the Colonel indignantly refuses. However, when faced by a choice of loyalties, the girl goes off with the Professor. The Colonel is completely crushed by this outcome, and is placed in an asylum, where he continues his meaningless mathematical ‘experiments’.

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.

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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.

© Roy Johnson 2013