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critical studies of all Henry James’s tales & short stories

critical studies of Henry James's complete tales and short stories

The Author of Beltraffio

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

The Author of Beltraffio first appeared in magazine form in two issues of The English Illustrated Journal, for June—July 1884. It was then reprinted in book form the following year by Macmillan in England and Osgood in Boston (USA).

The Knight Errant 18790

The Knight Errant – John Everett Millais

The Author of Beltraffio – critical commentary

Structure

The chronological structure and dramatic unity of the story are very strong, because the events of the tale take place in one location within the period of a two day weekend visit to the Ambient home. There is therefore a powerful continuity and sense of dramatic compression to commend the tale.

But this shaping is undermined by what seems like a shifting point of attention on James’s part. Because the story is essentially in three parts, and the problem is that they are essentially different subjects which do not fit well together. The three parts are as follows:

  1. the establishment of the narrator’s character
  2. the conflicts between Mr and Mrs Ambient
  3. the death of their son

1. The first part of the story is quite a witty social comedy in which a naive and over-enthusiastic narrator goes in search of his literary hero. He finds him, and regards everybody in the Ambient household through glasses tinted by Pre-Raphaelite Renaissance romanticism. He wants to regard Ambient as a superhuman being, and does everything to convince himself that he is one.

But in fact Ambient behaves towards him just like an ordinary person. He is polite, welcoming, hospitable, but keep a certain distance. There is every reason to believe that the family are going to find the narrator’s enthusiasm and his presence something of a bore. He is being set up by James as the over-intrusive fan.

2. But then the second strand of the tale begins to change the tone of the narrative. Mrs Ambient is unsympathetic to her husband’s writing; she doesn’t even read what he writes; and she has ideological views about the function of art which are at odds with those of her husband. The naive narrator becomes a spectator at this point – so the focus of attention switches away from him and centres upon the domestic conflict between husband and wife.

3. Then in the latter part of the story, attention is focused entirely on Mrs Ambient’s erratic behaviour towards her son, the doctor’s visits, and eventually the child’s death. This is a long way from the light comedy of the story’s opening, and in no way connected with it.

Literature that corrupts?

We are led to believe that Mrs Ambient disapproves of her husband’s writing because it might even lead to corruption. And of course it is the combination of her reading Ambient’s latest work, shutting out the doctor, and failing to give her son his medicine that leads to the boy’s death.

If only by implication, we are being asked to accept some sort of connection between these elements here. A little information on the background to the story might help throw light on what was being implied.

James wrote in his notebooks that the germ of the story came to him through his friendship with James Addington Symonds and his wife. Symonds was an English art historian, and a poet who was part of the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement at the end of the nineteenth century. This movement, which included writers such as Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, advocated that true Art should be free of all didactic purpose. That is, it should not seek to teach people moral lessons.

Such is the first level of Mrs Ambient’s differences with her husband – because she believes that art should have a moral purpose – and the clear implication from the little we know about Ambient’s writings is that they singularly lack this feature. But there is more to it than that.

The art for art’s sake philosophy was also a very bohemian movement, propounded by and associated with artists who led what were regarded as somewhat dissolute lives compared with the strict and rather puritanical norms advanced in Victorian England. These people read and associated with what were called ‘decadent’ poets and writers. They travelled to places such as France and Italy – which at that time was regarded as what we would now call ‘sexual tourism’. That is the second strand of Mrs Ambient’s differences with her husband and his works. But there is a third strand.

John Addington Symonds was also one of the first English authors to openly defend and even proselytise on behalf of male homosexuality. He was married, with a family, but had been educated at public (that is, private) school and Oxford University, which were the traditional all-male breeding grounds for homosexuality. He wrote in coded form in defence of ‘Greek ethics’ and ‘soldier love’. It is not altogether surprising that his wife took a slightly less-than-enthusiastic view of these matters.

James obviously could not make these issues explicit at the time he was writing, but he was certainly aware of them. So – Mrs Ambient does have some grounds for thinking that her husband’s writing might even corrupt his son – and it is all the more surprising that at the end of the story she has begun to read her husband’s work – even the infamous Beltraffio.

The Author of Beltraffio – study resources

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

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

The Author of Beltraffio Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Author of Beltraffio Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Author of Beltraffio The Author of Beltraffio – Kindle edition

The Author of Beltraffio The Author of Beltraffio – Paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Author of Beltraffio The Author of Beltraffio – eBook versions at Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Author of Beltraffio

The Author of Beltraffio – plot summary

Part I. A young American fan of the writer Mark Ambient visits him at his country house in Surrey. He interprets everything he sees there in terms of artistic romanticism. He praises the author to Ambient’s own wife, who he sees as a figure from a painting by Reynols or Lawrence. She responds to him with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, saying that she is not at all artistic and doesn’t even read what her husband writes.

Part II. The narrator interprets Ambient’s sister negatively as a Renaissance figure from a painting by Rossetti, and attributes all sorts of unproven opinions and attributes to the two women. At dinner he encourages Ambient to ‘talk’, which he thinks of as the height of Art. Afterwards, the child is reported to be ill.

Gwendolen Ambient tells the narrator that her sister-in-law disapproves of Ambient’s ideas as an influence on the child. When he talks further with Ambient, he takes the author’s silences as ‘an advance on intimacy’. Mrs Ambient confirms to him that she finds her husband’s writing ‘objectionable’.

Part III. Next day Gwendolen tells the narrator that Mrs Ambient thinks that books should have a moral purpose, and that she and her husband disagree over possible bad influences on the child. The narrator and Ambient walk in the countryside and discuss Ambient’s work as an artist (largely in metaphors). Ambient reveals that differences between him and his wife are of an ideological (religious) nature. Over lunch the narrator cannot understand why Ambient is so tolerant of his wife. Gwendolen reveals that the young boy continues to be ill. Ambient gives the narrator pages from his latest book to read..

Part IV. Whilst Ambient goes to fetch a doctor, the narrator asks Mrs Ambient to read the pages from her husband’s latest book – which she does later. It turns out that the boy has diphtheria. Mrs Ambient has been sitting up with him during the night, meanwhile reading Ambient’s latest pages. She then dismisses the doctor and locks herself in the room with her son. Gwendolen thinks Mrs Ambient is deliberately bringing about the boy’s death, but asks the narrator not to say anything. The child dies; Gwendolen retreats into a convent; then Mr and Mrs Ambient die too – though she has started to read her husband’s work shortly before her death.

Principal characters
I the outer narrator, a young American enthusiast and fan of Ambient’s work
Mark Ambient an English author
Mrs Beatrice Ambient his wife, who has different views
Dolcino their beautiful young son
Gwendolen Ambient Ambient’s sister

The Author of Beltraffio - Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

Henry James The BostoniansThe 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.

The Author of Beltraffio Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Author of Beltraffio Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James What Masie KnewWhat 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.
Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon UK
Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James The AmbassadorsThe 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.
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon UK
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

Henry James 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.

Henry James web links 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.

Red button 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.

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

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

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

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

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

Henry James web links 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

The Beast in the Jungle

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Beast in the Jungle (1903) is widely regarded as the greatest of James’s short stories – if not one of the greatest stories of all time. It is certainly one of his most frequently reprinted and anthologised works. And as if to mark the begining of modernism in the twentieth century, it is a story in which almost nothing happens. In fact that is one of the key features of the story.

It is worth noting that although Henry James made a number of technical innovations to both the story and the novel as literary genres, he gave his shorter works the collective name of tales. These works are rarely as short, condensed, and understated as we now think of narratives categorised as short stories: they are often quite long; many deal in a number of inter-related themes; and some become novellas and even short novels.

The Beast in the Jungle

The Beast in the Jungle – critical commentary

This story has been the subject of enormous amounts of critical commentary – partly because it is such a powerful narrative, and partly because its eventless and abstract subject lends itself to a number of possible interpretations. These are variations of three basic types – existential, biographical, and psychological.

Existential

It’s quite possible to see the story as an expression of existential angst some years before such philosophic notions became popular. After all, Kafka would be writing about lonely figures trapped inside vague fears and presentiments only a few years after James wrote The Beast in the Jungle.

Marcher is after all a civil servant, and although we have no account of his working life, it is quite clear that it is regimented and unexciting. He goes to the opera with May, and they even play piano transcriptions together, but his life is dominated by his idée fixe. He lives in London and his situation is that of an isolated city-dweller.

He feels a presentiment, and is not even sure if what awaits him in life will be of a positive or negative nature. That is part of the existential threat – not knowing what it will be and when it will come. He fears that it will be ‘tremendous’, but does not know in what way. That is its existential nature: it is a sort of metaphysical threat – something abstract and intagible, but felt as very real.

Biographical

Even the most cursory acquaintance with James’s own life cannot but suggest that he was reflecting on his own predicament in many of his late stories, and in particular The Beast in the Jungle. Throughout his life he had enjoyed relationships with a number of women – but only as friends. And he also worried terribly about the idea that he ought to be married. It was the normal, acceptable thing to do, but he could not face the prospect of commitment.

But many of his stories reflect a deep-seated fear of women as potential or actual sources of problems. And of course many post-Freudian commentators have observed the ssubmerged homo-erotic elements in his work.

Marcher rationalises his fear of marriage by claiming that it would be unfair to marry someone when he does not know what the outcome of his ‘destiny’ will be. He cannot marry May because it would be unfair to subject her to such uncertainty. That is his rationale – but in fact he continues to harrass her with discussions of his fear right up to the point of her death.

Psychological

Marcher is a man imprisoned in a solipsistic world. He has conceived this notion that something sets him aside from his fellow creatures. He believes he is destined for a special destiny. It might not be positive, it might even be tragic – but it will be something outstanding or momentous – which will confirm his superiority over other lesser beings.

He has no evidence to support the validity of this supposition. He merely feels it and asserts it. and his behaviour is guided entirely with reference to the belief.

May Bartram’s own personal tragedy is that she devotes her life to supporting him in this unfounded notion. We are led to believe from the inferences in the text that she hopes he will one day realise that she is the thing that is to happen to him. But of course he doesn’t realise this – because he is so wrapped up in himself.

Marcher’s sudden awareness of his wasted life at the end of the story is certainly a dramatic resolution – but in fact the story reaches its heart-stopping structural climax three-quarters way through when May comes as close as she ever does to offering herself directly to Marcher. She is ill; she can hardly get out of her chair; and Marcher is quizzing her relentlessly about the ‘thing’ that is to happen to him – yet she gets up and presents herself to him:

“I’m with you – don’t you see – still”. And as if to make it more vivid to him she rose from her chair – a movement she seldom made in these days – and showed herself, all draped and all soft, in her fairness and slimness. “I haven’t forsaken you.”

This is a very heart-rending, and a beautifully understated pivotal moment in the development of this apparently eventless story. Marcher of course fails to recognise or respond to what her words and movement signify. He is so blinded by his own egotism that May’s gesture is completely ignored. Marcher merely worries that she’s going to die before he finds the answer, and he even asks her (whilst she actually is dying), if he is going to suffer.

The Beast in the Jungle – study resources

The Beast in the Jungle The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Beast in the Jungle The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Beast in the Jungle Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Beast in the Jungle Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Beast in the Jungle The Beast in the Jungle – Penguin Modern Classics – Amazon UK

The Beast in the Jungle The Beast in the Jungle – Penguin Modern Classics – Amazon US

The Beast in the Jungle The Beast in the Jungle – Dover Thrift edition

The Beast in the Jungle The Beast in the Jungle – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Beast in the Jungle The Beast in the Jungle – read the story on line

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Beast in the Jungle

The Beast in the Jungle – plot summary

John Marcher is a minor civil servant with a library and a garden in the country. Visiting a stately home he encounters May Bartram who he met ten years previously in Italy. She reveals that he confided to her his abiding notion that something lay ahead for him in life which would have far-reaching consequences. He confesses that the fear still haunts him and invites her to join him in waiting and watching to see what it will be.

She inherits enough to buy a house in London, and they continue to meet regularly, comparing their thoughts and observations on the issue which continues to preoccupy him. As the years go by they discuss the problem ad nauseam. He realises that she is the only other person who knows about his fear, he is very dependent on her, and wonders what he would do if anything should happen to her.

He also begins to wonder if their relationship is causing her to be ‘talked about’, but she reassures him that she is doing as she wishes. He suspects that she secretly knows what the thing or the event will be, but isn’t telling him because it might be so horrible.

They grow old together, and she finally becomes ill. He is alarmed that she might die before revealing to him what it will be, and he makes a final plea for reassurance or relief. She tells him that the ‘thing’ has already happened and that he is not conscious of it.

She dies shortly afterwards and he is left wondering what it could be. He travels abroad, but finds no respite. Finally, whilst visiting her grave one day, he sees a man similar to himself who is obviously grieving a lost loved one in a passionate and deep manner. Marcher realises that he has lived his entire life without any deep feelings or passion of any kind. Moreover he realises that the thing for which he has been waiting was May Bartram and her offer of herself to him, and that he has missed his chance because of his egoism and selfishness.

Principal characters
John Marcher a minor civil servant
May Bartram a young English woman
Weatherhead an ‘almost famous’ house where they meet

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

Henry James Washington SquareWashington 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.
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James The Aspern PapersThe 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.
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James The Spoils of PoyntonThe 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.
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

Henry James 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.

Henry James web links 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.

Red button 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2012

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

The Beldonald Holbein

by

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

The Beldonald Holbein first appeared in Harper’s Magazine for October 1901. It was later collected with other tales in The Better Sort published in London by Methuen and in New York by Scribner in 1903.

The Beldonald Holbein

Holbein – Catherine Howard (1540)

The Beldonald Holbein – critical commentary

This is one of a number of stories Henry James wrote about artists – usually portrait painters. As a young man James had studied art, and the interest stayed with him throughout his long career as a novelist. In fact it is the relationship between visual and literary art which lies at the centre of this tale – and creates its central problem.

James enthusiastically records in his notebooks the original idea for this story – what he often calls the donné of the tale:

… little old ugly, or plain (unappreciated) woman, after dull, small life, in ‘aesthetic’ perceptive ‘European’ ‘air’. Element in it of situation of some other American woman (who has had lots of ‘Europe’ always) —thought so pretty (and so envied by my heroine) when younger&mdsh;and now so ‘gone’.

All these elements are present in the finished tale. Mrs Brash comes from her obscure American life and is specifically employed as an ugly old woman by the vain Lady Beldonald to act as a contrast to her own good looks. But the narrator and his friend Outereau see in Mrs Brash an unappreciated beauty of a kind they liken to a portrait by Holbein.

More than that, Lady Beldonald eventually realises that Mrs Brash is failing to fulfil the role for which she has been employed, and we are led to believe that Mrs Brash is despatched back to America where she sinks once again into plain obscurity.

This presents readers with a problem. How can Mrs Brash be ‘ugly’ when she first appears in the narrative, then miraculously becomes ‘attractive’ in the eyes of the narrator, Outereau, and Mrs Munden? It is obvious that they appreciate something in Mrs Brash’s appearance which has been neglected by her fellow Americans. But we have no way of knowing if these critical assessments are valid or not: all the information at our disposal is mediated via the un-named narrator.

The Beldonald Holbein – study resources

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

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

The Beldonald Holbein Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Beldonald Holbein Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Beldonald Holbein The Beldonald Holbein – Paperback – Amazon UK

The Beldonald Holbein The Beldonald Holbein – Paperback – Amazon US

The Beldonald Holbein The Beldonald Holbein – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

The Beldonald Holbein Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

The Beldonald Holbein Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Beldonald Holbein

The Beldonald Holbein – story synopsis

Part I   Mrs Munden proposes to the un-named narrator, an artist, that he paint a picture of her sister-in-law, the elderly but beautiful Lady Nina Beldonald. The commission is agreed but delayed because of the death of Nina’s black servant Miss Dadd, who has been hired to throw Nina’s beauty into sharp contrast.

Part II   Miss Dadd is replaced by an American relative Mrs Louisa Brash, who Nina employs because she is old and plain. But the narrator and his friend Paul Outreau feel that she is in fact a specially attractive ‘type’ – like a figure in a Holbein painting. The narrator asks Nina if he can paint Mrs Brash’s portrait, but she finds his suggestion offensive.

Part III   Nina cancels the commission for her own portrait. The narrator reconstructs Mrs Brash as an attractive figure who has not appreciated her own advantages. Having been ‘plain’ all her life, he wonders if she will be able to cope with being seen as attractive.

Part IV   The narrator and Mrs Munden feel responsible for Mrs Brash, who they fear may be turned away if she fails to perform the function for which she has been hired – which is to present a contrast to Lady Beldonald. However, they also feel they owe it to her to celebrate her attractiveness.

Part V   Mrs Brash eventually declines to sit for her portrait. Lady Beldonald then realises that she is an attractive woman, and sends her back to America, where she reverts to her former state of being – an elderly and plain woman. Lady Beldonald hires a new young and pretty servant, and offers to sit for her portrait after all – whereupon the narrator agrees.

The Beldonald Holbein – principal characters
— the un-named narrator, an artist
Paul Outereau the narrator’s friend, a French painter
Mrs Munden an American friend of the narrator
Lady Nina Beldonald an American ageing beauty
Miss Dadd a small black servant (who does not appear)
Mrs Louisa Brash Nina’s cousin, an ugly older woman

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

Henry James The Aspern PapersThe 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.
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon US

 

Henry James The Spoils of PoyntonThe 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.
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton 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 2014

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

The Bench of Desolation

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Bench of Desolation (1909) comes from the late period of James’s career as a writer of short stories, and with such a title readers might understandably assume it was similar to his late dark masterpieces such as The Beast in the Jungle and The Altar of the Dead. Indeed, the first two thirds of the story are marked by a mood of gloom which intensifies as the misery of the protagonist’s life becomes more protracted. But this atmosphere is completely dispelled by a resolution to the story which is as unexpected as it is improbable and unexplained.

The Bench of Desolation

a boring seafront

The Bench of Desolation – critical commentary

Is this story a lavish piece of wish-fulfilment on James’s part? It starts with the subject of one of his recurrent themes – the fearful prospect of marriage and its responsibilities. In fact it encompasses the fear of both the prospect and the consequences of marriage reflected in legal confrontation, public exposure, and financial punishment, followed by social death.

This clearly characterises the first part of the story, as Herbert Dodd is projected into his downward spiral of doom. But this scenario is completely dispelled in the latter part of the story. There is no credible justification provided for Herbert Dodd’s good fortune, and one can only think that it’s a form of wish-fulfilment on James’s part to come up with a resolution to this story which involves an old flame emerging from the past to offer both undiminished adoration and a large pot of money.

In fact the story suffers credibility weaknesses on two counts. First of all, no convincing motivation is provided for Kate Cookham’s ten year vigil. She has ruined Herbert financially by the original out-of-court settlement. He has subsequently married, become a widower, and sunk even lower in the social scale with no intervening contact between them to sustain either love or good will. But we are expected to believe that she has loved him and wished for his best interests throughout the decade. She even claims to have ‘hated’ what she was doing to him for ten years. We are given no explanation for her behaviour – only her statement of intent.

The second weakness is that not only has she worked and saved for a decade to repay him, but she is repaying his original two hundred and seventy pounds with interest. This original sum has accumulated simple interest of one hundred pounds a year to produce a total of twelve hundred and sixty pounds. That is a rate of return of thirty-seven per cent which even in the most prosperous years of the industrial revolution and the high point of British imperialism would have been impossible. Interest rates historically hover between three and ten percent. We can’t expect novelists to be professional economists or financial analysts, but we can object to their providing fairy tale pots of gold to furnish plot resolutions.

The story also has a rather uneven tone. At the beginning of the narrative Herbert Dodd is an almost comic figure – a vain, somewhat self-regarding character with a disdainful attitude to his low station in life. He could be seen as the Mr Pooter of the south coast. But as the misery of his blighted life begins to bite deeper, his seat on ‘the bench of desolation’ is a much more sombre affair. His state of tired resignation to a completely uneventful existence is something we are invited to take seriously. Having established this deeper mood, one would expect James to lead it towards a more logical and tragic conclusion, but instead of turning the screw tighter, he releases it to return to a mood of almost drawing room comedy.

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

The Bench of Desolation – study resources

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

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

The Bench of Desolation Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Bench of Desolation Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Bench of Desolation The Collected Stories – Everyman’s Library Classics – Amazon UK

The Bench of Desolation The Bench of Desolation – read the story on line

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button The Prefaces of Henry James – Introductions to his works – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Bench of Desolation

The Bench of Desolation – plot summary

Herbert Dodd has inherited a shop selling old books and prints in a ‘fourth-rate’ seaside town on the south coast of England. He becomes engaged to Kate Cookham, one of his customers, but when he changes his mind she threatens to sue him for breach of promise. He settles out of court for four hundred pounds compensation, mortgages his business, and in fact only pays her two hundred and seventy pounds.

He confides his plight to an old flame Nan Drury, and ends up marrying her. They have two children who die, as does she. The solicitors handling his mortgage go into liquidation because one of its partners embezzles from the firm, and his business is seized by creditors. He gets a job working as a petty clerk for the local gas works and begins to wonder in his misery at what might have happened if he had challenged Kate Cookham over the four hundred pound settlement.

Ten years pass, and his life is reduced to a meaningless void, when suddenly a much-improved Kate Cookham returns from London, seeks him out on his lonely seafront bench, and invites him to tea at her hotel. She reveals that she has taken his money, invested it, and wants to pay him back – with interest, because she loved him all the time. He is shocked by the news of her offer, but a week later he accepts the money – and her.

Principal characters
Herbert Dodd a somewhat effete dealer in old books and prints
Kate Cookham a plain private teacher and governess
Nan Drury an old flame of Henry’s who he marries
Bill Frankel a man known to Kate of whom Henry feels jealous

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

Red button Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, Harper Collins, 1985.

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

Henry James The Aspern PapersThe 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.
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James The Spoils of PoyntonThe 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.
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James Daisy MillerDaisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Daisy’s innocence and her audacity challenge social conventions, and she seems to be compromising her reputation by her independent behaviour. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. This novella is a great study in understatement and symbolic power.
Daisy Miller Buy the book from Amazon UK
Daisy Miller Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

Henry James 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.

Henry James web links 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.

Red button 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2012

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

The Birthplace

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Birthplace was first published in the collection The Better Sort in 1903. It is collected in Volume XI of The Complete Tales of Henry James (Rupert Hart-Davis) 1964.

Shakespeare's Birthplace

Shakespeare’s birthplace

The Birthplace – critical commentary

On the surface this appears to be a mildly amusing satirical dig at what we now call the ‘heritage industry’. Tourists and particularly foreigners flock to see the birthplace of a famous person in the hope that having seen some object or been in the same room as that person, they will thereby have some sort of transcendental experience that will provide them with a deep understanding of art, writing, philosophy, or other cultural value.

Maurice Gedge is appalled that the previous wardens (represented by Miss Putchin) and the visiting ‘pilgrims’ are interested in the place but not in the Work. They wish to see the birthplace, but are not interested in what the person born there created. And in Shakespeare’s case, even the authenticity of the birthplace is in doubt, since so little is known about him.

Rather cleverly, without ever naming him, James uses Shakespeare as a hook on which to hang his general argument. Very little is known about Shakespeare’s life, but the trustees wish to squeeze every ounce of cultural capital out of the smallest possible association.

It is this that Maurice Gedge rebels against, and then in an ideological volt-face to save his and his wife’s jobs, gives way to. He gives the pilgrims what they have come for – a cultural warm shower of half truths, romantic myths, and cultural platitudes.

But the story also contains within it a quite serious element of literary theory. It’s known as ‘the death of the author’ and was first made famous in 1967 by the French literary critic Roland Barthes. The theory, put in a very over-simplified form, is that there is no possible way to prove any causal link between authors’ lives and the works they produce. Therefore we should concentrate our critical attention onto the works themselves, not their authors. The novelist D.H. Lawrence put it another way when he said “Trust the tale, not the teller”.

That is the theory discussed between Maurice Gedge and Mr B.D. Hayes on the occasion of his first visit. Hayes quotes from Hamlet: “‘The play’s the thing’. Let the author alone.” Then he pushes the point further: “There should really, to clear the matter up, be no such Person”. And Maurice Gedge agrees: “There is no such Person.”

So – sixty-plus years before such ideas became formalised into what is now called ‘critical theory’, James was exploring the relationship between the Author and the Work. It has to be said that he was very resistant to any intrusions into his own private life, even though he had (until almost the end) very little to conceal. So it was a subject very dear to his heart.

The Birthplace – study resources

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

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

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

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

The Birthplace The Birthplace – Digireads reprint edition – Amazon UK

The Birthplace The Birthplace – eBook at Project Gutenberg

The Birthplace The Birthplace – read the story on line

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button The Prefaces of Henry James – Introductions to his tales and novels

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Birthplace

The Birthplace – plot summary

Part I. Maurice Gedge, a librarian and failed schoolmaster, is given the opportunity by a sponsor to become warden of Shakespeare’s birthplace (though Shakespeare is never actually named). Gedge and his wife start reading the Works and are determined to uphold the honour of His name.

Part II. Gedge is inducted into his custodial duties by one of the previous wardens, Miss Putchin. It becomes apparent that she (and the visitors) are more interested in the place as something like a holy shrine, rather than the famous person who lived there, or what he actually wrote.

Part III. Gedge takes to wandering round the house late at night to imbibe its spirit – but he realises that very few of its contents have any true connection or relationship with the Great Man. They are simply associated memorabilia, and the traces of previous visitors (or ‘pilgrims’ as they are called) in objects and signatures they have left behind.

Part IV. He begins to feel oppressed by the role he is required to play – trotting out ‘facts’ in which he does not believe in response to the demands of tourists. And he worries that the trustees might ‘inspect’ him and find him fraudulent. He tries to persuade his wife that they ought to admit the truth – that there are very few hard facts and very little evidence for all the claims being made about the place. She disagrees and argues that they ought to enhance the myths.

Part V. One day a young American couple arrive and Gedge finds that the husband agrees with him – that attention should be focused on the work of the great poet, and certainly not on such dubious items as the room where it was claimed (on no evidence) where he was born.

Part VI. Gedge feels his critical sense bolstered by this encounter, but he allows his scepticism to show through to the public. His original patron arrives as a representative of the trustees to give him a severe warning about ‘spoiling the show’. Gedge agrees to his wife that he will change his approach in order to protect their jobs.

Part VII. Over a year later, the young American couple visit again. Gedge is apprehensive, but he realises that they must have come to see him, since they know his views. He puts on a bravura performance as a tourist guide, full of clichés and gushing trivia. It turns out that his fame for delivering this sort of thing has spread across the Atlantic. Now he worries that he might be overdoing things in performing this deceit, but his sponsor arrives and doubles his salary in recognition of the increased income from receipts at the Birthplace.

Principal characters
Mr Grant-Jackson a banker, chair of the Birthplace committee
Maurice Gedge failed schoolmaster, librarian
Isabel Gedge his wife
Miss Putchin previous warden at the Birthplace
Mr and Mrs B.D. Hayes American couple from New York City

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

Henry James Washington SquareWashington 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.
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James The Aspern PapersThe 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.
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James The Spoils of PoyntonThe 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.
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

Henry James 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.

Henry James web links 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.

Red button 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2012

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

The Chaperon

by

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

The Chaperon first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in November—December, 1891 then was later reprinted in The Real Thing and Other Tales published by Macmillan in London and New York, 1893. The other pieces in this collection of tales by Henry James were Nona Vincent, Greville Fane, and Sir Dominick Ferrand.

The Chaperon

The Chaperon – critical commentary

The Chaperon [spelled without the normal ‘e’] contains many of the elements that characterise James’s other tales – society ladies jousting for social respectability, ambitious families wishing to marry their offspring for financial advantage, and various niceties of moral judgement being made amidst social infighting concealed beneath a cloak of respectability.

The principal irony encapsulated in the title is that the young daughter Rose Tramore acts as a chaperone to her mother – not the other way round. Rose protects her mother from the dangers and humiliations offered by polite society to a woman who has defied its conventions. Rose’s ambition is to rehabilitate her mother socially, and she refuses to accept invitations which are not offered in the formally correct manner: that is, made to the mother in the first instance, thereby acknowledging her status.

It is there that the main problem with the story lies – for we are given no persuasive reason to account for Rose’s motivation and behaviour. Rose’s loyalty to her mother is the driving force of the narrative – but we are not provided with any explanation for her reasons in being so doggedly loyal.

The other weakness in the story is that Bertram Jay is introduced (quite amusingly) as something of blockhead who a young woman with Rose’s intelligence and spirit would not for one moment consider as a good prospect for marriage. Yet by the end of the tale he has become a charming suitor who Rose is quite happy to accept. No reason for any change in his character is given.

The Chaperon – study resources

The Chaperon The Complete Tales of Henry James – Vol 8 – Digireads – Amazon UK

The Chaperon The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle eBook – Amazon UK

The Chaperon The Chaperon – free eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

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

The Coxon Fund Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Coxon Fund Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Coxon Fund The Complete Tales (Vol 9) – Paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Coxon Fund Selected Tales – Penguin Classics edition – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Chaperon

The Chaperon – story synopsis

Part I. Mrs Tramore leaves her husband and children to live on the Mediterranean with another man. Mr Charles Tramore does not re-marry, and the children are brought up by their aunt Julia and their grandmother. When the ‘other man’ dies in a boating accident without having married Mrs Tramore, she returns to London but is shunned by polite society.

The Tramore family act as if Mrs Tramore no longer exists, but when her father dies, Rose Tramore decides to rehabilitate her mother socially. Despite the objections and threats of her aunt and grandmother, Rose decides she will go to live with her mother – as a result of which her grandmother bans her from the house for disobedience.

Rose is visited by her already-rejected admirer Captain Jay, who also pleads with her not to take up with her mother (possibly with an eye on the fact that the family might disinherit her). She rejects his offer of marriage again – more forcefully.

Part II. Rose lives in unoccupied seclusion with her mother, but she turns down invitations to socialize because they are addressed to her personally, not to her mother. She wishes to challenge society’s attitudes towards a woman who has incurred social disgrace. She also repulses the advances of the baby-like Guy Mangler, whose mother Lady Maresfield is trying to marry him off.

Finding no success with her strategies in London, Rose and her mother tour Europe as a relief from the tedium and the strain of not being ‘in society’. There they meet Captain Jay, who is very taken with Mrs Tramore – as a result of which Rose changes her attitude towards him to one of approval.

Whilst in Venice together, they also meet Guy Mangler and Lady Maresfield, and with a little more tolerance on each side, social relations are very delicately restored. When they all return to London, Rose and her mother find themselves accepted into society again almost as curios – examples of people who have miraculously recovered from former disgrace. Rose marries Captain Jay, and all is well.

The Chaperon – principal characters
Charles Tramore Rose’s father
Mrs Tramore his adulterous wife
Rose Tramore their attractive eldest daughter (20)
Edith Tramore their younger daughter
Eric Tramore their eldest son
Miss Julia Tramore Rose’s aunt in St Leonards
Captain Bertram Jay suitor to Rose
Lady Maresfield society lady
Guy Mangler her son, who she wants to marry off
Mrs Bray Lady Maresfield’s rich sister
Miss Hack Rose’s former governess

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other work by Henry James

Henry James Washington SquareWashington 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.
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James The Aspern PapersThe 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.
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Aspern Papers 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 2014

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

The Coxon Fund

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Coxon Fund (1894) was inspired by James’s reading a biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was renowned in his day both as a powerful intellectual and a great talker. It is worth noting that whilst today Coleridge is thought of more or less exclusively as a poet (and not much known beyond Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) he was in his own time highly regarded as a poet, a social critic, and a philosopher. He produced an oeuvre which runs to dozens of volumes, including such works as Hints Towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life and Aids to Reflection, in the Formation of a Manly Character, on the Several Grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion. He was also separated from his wife, gave public lectures, and was an opium addict.

The Coxon Fund

The Coxon Fund

The Coxon Fund – critical commentary

The Narrative

Reading this tale is not easy. The story is delivered almost entirely through the narrator’s reflections on events and other characters. There is very little dramatisation, and much of the story is recounted very indirectly, using metaphor and allusive figures of speech:

I won’t pretend to have taken his vast measure on that first occasion, but I think I had achieved a glimpse of what the privilege of his acquaintance might mean for many persons in the way of charges accepted. He had been a great experience, and it was this perhaps that had put me into the frame of foreseeing how we should all, sooner or later, have the honour of dealing with him as a whole. Whatever impression I then received of the amount of this total, I had a full enough vision of the patience of the Mulvilles.

This was quite deliberate on James’s part. He records in his notebooks for the tale that he wishes to establish total control of the narrative. It’s interesting to note in the light of all his un-named first person narrators that in these notes James describes himself as the narrator. That is, he makes no attempt to establish any distinction between himself as author and as a character in the fiction.

I must do it from my own point of view—that of an imagined observer, participator, chronicler. I must picture it, summarize it, impressionize it, in a word—compress and confine it by making it the picture of what I see.

In addition to this difficulty, there are two problems with the story. The first is that we are never presented with any evidence of Frank Saltram’s intellect or his inspiring loquacity. These are not dramatised but reported to us by the narrator, and described as gushing accolades to his talents. In other words we have to take them on trust.

The narrator’s account of Saltram is offered in abstract, metaphorical (and rather hyperbolic) terms. He is described as ‘a big man’ with ‘extraordinary speculative breadth’. The narrator describes his effect to Miss Anvoy (at a lecture which Saltram fails to deliver) as being like ‘The sight of a great suspended swinging crystal—huge lucid lustrous, a block of light—flasing back every impression of life every possibility of thought’. But no concrete examples of his writing or his inspirational conversation are provided against which we can judge the veracity of this claim.

Convincing motivation

The second problem is that the narrator presents a negative and critical account of Saltram in the first three quarters of the story, and then at the end reverses his attitude and supports the decision to grant the Coxon Fund to Saltram – but we are given no justification for this change of attitude. Having established Saltram’s shabby behaviour in the first three quarters of the story, the narrator comes across Saltram on Wimbledon Common and sees him in a newly sympathetic manner:

I felt on the instant as if we had been overspanned and conjoined by the great arch of a bridge or the great dome of a temple.

Saltram’s eccentric behaviour is not in doubt. He wears purple carpet slippers, doesn’t dress for dinner, fails to turn up when delivering public lectures, and is often drunk. He takes advantage of his patrons and discards them when new enthusiasts come along. He has fathered a total of eight children – three of them out of wedlock. When he is eventually awarded the Coxon Fund he immediately stops writing and never publishes another word. But we have no way of knowing if he is a talented charlatan or a fraud who has established a social reputation solely on the strength of his after-dinner conversation.

In his notes for the story James makes it clear that he wishes to dramatise a sympathetic acceptance of an artist’s human flaws

the pivot and the climax of the action is the girl’s decision, in circumstances of the highest import for her, that Saltram’s ‘morality’, ie, his conduct, don’t in such an exceptional case matter.

The narrator too makes the decision to support her choice. He keeps the compromising letter from the Pudneys and does not destroy it (unread) until Saltram has died. But no convincing reason is given why they should support Saltram, other than the notion that in certain cases one should tolerate bad behaviour in great thinkers.

A secondary theme

The narrator’s young friend George Gravener rises to become a member of parliament for Cockleborough, and on the death of his father Lord Maddock he is elevated to the House of Lords. He becomes engaged to Ruth Anvoy, who when he meets her is heiress to the enormous fortune of her Boston father. There is therefore an Anglo-American link here which James features in many of his works. It also raises the link between money and marriage which features largely as a concern in nineteenth century literature in general and James’s work in particular.

However, when her father loses his fortune in the Wall Street panic of 1893, she in turn loses value in the marriage market, and it is at this point that the engagement between the two characters falters. She has ‘only’ four hundred pounds a year, and she rejects out of principle the opportunity to profit from the Coxon Fund. It is significant that the engagement is dissolved and she does not marry.

The Coxon Fund – study resources

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

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

The Coxon Fund Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Coxon Fund Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Coxon Fund The Complete Tales (Vol 9) – Paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Coxon Fund Selected Tales – Penguin Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Coxon Fund The Coxon Fund – Kindle eBook edition

The Coxon Fund The Coxon Fund – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Coxon Fund The Coxon Fund – audio book at LibriVox

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Coxon Fund

The Coxon Fund – plot summary

Frank Saltram is a charismatic writer and philosopher who is supported by wealthy patrons despite his unpredictable behaviour, largely because he offers inspirational conversation. He is estranged from his wife and family, and at the outset of the tale he is living with the Mulvilles, who sacrifice their own wellbeing in order to pay off his debts.

The tale’s narrator believes that Saltram has ‘an incomparable gift’, but his childhood friend George Gravener believes that he is a fraud. At a public lecture which Saltram fails to deliver, the narrator meets Ruth Anvoy, an American heiress. Saltram continues to issue prospectuses for lectures and literary projects which he does not complete.

When Saltram insults the Mulvilles and transfers his ‘allegiance’ to the Pudneys, the narrator begins to feel exasperated by his bad behaviour and goes abroad, during which time George Gravener is elected as MP for Clockborough and becomes engaged to Ruth Anvoy.

Saltram is subsequently reunited with the Mulvilles, and Miss Anvoy loses her inheritance when her father’s business collapses during the Wall Street panic of 1893. Gravener reveals to the narrator that the late Lord Coxon has left an endowment fund for research into some morally worthy cause. Lady Coxon may divert the funds if they are not spent, and has proposed to make them over to the now-impoverished Ruth Anvoy on the occasion of her marriage.

Miss Anvoy however will only accept the money if it remains in trust. She returns from America following the death of her father, and finds that Lady Coxon has also died. Her engagement to Gravener appears to be at a standstill, and she meets Saltram at the Mulvilles where he ‘speaks’ at length after dinner where he appears to be drunk.

Miss Anvoy is inclined to award the trust to Mr Saltram, but she first wishes to check if there is anything worse about his behaviour about which she has not been told. At this juncture the narrator receives a letter for Miss Anvoy from the Pudneys containing details of their complaints against him.

The narrator has become sympathetic towards Saltram, and withholds the letter. He confers with George Gravener, who stands to profit if Miss Anvoy does not award the trust money. The narrator offers to show Miss Anvoy the letter, but she refuses to see it. Saltram receives the trust money, and never writes another word.

Principal characters
I the un-named narrator
Kent Mulville a patron of Frank Saltram
Adelaide Mulville his wife
George Gravener the narrator’s friend, who becomes engaged to Ruth Anvoy
Frank Saltram an eccentric writer, philosopher, and speaker
Mrs Saltram his wife, from whom he is estranged
Miss Ruth Anvoy a beautiful young American heiress from Boston
Sir Gregory Coxon the former mayor of Clockborough
Lady Coxon widow of ex-mayor, Ruth Anvoy’s aunt, friend of Mrs Saltram
Lady Maddock George Gravener’s sister
Mr & Mrs Pudney patrons of Saltram from Birmingham

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

Henry James What Masie KnewWhat 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.
Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon UK
Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James The AmbassadorsThe 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.
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon UK
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James Washington SquareWashington 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.
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

Henry James 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.

Henry James web links 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.

Red button 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

&copy Roy Johnson 2012

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

The Death of the Lion

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Death of the Lion (1894) is a short story featuring a variation on the theme of the disparity between a writer and his work, and the manner in which he is percived by the public and his admirers. It was written at the same time as The Coxon Fund and anticipates The Figure in the Carpet by only two years. It takes a very satirical view of the lack of aesthetic appreciation in fashionable society, and possibly for that reason has always been a popular and much-anthologised work.

The Death of the Lion

The Death of the Lion

The Death of the Lion – critical commentary

The most interesting thing about this story is that it has all the ingredients of a minor tragedy – but doesn’t seem to be one. After all, in the first part of the narrative Paraday is given public recognition as a novelist of distinction and has the beginnings of what appears to be a great new work. Yet he is distracted from his vocation, sucked into a mindless fashionable society, and he dies with his work unappreciated and mistreated. James certainly had this critical perspective in mind in his notebook entries when planning the story:

the ravenous autograph-hunters, lion-hunters, exploiters of publicity, in whose number one gets the impression that a person knowing and loving the thing itself, the work, is simply never to be found…they kill him with the very fury of their selfish exploitation, and then not really have an idea of what they have killed him for

Yet this serious senario is at odds with the light-hearted satire of journalists, editors, and literary enthusiasts which pervades the rest of the story. Mr Morrow is a shallow opportunist who thinks a writer’s innermost philosophy can be guaged by looking at his writing table; the popular novelist Guy Walshingham turns out to be a young girl called Miss Collop; and another literary celebrity using the pen name Dora Forbes is ‘florid and bald; he had a big red moustache and wore showy knickerbockers’. The centre of the country house party which is celebrating Paraday is dominated by the Princess, who ‘had been told everything in the world and has never perceived anything’.

Moreover, Paraday is complicit in his own decline. He enters willingly into Mrs Wimbush’s social milieu, and actually hands over the sole manuscript of his yet-unfinished novel for others to pass round – and eventually lose. The great artist who the public in general do not appreciate or understand is a common enough figure in James’s work, but The Death of the Lion is ambiguous in its attitude to the topic.

We take it at the end of the story that the narrator will wait in vain for the recovery of any lost manuscript, but the story ends on a positive note since he has been united in marriage with Miss Hurter, his fellow Paraday suporter. Thus the narrative seems to be pointing in two different directions at one and the same time.

The Death of the Lion – study resources

The Death of the Lion The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Death of the Lion The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Death of the Lion Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Death of the Lion Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Death of the Lion The Death of the Lion – Oxford Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Death of the Lion The Death of the Lion – Oxford Classics edition – Amazon US

The Death of the Lion The Death of the Lion – Kindle eBook edition

The Death of the Lion The Death of the Lion – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Death of the Lion The Death of the Lion – audio book at LibriVox

The Death of the Lion The Complete Tales (Vol 9) – Paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Death of the Lion Selected Tales – Penguin Classics edition – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Death of the Lion>

The Death of the Lion – plot summary

An un-named narrator is working as a journalist on a weekly magazine. He proposes to the editor that he should write an article on Neil Paraday, a distinguished novelist. Despite the editor’s reservations, he visits the novelist, writes the article, and is invited to stay at the author’s home. Paraday lets him see the manuscript of an unfinished novel. The editor rejects the article, the narrator re-writes it, and it is published elsewhere but ignored.

Meanwhile, another London newspaper, The Empire publishes a leading article praising Paraday. This brings an opportunist journalist, Mr Morrow, to visit Paraday in the hope of writing a personal profile. The narrator protects the novelist from this intrusion, but Morrow writes an article anyway, and Paraday becomes increasingly famous in society.

A young American woman Miss Hurter is a Paraday enthusiast and autograph hunter. When she turns up in the hope of meeting him, the narrator persuades her that the greatest homage she can render him is not to meet him, but to leave him alone to get on with his work.

Despite the narrator’s protective efforts, Paraday is embraced by fashionable society and is distracted from his work by its demands on his time. At a country house gathering, the guests read his latest novel as if it were a magazine, and the manuscript of his unfinished novel is lost.

Paraday becomes seriously ill whilst he is staying there, and fashionable novelists arrive as replacements to read their less worthy work for the entertainment of guests. Eventually the guests are sent home, and Paraday dies, leaving the narrator to keep alive reverence for his critical reputation, which he does with Miss Hurter, who he has meanwhile married.

Principal characters
I the un-named narrator – a journalist
Mr Pinhorn weekly journal editor
Mr Deedy the journal’s previous editor and owner
Neil Paraday a distinguished novelist, separated from his wife
Mr Morrow an opportunistic journalist
Mrs Weeks Wimbush society lady, wife of a brewer
Miss Fanny Hurter a young American Paraday enthusiast and autograph hunter
Mrs Milsom her sister, who lives in Paris
Guy Walsingham novelist, author of Obsessions – real name Miss Collop
Dora Forbes novelist, author of The Other Way Round – a man
Miss Braby socialite
Mrs Bounder socialite
Prestidge Mrs Winbush’s country house
The Princess polyglot European socialite
Lady Augusta Minch socialite who lends Paraday’s manuscript
Lord Dorimont socialite who loses Paraday’s manuscript

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

Henry James The Aspern PapersThe 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.
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James The Spoils of PoyntonThe 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.
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James Daisy MillerDaisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Daisy’s innocence and her audacity challenge social conventions, and she seems to be compromising her reputation by her independent behaviour. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. This novella is a great study in understatement and symbolic power.
Daisy Miller Buy the book from Amazon UK
Daisy Miller Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

Henry James 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.

Henry James web links 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.

Red button 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

&copy Roy Johnson 2012

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

The Diary of a Man of Fifty

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tutorial, commentary, web links, and study resources

The Diary of a Man of Fifty first appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Macmillan’s Magazine for July 1879. The first English book version appeared later the same year in the collection The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales published by Macmillan.

The Diary of a Man of Fifty

The setting – Florence

The Diary of a Man of Fifty – critical commentary

This tale is one of James’ least-known stories, and he didn’t even include it in the twenty-four volume New York Edition of his Novels and Tales (1907-09). It’s also rather unusual, because it’s written in the form of a journal. James normally liked to keep the narrative and the point of view tightly under his own control in the form of a first person or omniscient third person narrator. The only other instances of his using the diary and journal forms in his tales were A Landscape Painter (1866), A Light Man (1869), and The Impressions of a Cousin (1883).

The General is very forcibly struck by the parallels between his own situation and Stanmer’s. The General was in love with the beautiful Countess twenty-five years previously, and now he meets young Stanmer who is enchanted by her equally alluring daughter, and who bears the same name – Bianca. The General felt betrayed by the Countess when she married his rival, Count Camerino, and he feels that Stanmer is likely to be ill-treated by Bianca in the same way – though he has no evidence to support this notion.

Stanmer feels that the General is pursuing the ‘analogy’ too far, and resists the attempts to persuade him of any danger. And in the end, Stanmer does marry Bianca, and he is happy according to his own report. So for once in these cautionary tales about the dangers of marriage, the protagonist’s fears seem to be overturned. The General is left wondering what might have been, and the reader is left wondering if he is another candidate for James’s collection of unreliable narrators – a man who is so blinded by his own past experience and lack of real perception that he is unable to correctly interpret the world he inhabits.

It is difficult to form a clear judgement on this issue – because we do not have sufficient independent evidence. But it is worth noting (in the balance of its being a ‘cautionary tale’) that both the Countess and her daughter Bianca ‘lose’ three husbands between them – all of whom die in duels brought about because of rivalry and jealousy. So no matter what we think in the choice between Stanmer and the General, the state of matrimony is depicted as a zone of conflict and potential death.

Study resources

The Diary of a Man of Fifty The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Diary of a Man of Fifty The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Diary of a Man of Fifty Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Diary of a Man of Fifty Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Diary of a Man of Fifty The Diary of a Man of Fifty – Classic Reprint edition

The Diary of a Man of Fifty The Diary of a Man of Fifty – Kindle edition

The Diary of a Man of Fifty Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition

The Diary of a Man of Fifty The Diary of a Man of Fifty – eBook formats at Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Diary of a Man of Fifty

The Diary of a Man of Fifty – plot summary

An English army general of fifty-two returns to Florence twenty-five years after a romance with Countess Falvi, a woman who has died ten years previously. He revisits the places they used to frequent together.

He then meets Edmund Stanmer, a young English traveller of twenty-five who is acquainted with the Countess’s daughter Bianca. The General takes a liking to him, feeling that he is a reminder of his younger self.

Stanmer arranges a meeting between Bianca and the General, who is at first reluctant to follow it through, because his memories of her mother are that she was a dangerous woman.

However, when he goes to see Bianca the next day she is charming and attractive. They reminisce about her mother. Bianca lost her own father when she was young; her mother re-married, and she also lost her own husband three years previously.

The following day the General warns Stanmer that Bianca is an actress and a coquette, just like her mother. Stanmer resents the comparison and wants to know what the mother did to hurt the general – but he initially passes up on the opportunity to hear what it was.

Next evening at the Casa Salvi the General learns that Bianca’s stepfather was killed in a duel. They discuss Stanmer together , and Bianca asks the general to ‘explain’ her to his young friend.

The General continues to warn Stanmer about Bianca, but admits that he finds her fascinating. He then stays away from the Casa Salvi for a while, uncertain about his intentions regarding Stanmer.

But then Stanmer demands to know what happened between the General and the countess. The General reveals that he was jealous of Count Camerino, who was a suitor to the Countess, and who killed her husband in a duel caused by jealous rivalry – though another man (acting as his second) was deemed responsible. The General was horrified when the Countess married the man who had killed her own husband, and he left Florence, never to see her again.

The General takes his leave of Bianca, who reproaches him for having deserted her mother at a time when she needed a protector.

The general later hears that Stanmer married Bianca. The two men meet again in London some time later, where Stanmer tells the General that he was wrong about his account of the Countess, and that maybe she really did need his protection. This causes the general to doubt his own judgement, and he thinks it might be possible that he has made a mistake.

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Principal characters
General — an un-named former soldier from the English army in India (52)
Edmund Stanmer a young Englishman (25)
Countess Salvi-Scarabelli the General’s former amorata
Bianca Scarabelli her beautiful daughter
Count Salvi the Countess’s former jealous husband
Count Camerino the general’s rival, and second husband to the Countess

Henry James's Study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

Henry James The BostoniansThe 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

 

Henry James What Masie KnewWhat 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.

Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon UK
Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

Henry James 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.

Henry James web links 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.

Red button 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2005

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

The Figure in the Carpet

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Figure in the Carpet (1896) is one of a number of stories James wrote in his later years which deal with issues of authorship, writing, and literary reputation. The tale has baffled critics ever since it first appeared. Some commentators claim that it’s a satire of literary criticism, others that it’s no more than a literary joke, and just a few readers claim that it is a profound exploration of literary hermeneutics – which is ‘the study of the interpretation of written texts’.

The Figure in the Carpet

The Figure in the Carpet

The Figure in the Carpet – critical commentary

The question of interpretation

It is generally agreed that The Figure in the Carpet is one of James’s more baffling stories. We naturally would like to know exactly what ‘secrets’ Vereker has embedded in his work, just as the narrator would. But he is thwarted in that hope, and so are we.

It’s possible to see the tale as a critique of literary criticism – since that is the narrator’s occupation. He sees Vereker’s work as a means of advancing his own reputation as a critic, and he views his friend Corvick and the latecomer Drayton Deane as threatening rivals.

In this approach to reading the story, James is taking revenge on lazy literary critics who are not prepared to study an author’s work in sufficient depth, but are only interested in advancing their own celebrity and careers. The narrator spends most of his efforts trying to extract the ‘secret’ from other people, instead of doing the work himself. At the end of the story he is no wiser, and the implication of this reading is that the literary joke is on him. This view can be supported by the initial ideas James recorded for the tale in his notebooks:

the lively impulse, at the root of it, to reinstate analytic appreciation, by some ironic or fantastic stroke, so far as possible, in its virtually forfeited rights and dignities.

In fact the ‘literary hoax’ interpretation could be taken even further if we posit the notion that Vereker, as an intelligent novelist, actually invents the idea of a hidden meaning in his work in order to tease the narrator.

The literary joke

Vereker makes an eloquent claim for the hidden meaning in his work, but he refuses to say what it is. The remainder of the story is focused on the narrator’s fruitless search for an answer to the mystery. This reading of the story sees the narrator as a gullible dupe.

First we might observe that Vereker’s claim is itself a fictional construct. There is no way a reader can know if it is true or not – because we have no examples of Vereker’s work with which to form a judgement. Covington’s subsequent claim to have discovered the secret is also part of the fiction. His word too is something whose veracity cannot be checked – even though the events of the text include Vereker’s apparent endorsement of Covington’s claim. The fact that two fictional characters might agree on the existence of a ‘secret meaning’ does not mean that such a meaning exists.

Those who wish to see the story as a literary joke might also observe that having apparently established the discovery of the hidden secret, the narrator is then tantalised, to an almost ridiculous extent, by his failure to drag the secret from the hands of those claiming to have grasped it.

In fact the very three people who claim to know the answer to the mystery (Vereker, Covington, and Gwendolen) all die in rapid succession, just as the narrator thinks he might learn the secret from them. He is left at the end of the story staring into the void, having also infected the hapless Drayton Deane with his belief in the mystery..

The face value interpretation

It is also possible to take the fictional claims made in the story at face value. Vereker claims his work has an ‘exquisite scheme’, but refuses to reveal it; and Covington claims to have discovered the secret, but dies before explaining what it is.

If we take this to be true, the story becomes a psychological study in the Narrator’s self-regard and egotism, which blinds him to the nature of events and the people with whom he is concerned.

Vereker warns him not to go off in pursuit of the ‘buried treasure’ in his work – “Give it up, give it up!” – to which the narrator responds by accusing him of being ‘a man of unstable moods’. If we follow the narrator’s comments closely, he reveals himself as a dubious judge who is also full of self-congratulation.

When Covington at first fails to uncover the ‘figure in the carpet’ the narrator observes ‘I considered I showed magnanimity in not reproaching him’. And when Covington goes to visit Vereker, he comments ‘We pictured the whole scene at Rapollo, where he would have written , mentioning my name, for permission to call’.

After spending more time with Gwendolen both before and after Covington’s death, he finds her much improved, ‘showing, I thought the better company she had kept’ (which can only be a reference to himself). Finally, he quite cynically contemplates the idea of marrying her just in the hope of gaining access to the mystery, which he thinks might be transmitted naturally enough from husband to wife. But he is so far detached from the emotional sphere of human relations, he speculates on Covington revealing the literary mystery to Gwendolen, and wonders ‘For what else but that ceremony had the nuptials taken place?’.

The narrator is left at the end of the story with no resolution to the mystery, and more importantly no further insight into himself and the limitations of his sensibility. This is a satirical version of the outcome of stories such as The Beast in the Jungle in which a narrator blinded by egoism realises that his life has been futile.

Story or tale?

Very few of James’s stories are short by modern standards, and the fact is that he called them tales, not stories. But as short fictions, they are usually judged by the same criteria as most stories – from Edgar Allen Poe to Maupassant, Checkhov, Joyce, and Woolf.

Poe suggested that a short story is something that can be read at one sitting, and that all its interest is focused onto a single issue. To these unities there have since been added unity of theme, time, imagery, place, character. In other words, short stories are at their best when they are as concentrated and unified as possible.

It could be argued that The Figure in the Carpet certainly focuses attention on one issue – the pursuit of a mystery – and has one principal character – the narrator. But these features are overwhelmed by something of a superfluity of incident. The story contains two marriages and no less than four deaths, on all of which the narrative depends – which is too much for even a short tale to bear.

It also has a singular lack of geographic unity. The story moves from London to Bombay, then on to Munich, Rapallo, and Meran before returning to London. It is certainly something of a mystery, but not a carefully unified whole.

The Figure in the Carpet – study resources

The Figure in the Carpet The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Figure in the Carpet The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Figure in the Carpet Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Figure in the Carpet Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Figure in the Carpet The Figure in the Carpet – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Figure in the Carpet The Figure in the Carpet – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Figure in the Carpet The Figure in the Carpet – Penguin Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Figure in the Carpet The Figure in the Carpet – Penguin Classics edition – Amazon US

Red button The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle eBook edition

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

The Figure in the Carpet The Figure in the Carpet – audio book

The Figure in the Carpet The Figure in the Carpet – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Figure in the Carpet

The Figure in the Carpet – plot summary

An un-named literary critic feels he has successfully reviewed the latest work of Hugh Vereker, a distinguished novelist. But when he meets the author in person at a social event, Vereker tells him that whilst the review is intelligent, he has missed the hidden underlying issue which informs all of his writing. The narrator presses him to reveal the nature of this mystery, but Vereker refuses, claiming that it will be self-evident in any close reading of his work.

The narrator enlists the support of his friend, the writer George Corvick, in the search for this hidden key. The hunt also entails novelist Gwendolen Erme, to whom Corvick is engaged but whose mother is opposed to the match. None of them succeeds in uncovering the secret pattern, but when Corvick goes to India with a commission for journalistic work, he writes back to announce that he has discovered the secret.

When pressed for information, he says he will only reveal the secret after he has married Gwendolen. He then visits Vereker in Italy on his way back to London, and we are given every reason to believe that Vereker confirms Corvick’s solution to the mystery. Corvick then begins to write the definitive interpretation of Vereker’s works.

Gwendolen’s mother dies, and Corvick’s wedding takes place, but he is killed in an accident on his honeymoon. When the narrator appeals to his widow for the key to the mystery, she refuses to divulge anything. It transpires that Corvick’s study of Vereker’s work is no more than a few introductory pages which reveal nothing.

The narrator is so sure that Corvick will have revealed the secret to Gwendolen that he contemplates marrying her to get at the information, but she meanwhile publishes another book and marries fellow novelist Drayton Deane, who the narrator perceives as a literary and social rival. But Gwendolen then dies in childbirth, leaving the narrator to appeal to Drayton Deane, asking if she has passed on to him the key to the mystery. She has not, and they are both left to contemplate the fact that they will never find it.

Principal characters

I the un-named narrator, who is a literary critic
George Corvick his friend, an author
Gwendolen Erme a novelist, ‘engaged’ to Corvick
Lady Jane a society hostess
Bridges her country house
Hugh Vereker a distinguished author
The Middle a literary magazine
Drayton Deane a novelist who marries Gwendolen

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

Henry James Washington SquareWashington 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.
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon US

 

Henry James The Aspern PapersThe 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.
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James The Spoils of PoyntonThe 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.
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

Henry James 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.

Henry James web links 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.

Red button 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

&copy Roy Johnson 2012

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