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literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

Arthur Conan Doyle

August 31, 2016 by Roy Johnson

a short biography, video presentation & further reading

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in 1859 in Edinburgh and educated at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire – a public school run by Jesuits (alumni include Gerard Manley Hopkins and J.R.R. Tolkien). From there he went back to Edinburgh University to study medicine, meeting in the process Doctor Joseph Bell, a consulting surgeon whose powers of deduction and induction were later used as the basis for the creation of Sherlock Holmes. He also began to develop a youthful enthusiasm for writing around this time. In 1880 he signed on as ship’s surgeon on an Arctic whaling expedition, then after returning several months later, completed his degree and sailed off again, this time to Africa.

He set up his first practice as a doctor in Portsmouth, and in the long periods spent waiting for patients wrote stories which were published anonymously. In 1885 he married the sister of one of his patients and the year after wrote the book in which Sherlock Holmes made his first appearance – A Study in Scarlet. He went on to write historical romances, but when more Sherlock Holmes stories appeared in The Strand Magazine and became increasingly popular, he gave up medicine to become a professional author.

The Sherlock Holmes phenomenon made his fame and fortune, but because he thought of himself as a ‘serious novelist’ he killed off his by now famous detective hero by having the villainous Professor Moriarty pull him to his death over the edge of the Reichenbach falls in the appropriately named story The Final Problem.

Conan Doyle travelled widely in America, Egypt, and South Africa, working for a time as a doctor in the Boer War. In 1902 he was knighted by Edward VII for his enthusiastic contribution to the English war against the Boers.

Meanwhile the success of the Sherlock Holmes stories in America brought a renewed and very profitable demand for more. As a first move he wrote one of his best Holmes pieces – The Hound of the Baskervilles – but set it at a time before the supposed demise of his hero. However, the book was such an huge success that he was forced to resurrect Holmes completely, and he went on to write another series of the stories – though devotees of the cult claim that these are not quite so skilfully crafted as their predecessors.

Conan Doyle became a public figure and gave his name to a number of different causes. He stood for parliament on two occasions – both times unsuccessfully. He took up the cases of people he felt had been unjustly treated by the law. Most controversially, he gave money and time to advance the case of spiritualism.

In 1912 he published his second most successful work that does not include Sherlock Holmes – The Lost World. This was a novel of adventure featuring a prehistoric world of dinosaurs and mammoths discovered in the jungles of South America.

During the period 1914-1918 he occupied himself producing patriotic tracts, wrote a six-volume history of the war, and gradually transferred most of his attention to works of non-fiction. Then during the last fifteen to twenty years of is life he devoted himself almost entirely to the promotion of spiritualism.

At that time the phenomenon was in its heyday of seances in which the dead were summoned back to life at public meetings, psychic mediums extruded ectoplasm from their mouths, and photographs of ghosts and fairies were seriously offered as evidence of a hidden spirit world.

Despite the fact that these events were exposed as frauds by Harry Houdini – the escapologist he met and befriended in 1920 – Conan Doyle continued in his blind belief and damaged his public reputation with publications such as The Coming of the Fairies (1922). In his last years he toured Australia, the United States, and Scandinavia, preaching the spiritualist cause. When he died in 1930 his grave was inscribed:

STEEL TRUE
BLADE STRAIGHT
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
KNIGHT
PATRIOT, PHYSICIAN, MAN OF LETTERS

Arthur Conan Doyle – further reading

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Penguin – Amazon US

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Wordsworth – Amazon UK

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Wordsworth – Amazon US

More 19C Authors
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As A Man Grows Older

February 27, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, critical commentary, plot and study resources

As A Man Grows Older (Senilità) was first published in 1898, and like all of Italo Svevo’s other books, it was published at his own expense. His first novel A Life (Una Vita) had appeared five years earlier and had been completely ignored. The same fate befell Senelità and Svevo was so discouraged by this lack of success that he virtually gave up writing for the next twenty-five years. But in 19o7 he was being tutored at the Berlitz School of languages in Trieste by a young James Joyce who had gone to live in exile there. Svevo showed the novel to Joyce, who encouraged and championed his work. It was Joyce who suggested the English title for the novel, and it was eventually translated into English in 1932.

Italo Svevo

As A Man Grows Older – commentary

Modernism

At a surface reading, As A Man Grows Older appears to be a rather traditional, low-key novel whose subject is not much more than an unsuccessful love affair. But it has many of the elements of modernism that were to be developed in the three decades that followed its publication.

The novel has a noticeable lack of dramatic tension, and attention is focussed instead on psychological analysis and presentation. The protagonist is an anti-hero who fails in almost everything he attempts. There are also modernist elements of unreliable witness, since the majority of events are seen from Emilio’s point of view, and he repeatedly misjudges people and attributes motives to other characters for which he has no evidence, and these attributions often turn out to be wrong.

There is a great deal of emphasis on the modern city as the theatre of events. All the drama in Emilio’s life takes place between the claustrophobic apartment he shares with his sister, and the public spaces which are the backdrop to his courtship of Angiolina

Characters

Emilio is both the protagonist of the novel, and the point of view through which almost all events are seen. He wishes to present himself in a positive light – but he is inept, he deceives himself, misreads others, and is a self-deceiving character, full of comic contradictions. There is a persistent disjuncture between his intentions and his actions. He is irresolute, he changes his mind, is indiscreet, and is trapped in what is often seen as a satirical or ironic attitude to life.

Stefano is something of an alter-ego figure to Emilio. He is muscular, handsome, and energetic – everything that Emilio is not. He is a rich and successful artist (though very little convincing evidence is provided for this) and most importantly he is successful with women. Emilio looks to him for advice regarding his love life and even his dying sister.

Angiolina is presented largely from Emilio’s point of view as an attractive woman, but it becomes rapidly obvious to the reader that she is first a flirt, then a schemer, and finally (even to Emilio) a whore. She is certainly a convincingly erotic figure, but from the start we know she has a record of former affairs (with Merighi for instance). For a poor girl, she is also suspiciously well dressed and has a luxuriously furnished room in the family apartment.

Her scheming nature is revealed when she devises the strategy of establishing a ‘decoy’ relationship as a safety net before she gives herself to Emilio. She becomes engaged to the ugly tailor Volpini as a social fall-back. But all this time she is accepting money from Emilio, and eventually her stories of visiting the Deluigi family are exposed as lies. At the end of the novel she has run off to Vienna with a man who has robbed a bank.

The modern city

It is interesting to note that As A Man Grows Older was written in a period at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century which saw the production of a number of novels that featured the city as the symbol of modern industrial and commercial life (though Charles Dickens had done the same in the middle of the nineteenth century for the establishment of the Industrial Revolution).

Andrei Biely’s Petersburg appeared in 1916, set in what was then the capital of pre-revolutionary Russia. In 1922 James Joyce’s Ulysses featured the Irish capital Dublin as it was in 1904. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925 is set exclusively in London, and Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) is a portrait of the capital of the Weimar republic of the 1920s. Similarly, a huge amount of Kafka’s work is set in Prague, although he rarely names the streets and buildings, and Manhattan Transfer (1925) by John Dos Passos is almost a prose poem to New York City.

What all these novels did was to position the modern city as the location of modern sensibility. All the events of As A Man Grows Older take place in Trieste – which at that period was the fourth largest city of the Hapsburg Empire, its most important port, and a centre for literature and music. It is entirely in keeping with this culture that Emilio has published a novel, and at one point attends a concert of Die Walküre.

To many readers (particularly English-speaking) Trieste probably seemed like ‘a faraway place’ of no consequence that they had never heard of – but in fact it was a crucial centre of commercial and military power in an Empire which just happened to be on the verge of collapse. Svevo was an appropriate chronicler of its fortunes in the character of Emilio Brentani who symbolises lethargy, failure, despondency, and self-regard.

The complex relationships between Svevo’s work and language with these political ambiguities are addressed by Eduardo Roditti in his introduction to Confessions of Zeno:

Svevo’s works are indeed difficult to place properly in the complex and conflicting traditions of the Italian novel. The society that he describes is not typically Italian: his characters illustrate many qualities and faults of the Austrian bourgeoisie; his language, far from being the literary Tuscan of classical idealists or a colourful dialect such as the regional realists or Veristi affected, is rather the sophisticated and nerveless jargon of the educated Triestine bourgeoisie which spoke Italian neither as a literary nor as a national language, but as a convenient and easy manifestation of local patriotism.

The Kafka connection

The Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, discussing similarities in the work of Robert Browning and Franz Kafka, observed:

The poem ‘Fears and Scruples’ by Browning foretells Kafka’s work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the critics’ vocabulary, the word ‘precursor’ is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

There is a very good case to be made for Svevo as a precursor to Kafka. Emilio Brentani the contradictory, obsessive, and self-analysing protagonist of As A Man Grows Older could step directly out of any number of Kafka’s stories and novels – from Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis to Joseph K in The Trial.

But there are equally good reasons of a material, geographic, and cultural origin to explain the similarity between the two writers. First, the two men were contemporaries. Although Svevo was older and started writing earlier, they died within four years of each other in the 1920s. Second, they were both born in what was then the Hapsburg Empire, the Austro-Hungarian political dynasty whose domination reached from Prague to the Mediterranean port of Trieste.

Both Svevo and Kafka had fathers who were German-Jewish businessmen, and both of them were non-practising Jews. Both writers were raised in a linguistically ambiguous environment. Svevo’s family spoke a Triestine dialect, but Svevo himself was educated in German and wrote in Italian. Kafka lived in a Czech culture, was part of a Jewish family, and was educated (and wrote) in German. This level of cultural ambiguity was a product of the imperialism of the Hapsburg Empire which had sought to impose itself on very diverse ethnic groups and nationalities. As writers, both of them worked professionally in commercial offices – Svevo in banking, Kafka in insurance – and both of them wrote in the evening, produced a lot, but published little.

There are two further similarities. Both of them chose neurotically obsessive characters as their protagonists – characters who are ill at ease in the society they inhabit. When a problem occurs, every possible explanation or solution is examined in fine detail, including the possible motives of the other people involved. This level of pathologically neurotic behaviour is a function of both social insecurity and existential anxiety – both of which became well-recognised features of the early twentieth century. It is no accident that writers such as Svevo and Kafka were interested in the writings of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Freud. Indeed, Svevo went on to produce his third novel Confessions of Zeno entirely posited on the notion of a character who is undergoing Freudian analysis – with a semi-comic lack of success.

The second similarity is the spatial obverse of the capital city as a setting of events – the family apartment building as the site of claustrophobic domestic life. Both writers feature heavily the geography of the apartment with its adjoining rooms, its lack of privacy, and its inhabitants who are forced to overhear each other’s conversations and take into account sleeping arrangements and the clothes they can wear.

The apartment is technically the scene of private, domestic life as distinct from the public life of the streets. But the contiguity of the tiny rooms becomes an oppressive symbol of the intrusion of domestic responsibilities onto the dignity of the individual. At one point Emilio overhears his sister’s private thoughts because she talks in her sleep, and then is forced to hold a conversation with her conducted through the keyhole of an adjoining door, all the time dressed in his nightshirt. This is the sister who will shortly afterwards die very painfully in the very same room, dressed only in her own thin chemise.

As A Man Grows Older – study resources

A Life – Secker & Warburg- Amazon UK

A Life – Secker & Warburg – Amazon US

As A Man Grows Older – NYRB Classics – Amazon UK

As A Man Grows Older – NYRB Classics – Amazon US

Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon UK

Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon US

Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon UK

Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon US

As A Man Grows Older – chapter summaries

I. Emilio Brentani works in an insurance office, has published a novel, and lives a quiet humdrum existence with his younger sister, who looks after him. When he meets attractive young Angiolina he thinks he can enjoy a flirtation without any responsibilities or consequences. He learns that she has been involved in romantic intrigues in the past, but this only arouses his interest even more. He confides in his spinster sister Amalia.

II. Emilio rather gauchely questions Angiolina about her past. He has no real experience of life himself, but he conceives a plan of ‘educating’ her. He misinterprets her reactions to him and advises her to be more unscrupulous, which she finds insulting. He objects to her name, and uses French diminutives when addressing her. At home his sister reproaches him for leaving her alone, which only makes him angry.

III. Emilio calls unannounced at Angiolina’s house and is vexed to see that she has photos of men in her luxurious reception room. When she goes away to visit some friends of her family, Emilio criticises her to his friend Stefano Balli. Later, as he and Angiolina approach the point of sexually consummating their relationship, she suggests that they need a third party on whom they could blame any ‘consequences’. But when she announces that she has become engaged to Volpini, a short and ugly tailor, Emilio thinks of her as a ‘lost woman’.

IV. Emilio is disconcerted by Angiolina’s flirtatious behaviour when they are in public together. He seeks advice from his fiend Stefano, who suggests an outing a quatre with his girl friend Margherita. But when they meet, Stefano behaves boorishly and flirts with Angiolina, who responds coquettishly. Volpini the tailor postpones the marriage for a year, but insists he cannot wait that long to possess Angiolina.

V. When Stefano calls to see Emilio the next day his friend reproaches him for his bad behaviour. They argue and Emilio’s sister (who is in love with Stefano) is asked to adjudicate in the dispute. She takes Stefano’s part in the disagreement. Over dinner Stefano boastfully recounts the story of his rich patron who has left him all his money. Stefano discovers that his girlfriend Margherita has other men in her life, and he vows to get rid of her.

VI. Stefano sees Angiolina in town with an umbrella-maker. He sends for Emilio to expose her duplicity. He urges Emilio to give up Angiolina, as he will give up Margherita. Emilio rehearses how he will avenge himself on Angiolina, and walks around the town trying to find her – without success. He goes home to hear his sister talking in her sleep.

VII. Next day he goes to Angiolina’s house intending to expose her duplicity – but he fails to do so. She lies to him about the previous night. Eventually he breaks off the relationship, then walks around town looking forward to meeting her again ‘some time’. He meets Sorniani who confirms that Angiolina has had several lovers. Then he bumps into Leardi, from whom he tries to extract further information about Angiolina, but without success.

VIII. The next day Emilio confers with his friend Stefano again, and is clearly jealous of his friend’s liberty to have access to Angiolina. Overhearing his sister talking in her sleep again about Stefano, he realises that she is in love with him, and vows to ‘save’ her. After another dinner, he accuses Stefano of compromising Amalia by his regular visits. Stefano protests his innocence, and the two friends are eventually reconciled.

IX. Stefano stops visiting the house, which makes Emilio feel very sorry for his sister. He confides in her about Angiolina, who he has not seen for a week. She cries and complains that Stefano has no right to assume that he is compromised by their regular meetings. She insists that Emilio make him resume his visits to the house. But when he does visit again he behave coldly towards Amalia. Emilio takes his sister to a concert, and feels uplifted by the music of Die Walkuyrie.

X. Emilio’s anguish regarding Angiolina grows less, and he begins writing again, turning his relationship with Angiolina into a novel. But he is not satisfied with the results. He wants to see Angiolina again, and so does Stefano, who has the pretence that he wishes to model her. When Emilio meets Angiolina in the Gardino Pubblico one night, they become reconciled. She reveals that she has given herself to Volpini, but she takes Emilio back home and goes to bed with him. She asks him to keep the fact secret, to guard her social reputation. He immediately tells Stefano about it. He hires a room in a house, but the very gestures and language Angiolina uses inflame his jealous fear that she has other lovers. He is due to be reproached by her father, but the old man turns out to be slightly crazy.

XI. Stefano makes the sculpture of Angiolina, but he respects Emilio’s jealous fears. Emilio visits the artist’s studio where Stefano is seen as a positive and creative being. Emilio is happy in his sexual relationship with Angiolina, but he becomes jealous again when he thinks it is a result of Stefano’s influence. The tailor Volpini breaks off his engagement to Angiolina because of her reputation. Emilio helps her to write a letter back to him in response.

XII. When Emilio returns home he finds Amalia in a delirious state. A helpful neighbour stays with her whilst he goes to Stefano for advice. A doctor is summoned: he suggests that Amalia has been drinking. Emilio is doubtful about both his diagnosis and his remedial prescription. Emilio feels guilty about neglecting his sister, and thinks this is a good reason for breaking off his relationship with Angiolina. When Stefano reveals that Angiolina has made advances to him, Emilio meets her and challenges her with accusations of multiple infidelities, calling her a whore. They argue, whereupon she leaves him..

XIII. Amalia’s delirium continues. She invents a rival called Vittoria, and drifts from one deluded topic to another. The neighbour Elena tells them the sad story of her ungrateful stepchildren, during which more of Angiolina’s lies are revealed. Emilio wants to see her again – just to reproach her. Meanwhile he discovers that Amalia has been taking drugs. Here delirium eventually peters out, and she dies.

XIV. Some time later Emilio hears that Angiolina has run off to Vienna with man who has robbed a bank. He visits Signora Elena and then Signora Zarrii, and ends by blending together memories of both Angiolina and Amalia to produce a comforting amalgam of the two.

As A Man Grows Older – principal characters

Emilio Brentani	a bachelor insurance clerk (35)
Amalia Brentani	his younger sister, a plain spinster
Angiolina Zarri	a poor but very attractive young woman
Signora Zarri	Angiolina’s mother
Stefano Barri	Emilio’s best friend, a rich sculptor
Sarniani	a lady’s man and gossip
Merighi	Angiolina’s former lover, a businessman
Leardi	a womaniser
Datti	a photographer
Volpini	a small ugly tailor, Angiolina’s fianceé
Margherita	Stefano’s tall girlfriend
Signora Paracci	landlady of a rooming house
Signora Elena Chierici	Emilio’s helpful neighbour

More on Italo Svevo
Twentieth century literature

At Isella

June 22, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

At Isella first appeared in The Galaxy Magazine for August 1871. Its first appearance in book for was as part of the collection Travelling Companions published in New York by Boni and Liveright in 1919, three years after James’s death.

Simplon Pass 1919 – by John Singer Sargeant

At Isella – critical commentary

This tale is little more than a travelogue and study in landscape word-painting, coupled to an anecdote. The first part of the story is a vivid and romantic account of travelling through the Alps in southern Switzerland, towards the Italian border. The narrator emphasises the rugged grandeur of the Saint Gothard, the Furka, and the Simplon passes; and he keeps before him a romanticised view of everything lush, comfortable, and welcoming that he feels lying in wait for his arrival in Italy.

The second part of the story is his meeting with the mysterious woman going in the opposite direction for roughly similar reasons – to join someone she loves. The only element approaching a story or plot is that the reader is given every reason to believe that the narrator will turn out to be the victim of a confidence trick. The mysterious woman takes his money without offering any evidence to support her story of an irate husband being in hot pursuit to catch her. But in fact the husband turns up the next morning – so our ‘expectations’ in terms of traditional narratives are thwarted.

However, it has to be said that the effect is somewhat bathetic. There is no lesson for the narrator or anyone else to draw from the episode. The Italian inn-keeper lies to assist the woman in flight from her husband – but that is all.

At Isella – study resources

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

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

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

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

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

At Isella – plot summary

An un-named narrator gives a rather critical account of Switzerland, which he is leaving to spend some time in northern Italy. He climbs the Saint Gothard Pass road, stays with clergymen in a hospice, then descends into Lombardy via the Simplon Pass.

When he reaches Isella, he meets an Italian woman travelling in the opposite direction. They dine together, and he speculates on her age and social background. She reveals that she has been unhappy in Italy. He delivers a romantic encomium to the country, then reveals that he is en route to meet his fiancée in Florence. She is running away from her husband and going to meet a friend in Geneva.

She tell him her background story – how her brother was killed, then she met and loved his best friend the artist Ernesto. But her father forced her to marry a man three years previously who turned out to be a ‘brute’. She has corresponded with Ernesto, who is now ill in Geneva.

She has run away from her husband, but does not have the money for her fare to Switzerland. The narrator gives her the money, and she departs immediately. Next day her husband turns up looking for her, but the inn-keeper denies she has been there.

Principal characters

I	an un-named American narrator
—	an un-named Italian woman
Bonifazio	the Italian inn-keeper at Isella

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Other works by Henry James

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aurora Floyd

August 31, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study resources, plot summary, further reading

Aurora Floyd (1868) was the second of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ‘sensation’ novels. It followed hard on the heels of her first major success, Lady Audley’s Secret (1867) with which it has a lot in common. Braddon became the doyenne of this new genre that combined stories of polite English society with elements of crime, mystery, blackmail, and even murder. Her work was published in newspapers, magazines, and most importantly in the circulating libraries such as Mudie’s. Braddon had been an actress before she took up writing, and her novels are full of dramatic incidents and well-organised, complex plots. She was an astonishingly prolific writer, with a total output of more than eighty novels.

Aurora Floyd – a note on the text

The novel first appeared as a serial in thirteen parts in the monthly magazine Temple Bar from January 1862 to January 1863. The publishers, Tinsley Brothers, paid Braddon £1,000 (almost £100,00 today) for two years exclusive rights. The novel went through five editions in its first year. Its initial appearance as a single volume edition was at the end of 1863. No manuscript of the novel has survived, though Braddon made substantial changes (and deletions) to the original. For a full bibliographic account of the text, see P.D. Edwards’ note in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel.

Aurora Floyd – critical commentary

The sensation novel

It was Wilkie Collins who is credited as the originator of the sensation novel, with the publication of The Woman in White in 1859. But Braddon adopted its features with relish and made them her hallmark. The sensation novel. sometimes described as ‘the novel with a secret’, pushed the limits of anti-social behaviour as far as they were allowed to be expressed in the mid-Victorian age.

The plots of these novels included mysterious identities, crime, blackmail, forged wills, secret marriages, illegitimacy, melodramatic revelations, madness, and incarceration. These were elements inherited from the Gothic romances of the late eighteenth century – but events were taken away from haunted castles in the Apennines and transposed to settings in polite English society.

Mystery

The mystery that drives the first two thirds of the novel is the ‘missing’ twelve moths in Aurora’s life after she leaves the finishing school in Paris. We do not know why she left the school, and she refuses to give an account of what happened to her. There is also a secondary mystery in her father’s distress, which is similarly unexplained. To these ingredients is then added the second major puzzle – how and why does the former jockey James Conyers have any hold over her?

Blackmail

Conyers exhorts a diamond bracelet from Aurora, and then a bribe of two thousand pounds to leave the country – but the secret of their marriage is withheld as long as possible in the narrative. After it is revealed, the element of the two thousand pounds is transposed into yet another staple feature of a sensation novel – the murder.

Murder

The murder in the plot serves two functions. It produces the violence and disruption threatening the peace and security of rather complacent upper class life. Braddon makes quite clear that John Mellish feels existentially threatened by the mere proximity of social disruption to his privileged and well-ordered estate.

He sat down to-night, and looked hopelessly round the pleasant chamber, wondering whether Aurora and he would ever be happy again: wondering if this dark, mysterious, storm-threatening cloud would ever pass from the horizon of of his life, and leave the future bright and clear.

The murder also introduces yet another element of ‘whodunnit’ mystery, since we do not know (at first) who shot the bullet that kills James Conyers. However, readers with ‘Chekhov’s gun’ theory in mind will know the identity of the culprit in advance of its being revealed.

This theory is a dramatic principle established by the Russian dramatist and short story writer Anton Chekhov – that everything in a narrative should be necessary and anything unnecessary should be removed.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.

We know that Stephen Hargraves stole a pistol from Archibald Floyd’s house – so, despite the circumstantial evidence of a connection between Aurora and Conyers at the murder scene that can throw suspicion onto her, we know Hargraves is likely to be the assailant.

Social pedigree

Eliza (and hence Aurora) comes from an indeterminate lower class. Eliza was an actress and her brother Samuel was abandoned as a child to become a cabin boy. This is counterposed with the snobbish Bulstrode who comes from the aristocracy and will not marry the woman he loves because she will not reveal a twelve month gap in her social history. He (rightly) fears that this might be a potentially damaging stain on the reputation of his family. Even though he later regrets that decision and assists her in defending her name, his caution is justified by the scandal that ensues in the narrative.

Bigamy

Until the later part of the twentieth century, bigamy was considered a serious crime. that had originally been punishable by prolonged imprisonment and even execution. Yet strangely enough, female bigamists were treated more leniently, because of their perceived lack of ‘moral agency’.

The issue that provides the plot of Aurora Floyd is the power that Conyers holds over Aurora because they are still married. He exploits this power by blackmailing her – and he nurtures the outside hope that when her wealthy father dies, he will ‘inherit’ all the money left to her. Until the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1882 a woman’s personal property automatically went to her husband – and she ceased to exist as a legal identity.

Aurora believes that her first husband James Conyers has been killed in a riding accident, but in fact he is only injured. Consequently, she becomes guilty of bigamy when she marries John Mellish – and Mellish is not only guilty himself, but he takes on ‘responsibility’ for his wife’s guilt as well.

There is a possibility that the element of bigamy is acting as a surrogate for sexuality in the novel. Adultery or sex out of wedlock would not have been acceptable as a literary subject at that time. But bigamy by ‘accident’ or through mistaken identity would pass the censorship ‘guidelines’ imposed by the circulating libraries, which were notorious for their prudishness.

Aurora as a spirited young girl is seduced by a handsome lower-class groom with dark hair, long eyelashes, and god-like looks. There is no mention of any sexual intimacy between them, but they are united by their interest in horses. Most commentary on the novel and its kind emphasises the fact that ‘horsey’ heroines were equated with ‘fast’ women who enjoyed the spice of danger and overt eroticism in their lives.

Moreover, having married once and believing her husband to be dead, Aurora has very little hesitation in marrying again. The gauche and good-hearted John Mellish is hardly an erotically charged figure at all, but by her early twenties Aurora has had two husbands and (statistically therefore) a considerable amount of sexual experience.

Marriage

Interestingly enough, in a novel whose central mystery and plot device is bigamy, Braddon seems to incorporate a great deal of direct and indirect comment on the subject of conventional ‘love and marriage’.

The aristocratic Bulstrode falls passionately in love with Aurora – almost at first sight. His snobbish notions of family pride prevent him from accepting her as a wife, and so he chooses Lucy instead. She is presented (and behaves) in a far less exciting manner, and yet their union is successful and happy.

Similarly, Mellish is presented as a bumbling and gauche countryman who Aurora accepts as a second-best choice to Bulstrode. Yet they too eventually establish a loving and trustful relationship from which passion seems to have been excluded.

It’s as if Braddon is presenting the case that passionate love is not necessarily a good recipe for a successful marriage, whereas concern, respect, and admiration are more likely to lead to happiness.

Aurora Floyd – study resources

Aurora Floyd – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Aurora Floyd – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Aurora Floyd – Immortal Classics – Amazon UK

Aurora Floyd – Immortal Classics – Amazon US

Aurora Floyd – Kindle eBook – Amazon UK

Aurora Floyd – Kindle eBook – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Kindle eBook

Aurora Floyd – chapter summaries

I. Archibald Floyd, a retired city banker, suddenly marries Eliza Prodder, a young and beautiful actress he meets in Lancashire. Polite society regards her as an upstart, but she is proud and devoted to her husband. However, after only one year of marriage she dies.

II. The widower Floyd devotes all his attention to his daughter Aurora, who grows up to become a spirited and attractive young woman. He sends her to a Parisian finishing school, from which she returns just over a year later in a poor physical condition.

III. Aurora has bad feelings about her time in Paris. She meets a man to whom she owes money. He father throws a ball to celebrate her nineteenth birthday, where she meets the proud Talbot Bulstrode.

IV. Bulstrode is conscious of being remote and unloved. He thinks Lucy Floyd would make a suitable wife, but he is intrigued by Aurora, whose mysterious behavior he attributes to horse-racing gambling debts.

V. Floyd employs the very unsympathetic Mrs Powell as governess to Aurora. They go to stay in Brighton, where Bulstrode has bought himself out of the army. Lucy is anguished because she loves Bulstrode, who is besotted with Aurora. They are joined by Bulstrode’s gauche Yorkshire friend John Mellish.

VI. Bulstrode proposes to Aurora, but she rejects his offer (as she has just rejected an offer from Mellish). But then she accepts the offer next day – after reading of the death of an English jockey in Germany..

VII. Preparations are under way for the marriage, but then out on a drive they meet Matthew Harrison, who demands money from Aurora. Bulstrode asks how she comes to know him – but she refuses to divulge the information.

VIII. John Mellish returns from exile in Paris and accuses Bulstrode of ‘treachery’. He then confides in Lucy, and realises she loves Bulstrode. Constance Trevyllian, Bulstrode’s cousin, returns from the Paris finishing school, much to Aurora’s consternation.

IX. Next day (Xmas) Bulstrode receives a letter from his mother revealing that Aurora ran away from her Parisian school and was missing for the following year. When Bulstrode asks for an explanation she pleads with him for understanding, but will not reveal where she was for the twelve months. He breaks off their engagement and leaves.

X. Aurora falls seriously ill with a fever that lasts for four months. Floyd takes his daughter to Leamington for recovery, where they are joined by John Mellish. Floyd gives Mellish his blessing to wait for a possible change in Aurora’s feelings towards him.

XI. The Floyd party go to northern France. Aurora continues to think about Bulstrode, but Mellish pressures her emotionally and offers to marry her without knowing the secret of her ‘missing year’.

XII. Aurora becomes engaged to Mellish and is regarded by many as rather fickle. Bulstrode enters parliament, and is angry when he reads of the marriage. Aurora goes to live at Mellish Park where she develops two enemies – Mrs Powell and Stephen Hargraves, the repugnant groom, who is fired for mistreating her dog.

XIII. John Mellish allows Aurora to dominate him, and Lucy is dismayed that her cousin can forget Bulstrode so easily. The Floyd party visit York races where they meet Bulstrode, who still feels bitter regarding Aurora.

XIV. Bulstrode is invited to stay at Mellish Park, where he meets Lucy Floyd and realises that she is in love with him. He proposes to her and they are married shortly afterwards.

XV. Aurora sees Stephen Hargraves lurking in the woods at Mellish Park. A letter arrives recommending the horse trainer James Conyers. Aurora faints at the mention of his name.

XVI. Mellish questions his wife, who will only reveal that Conyers knows her secret. Mrs Powell is peeved on being excluded. The adventurer Conyers arrives at Mellish Park as trainer. Mrs Powell spies on him opening his letters – one of which is from Aurora.

XVII. The unscrupulous rogue Conyers hires Stephen Hargraves as his servant. He forces him to deliver a letter to Aurora, who angrily assents to its contents.

XVIII. Mellish decides to trust his wife, despite her enigmatic behaviour. Aurora goes to see Conyers at night, followed by Mrs Powell, who eavesdrops with Stephen Hargraves whilst Aurora tries to buy off Conyers. On return Mrs Powell locks Aurora out of the house in the rain, which alarms Mellish.

XIX. Archibald Floyd is lonely without his daughter Aurora. He is entertaining Bulstrode and Lucy when Aurora and Mellish arrive to discuss ‘money matters’. Aurora asks her father for two thousand pounds, refusing to tell him what it is for. He gives her the money, making a record of the banknote numbers.

XX. Captain Samuel Prodder arrives from Liverpool at Felden Woods where he is warmly welcomed by Mr Floyd. He has come in search of his sister Eliza, but learning of her death would like to see his niece Aurora.

XXI. Conyers neglects his duties and abuses Hargraves. When Conyers arrives home drunk one night, Hargraves finds a paper in his clothes confirming that the two thousand pounds ‘agreement’ with Aurora is for him to quit England.

XXII. Hargraves steals Mellish’s pistol at the house. Aurora arranges a meeting with Conyers. Mrs Powell snoops on all concerned.

XXIII. The Mellishes have boring guests to dinner, but Aurora manages to leave the house to keep her late night appointment with Conyers.

XXIV. During dinner Captain Prodder arrives at the house, but is turned away. He walks through the grounds and overhears Aurora rebuking Conyers. There is a pistol shot. Prodder reports back to the house that there has been a murder.

XXV. Mellish and Prodder go out, recover Conyers’ body, and take it back to the Lodge. Hargraves is in bed and pleads innocence. A policeman discovers the message sewn into Conyers’ waistcoat. Prodder suddenly disappears. Mellish realises Aurora might be a suspect, and Mrs Powell refers to her being close to the scene. Aurora reveals that Conyers was formerly in her father’s employment. Mellish feels shattered by the onset of unhappiness and thinks he has not been socially virtuous enough.

XXVI. The inquest is inconclusive and returns a verdict of ‘murder by person(s) unknown’.

XXVII. However, Mellish is recalled by the coroner, who produces the blood-stained marriage certificate between Conyers and Aurora.

XXVIII. Hargraves tells Aurora that the marriage certificate has been found. She feels ashamed of having deceived Mellish, and she runs away – intending to consult Bulstrode.

XXIX. Mellish returns home, forgiving Aurora for her youthful indiscretion. Discovering that she has left, he prepares to follow her – but first he dismisses Mrs Powell.

XXX. Aurora visits Bulstrode for his advice. She recounts the history of her youthful marriage to Conyers, his blackmailing, and his recent death. Lucy comforts her.

XXXI. Next day Bulstrode meets Mellish, who is then reunited with Aurora. Bulstrode advises Mellish to re-marry Aurora as soon as possible.

XXXII. The Mellishes visit Archibald Floyd, where Aurora confesses the truth to her father, who wonders where his two thousand pounds are. They return to London and are re-married – although they are being followed by two strange men.

XXXIII. Samuel Prodder buys himself a new suit and returns to Doncaster where he overhears Stephen Hargraves implicating Aurora in the murder via mixture of circumstantial evidence and half truths. Prodder attacks him in outrage, but Hargraves produces Aurora’s note to Conyers to support his claims.

XXXIV. The Mellishes return home, but Aurora feels the effects of the murder hanging in the air. The servants are suspicious of her sudden unexplained flight. Mellish’s pistol is found in the grounds.

XXXV. The Bulstrodes arrive and realise that something is wrong. Aurora lies to Lucy, claiming John no longer loves her. Bulstrode badgers Mellish into revealing the truth – that suspicion points to Aurora. They meet detective Joseph Grimstone who reveals the existence of two letters accusing Aurora – both written by Mrs Powell.

XXXVI. Bulstrode persuades Mellish to reveal what he knows, then relays this information to Grimstone, who has found a brass button at the crime scene.

XXXVII. Grimstone locates the origin of the brass button on a pawn shop waistcoat, then traces the garment as a gift from the gardener to Hargraves.

XXXVIII. Grimstone inspects Hargraves’ room in his absence but finds nothing, then he discovers that his assistant Chivers has lost track of Hargraves whilst stalking him.

XXXIX. Mellish and Bulstrode wait impatiently at the house for news. Bulstrode visits Grimstone in Doncaster but there is nothing new to report. However, on his way back to Mellish Park he spots Hargraves in the Lodge. Hargraves attacks him, but Bulstrode is rescued by the sudden arrival of Prodder. The waistcoat and the money are recovered. Hargraves is hanged at York assizes, Mellish and Aurora travel to the south of France, where a baby is born and they are joined by Bulstrode and Lucy.

Aurora Floyd – principal characters

Archibald Martin Floyd	a rich and retired city banker
Falden Woods	his estate in Kent
Eliza Prodder	a beautiful but poor actress, Aurora’s mother
Aurora Floyd	a strong-willed and attractive young woman
Lucy Floyd	Aurora’s friend and cousin
Talbot Bulstrode	the proud intellectual son of an ancient family
John Mellish	a rich, generous, but gauche Yorkshireman
Mrs Walter Powell	Aurora’s unsympathetic governess
Steeve Hargraves	a repugnant groom at Mellish Park
Joseph Grimstone	a Scotland Yard detective
James Conyers	a horse trainer, rogue, and adventurer

Aurora Floyd – further reading

Richard D. Altick Victorian Studies in Scarlet, New York: W.W. Norton, 1979.

Jennifer Carnell, The Literary Lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon: A Study of Her Life and Work, UK: Sensation Press, 2000.

Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

P.D. Edwards, Some Mid-Victorian Thrillers: The Sensation Novel, Its Friends and Its Foes, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1971.

Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Woman’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing, London: Routledge, 2013.

Anthea Trodd, Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1988.

Robert Lee Wolff, Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, New York: Garland Publishers, 1979.

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Autres Temps

November 19, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Autres Temps first appeared in the Century Magazine in July— 1911. It was originally published under a different (and more obvious) title of Other Times, Other Manners. The story was subsequently included in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction, Xingu published in 1916.

Autres Temps – critical commentary

Europe and America

The story has elements of what Edith Wharton’s friend and fellow author Henry James called the ‘International Theme’. Although Autres Temps is not concerned with tensions between Europe and America, it is significant that the geographic axis of the story is Florence in Italy and New York in America.

Mrs Lidcote has retreated to live in Europe following her own social disgrace, which we are led to believe is a marital rupture and elopement with another man. She has been forced into this dis-location because of the social opprobrium her actions have brought upon her in very conservative nineteenth century American upper-class society.

It was very common for people in America and England to retreat to the more tolerant locations of European cities following any sort of scandal or disgrace – or even for reasons of financial hardship. As late as 1897 Oscar Wilde had fled Britain to live in France following his trial and imprisonment following his failed libel case against the Marquis of Queensbury.

Mrs Lidcote is confronted with the manners and morals of the ‘new’ New York after exposure to her daughter and friends, rather than the ‘old’ New York in which she had been raised. Symbolically, she retreats to Florence where she can at least be sure of consistency.

It is worth noting that her retreat is not caused by any shock she feels at their apparently laissez faire attitude to divorce and re-marriage, but because they have embraced their own new freedoms without examining or calling into question examples of censure in the past. As she puts it very pithily – ‘society is much too busy to revise its own judgements’.

What has she done?

Mrs Lidcote has been living in exile in Florence for eighteen years, ostracised by fashionable New York society because of a former indiscretion. So what exactly did she do? The text does not make this entirely explicit – but there are certain clues.

First, she fears that Leila might make the same mistake that she made. Leila has divorced one husband an married another. In Mrs Lidcote’s eyes she has gambled her social reputation for the sake of personal happiness – which is what we take it Mrs Lidcote did.

But Mrs Lidcote still has her married name, from which we can infer that she left her husband for another man – but did not get married to him. Furthermore, she mentions how social ostracism can have very damaging consequences:

She had had what she wanted, but she had had to pay too much for it. She had had to pay the last bitterest price of learning that love has a price: that it is worth so much and no more. She had known the anguish of watching the man she loved discover this first, and of reading the discovery in his eyes.

Since these events were ‘a long time past’ and it appears that she has been living alone in Florence, there is an inference that her lover capitulated to social convention and abandoned their relationship, leaving her doubly isolated.

These were all live issues for Edith Wharton herself. She had begun an affair with Times correspondent W. Morton Fullerton in 1908, moved to live in France in 1911 (the same year at Autres Temps was published) and divorced her husband Edward (Teddy) Wharton the following year.

Sheep’s clothing?

Beset as she is by a selfish and ambitious daughter, dubious relatives (Suzy Suffern, who dresses in dead people’s clothes) and a society which shows no sympathy to her plight, Mrs Lidcote has yet one supporter who offers loyalty and understanding. Franklin Ide has been a friend and admirer for many years, and he reassures her that times and attitudes have changed – “It’s all right”, he repeats, and seems to be correct. He goes out of his way to renew the appeal he wishes to make to her (which is not made explicit).

But when examined more closely, he turns out to be a empty shell. All his appeals to Mrs Lidcote are made in private, outside the society to which they both belong – on holiday in Switzerland and in the New York hotel room where she stays on arrival and departure. And of course when she finally accepts the idea of socialising with some of her contemporaries, he is exposed as a conventionalist, because he is embarrassed and does not want to be seen with her. So at best he is fraud, but at worst he is a snake in the grass who all the time has been proposing an illicit relationship.

So Mrs Lidcote triumphs morally over those who are trying to decieve her – her daughter Leila and her ‘admirer’ Franklin Ide. She reduces them both to a state of acute confusion (they both blush) by forcing them to confront the truth of their hypocrisy and double standards. But she has spent the entire story cooped up in rooms – at the hotel, and in her daughter’s house – and it has to be said that in the end she is going back to a state of confinement in her Florentine apartment. She is ‘in the right’, but there is still a price to pay.

Autre Temps – study resources

The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon UK

The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon US

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Autres Temps – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Autres Temps – story synopsis

Part I. Mrs Lidcote is returning to America from Florence, where she has been living for eighteen years. She has received the news that her daughter Leila has divorced her husband Horace Pursh and married Wilbour Barkley. She fears that Leila will be ostracised by New York society as she was herself in the past for a similar social indiscretion. On board the Utopia she is snubbed by ambassador’s wife Mrs Lorrin Boulger, but is reassured by an old friend Franklin Ide, who tells her that everything will be all right.

Part II. She is met in New York by her cousin Suzy Suffern who reveals that the old social conventions of upper-class society have been replaced by more liberal attitudes. There is no longer any need for her to fear social censure. Mrs Lidcote has some years before received hints of a romantic kind from Franklin Ide, but she has not taken them up because she thought her negative reputation would damage his happiness (as it had done in her previous history). Now that times have changed and Leila doesn’t need her mother’s protection any more, Franklin Ide renews his expressions of interest.

Part III. Leila has house guests when Mrs Lidcote arrives there, and she keeps her mother at a distance emotionally whilst expressing a exaggerated concern for her welfare. Mrs Lidcote reflects on the sacrifices she had to make for her chance of love and happiness, compared with the ease with which Leila takes everything for granted.

Part IV. Mrs Lidcote is urged to stay in her guest room and rest – because it becomes apparent that Leila has invited older guests to dinner. They include Mrs Lorrin Boulger, because Leila wants to secure a diplomatic appointment for her new husband in Italy. Mrs Lidcote is offended by this treatment, sees a challenge, at first refuses to stay in her room.

Part V. Leila arrives in haste, trying to prevent her mother appearing at dinner. Once again she pretends an overwhelming concern for her mother’s comfort – but Mrs Lidcote exposes her deviance and hypocrisy, causing her deep embarrassment. Having triumphed in this way, Mrs Lidcote then declares that she will stay in her room until all the guests have departed after the weekend.

Part VI. The following Monday she announces that she is returning immediately to Florence. Franklin Ide intercepts her in her New York hotel. She explains to him how shabbily she was treated. He tries to persuade her she is wrong and offers himself to her again, but when she puts him to the concrete test of meeting some mutual friends together, he is deeply embarrassed and unable to face the social challenge.

Principal characters

Mrs Lidcote	a middle-aged American divorcee and expatriate
Leila	her recently divorced and re-married daughter
Suzy Suffern	her cousin, who dresses in mourning
Mrs Lorrin Boulger	the wife of an American ambassador
Franklin Ide	old friend and suitor to Mrs Lidcote

Video documentary

Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.

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The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.

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Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
More on short stories

Baroque Concerto

January 17, 2015 by Roy Johnson

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

Baroque Concerto (Concierto barroco) was first published in Mexico by Siglo Ventiuno Editiores in 1974. It is one of a number of novellas written by Alejo Carpentier in which he uses the literary conceits of magical realism to explore the relationships between Europe and Latin-America, to compare historical periods with the present, and to mix realism and fantasy, producing a hybrid narrative style for which he coined the term ‘magical realism’.

Baroque Concerto – commentary

The theme

A major theme in the work of Alejo Carpentier is the history and relationship of ‘Old World’ Europe with ‘New World’ America – and that is, largely South (Latin) America. Of course the ‘New World’ was only new in the sense that it had not yet been ‘discovered’ by Europeans. This tension (and conflict) was most dramatically symbolised by the expeditionary force of Hernan Cortes in his conquest of Mexico in 1519.

This event brought into sharp conflict the ideals and values of the European renaissance (The Age of Enlightenment) with those of the so-called ‘primitive’ values of the natives of Latin America – and the social and cultural mix was also given a further degree of complexity by the presence of slaves in the region.

Carpentier explores the clash of civilizations in many of his major works, such as The Kingdom of this World – El reino de este mundo (1949), Explosion in a Cathedral – El siglo de las luces (1962), and The Harp and the Shadow – El arpa y el sombra (1978).

In Baroque Concerto this idea is examined almost in reverse. A rich Mexican is visiting the ‘Old World’, and encounters European culture in the form of three of its most distinguished musical composers – Scarlatti, Handel, and Vivaldi.

It should be obvious from even the most cursory reading of Baroque Concerto that Carpentier was fascinated by two subjects – music and architecture. He studied architecture and musical theory, wrote a book on the history of Cuban music (La musica en Cuba 1946), and composed an opera La Passion Noire which was performed in Paris in 1924.

Carpentier’s own life also straddles these two worlds. He was born in Lausanne, Switzerland to Russian and French parents, but he grew up in Havana, Cuba. He also spoke French but wrote in Spanish. For all these reasons he seems to have allegiances with the cultures of both the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Worlds.

In the novella Scarlatti, Handel, and Vivaldi perform their Baroque Concerto in the Ospedale dell Pieta, but Filomeno (representing the less harmonically developed but no less vigorous musical heritage of the slaves of African descent) performs his own energising supplement on whichever percussion instruments are to hand. He also takes up the military-based instrument – the trumpet – ready to articulate the clarion call to freedom (“The trumpet shall sound / And we shall be saved”) and is last seen watching somebody from the same ethnic background doing the same thing – Louis Armstrong raising the roof in his own concerto at the imaginary theatre performance.

Magical realism

It was Alejo Carpentier who first coined the term ‘magical realism’ (lo real maravilloso) to describe the literary style that combines realism with fantasy, and which characterises much of the Latin-American fiction that emerged from the period of experimental modernism in which he was an active participant in the 1920s and 1930s. This was an approach to narrative that combined the very realistic tendency to give object and matters of nature and history their true names, with fanciful notions and imaginative inventions that telescoped time, defied logic, and overturned rational explanations.

In Baroque Concerto the fictional character of the rich Mexican burger meets the historical figures of Scarlatti, Handel, and Vivaldi at the highpoint of the European renaissance in the early eighteenth century. After their imaginary concert performance in Venice they repair to the cemetery island of San Michele. There they picnic on the grave of Igor Stravinsky, who did not die until 1971 and is indeed buried there, alongside other twentieth century artists such as Serge Diaghilev, Joseph Brodsky, and Ezra Pound.

This mixture of realism and fantasy was very much a popular feature of Latin-American fiction in the post-war years, and it reached the height of its influence with the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1967. It also has an ‘Old World’ parallel with the work of writers such as the Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov whose The Master and Margerita was first published in the West at exactly the same time.

This influence is to be seen in the work of Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum – Die Blechtrommel (1959) which in its turn can easily be seen as the source of many scenes in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). These novels seemed like innovative works at the time of their first publication (and were enormously successful in commercial terms) but it should be noted that both of these authors have suffered steep declines in their critical reputations ever since. It is as if the fanciful literary devices of Latin-American magical realism do not sit easily with the empirical realist traditions of the English and the European novel.

In Baroque Concerto we can easily accept the idea of a rich Mexican burger meeting three European composers on a journey to Italy – where all three of them worked at one time or another and actually did meet each other in 1709. It can be taken as a fanciful idea which is given a realistic historical substance to make it credible. But jerking temporally forward to also include Igor Stravinsky and Louis Armstrong snaps the thread of our suspended disbelief. It is as though we have been tricked or had the carpet pulled from under our feet.

At least that is the negatively critical view on this matter. Other readers might choose to focus on the thematically congruent issue of music in the Vivaldi-Stravinsky-Armstrong continuum and regard the tale as a meditation on the transformative power of works of art. As the Negro servant Filomeno says to his Master as they go their separate ways at the end of the novella:

of what good is the illusion of theatre if not to remove us from where we are and take us to where we can’t get to on our own? Thanks to the theatre we can go back in time and live in periods forever gone – something impossible for us in our present flesh.

Baroque Concerto – study resources

Baroque Concerto – at Amazon UK – (Text in English)

Concierto barroco – at Amazon UK – (Text in Spanish)

Baroque Concerto – at Amazon US – (Text in English)

Concierto barroco – at Amazon US – (Text in Spanish)

Baroque Concerto – plot summary

Part 1. The Master, a rich Mexican burger, is taking stock of his house prior to embarking on a journey to Europe. He drinks wine with his servant and is visited by his mistress. Other visitors arrive with requests that he bring back various luxury items from his excursion.

Part 2. He travels from Veracruz to Cuba where the ship has to be repaired. Havana is in the grip of a plague. When his servant dies he takes on Filomeno, a freed Negro, as his replacement. Filomeno relates a story of European adventurers pillaging in the Caribbean who were defeated by his grandfather, who was given his freedom as a reward. The victory was celebrated for two days with primitive musical instruments.

Part 3. When he arrives in Madrid, the Master finds the capital squalid, the cuisine boring, and cultural life poor in general compared with his homeland. He and Filomeno travel to Valencia, then on to Barcelona, where they prepare to continue their journey to Italy.

Part 4. When they arrive in Venice, the Carnival is in full swing, with people taking opportunities for licentious behaviour behind their costumes and masks. The Master is dressed as the Aztec king Montezuma, and he meets Vivaldi, Handel, and Scarlatti who decide they are overwhelmed with the celebrations and wish to play some music.

Part 5. They repair to the Ospedale della Pieta, where the young abandoned girls under Vivaldi’s tutelage provide the orchestra for a grand concerto – with Handel at the organ and Scarlatti at the harpsichord. After this, Filomeno leads a primitive bachannalian song and dance around the church. At dawn, they leave in gondolas with picnic hampers.

Part 6. They repair to an island cemetery where the Master recounts the story of Montezuma, which Vivaldi thinks will make a good plot for an opera. They discuss the plots of Shakespeare’s tragedies whilst breakfasting around the grave of Ivor Stravinsky. Then they return to St Mark’s Square.

Part 7. Next day the Master and Filomeno attend a performance of Vivaldi’s opera Montezuma at the Teatro Fenice. The story of the conquest of Mexico by Cortes has been changed in its historical detail and accuracy. There is a re-enactment on stage of battles, the capture of a princess, and then a happy finale when Cortes forgives and pardons all his prisoners. The Master protests at the lack of historical accuracy, but Vivaldi argues that artifice has its own rules of logic and aesthetic structure.

Part 8. Afterwards the Master and Filomeno discuss the relationship between history and art, and the differences between a European and (Latin) American view of the world. They visit a music shop where they see copies of The Four Seasons and The Messiah. They part company at the railway station, after which Filomeno stays behind to visit the theatre again, where there is a recital given by Louis Armstrong.

Alejo Carpentier

Alejo Carpentier – other works

The Kingdom of This World is a marvelously compressed account of the slave uprising and first revolution of the early nineteenth century in San Domingo – now Haiti. Carpentier uses ‘magical realism’, long before it became fashionable, to depict the contradictions between political reality and religious or mythical beliefs. The story passes rapidly in a series of vivid scenes from the early unsuccessful uprising led by Macandal, then Bouckman who led Haiti in its fight for independence from France, and finally to Henri Christophe the revolutionary leader who later became Emperor of Haiti, and who built Sans Souci and La Ferrière Citadel.
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The Lost Steps (1953) is a story told twice. A disillusioned north-American musicologist flees his empty existence in New York City. He takes a journey with his mistress to one of the few remaining areas of the world not yet touched by civilization – the upper reaches of a great South American river (which we take to be the Amazon). The novel describes his search, his adventures, the revival of his creative powers, and the remarkable decision he makes about his life in a village that seems to be truly outside history. This novel offers a wonderful evocations of Latin America from the founder of ‘Magical Realism’.
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Alejo Carpentier weblinks

Carpentier at Wikipedia
Background, biography, magical realism, major works, literary style, further reading

Carpentier at Amazon UK
Novels, criticism, and interviews – in Spanish and English

The Kingdom of this World
Lecture by Rod Marsh – University of Cambridge

Carpentier at Internet Movie Database
Films and TV movies made from his novels

Carpentier in Depth
Spanish video documentary and interview with Carpentier (1977)

More on Alejo Carpentier
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Basil

December 19, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Basil (1852) was the first major novel by Wilkie Collins and possibly one of the first sensation novels. Because of his friendship with the more famous writer Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins has been unjustly neglected, with the exception of his two best known novels The Woman in White and The Moonstone. But he was an energetic and prolific artist who, like his contemporary Mary Elizabeth Braddon, was amazingly successful in the mid-nineteenth century. Their novels were the cultural equivalents of today’s soap operas and multi-part television dramas.

Basil contains all the elements of a mystery story and a thriller, and is amazingly in advance of its time in depicting what we would now call existential angst. As a result of a casual sighting of an attractive woman, Basil gradually finds himself enmeshed in a life-threatening struggle with forces he only half understands.

Basil – a note on the text

Basil was first published in three volumes by Richard Bentley, London in 1852. The full title at that times was Basil: A Story of Modern Life. It was then reprinted in 1856 and reset in one volume, published by James Blackwood, London with no alterations.

Wilkie Collins then carefully revised his text (and eliminated the sub-title) for publication in one volume by Sampson Low, Son & Co, London in 1862. The changes he made were largely a reduction in the length of some of the longer scenes and the removal of items from doubled or trebled phrases which were a common feature of his style.

Basil – critical commentary

The sensation novel

The sensation novel came of age in the 1860s with the publication of Collins’ The Woman in White (1860) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1861). The genre has been described as ‘novels with a secret’ – and it is easy to see Basil as a precursor to these well known examples.

Basil certainly has a number of secrets that help to drive the plot and its suspense. The first of these is the enigmatic figure of Margaret Sherwin – a a woman who completely mesmerises Basil, but about whom we know nothing. Unknown to Basil she is conducting a secret relationship with the sinister character Mannion.

The second secret or mystery is Mr Sherwin’s bizarre proposal of a secret marriage for his daughter, followed by a twelve month chaste courtship. Why would anyone propose so unusual an arrangement? This puts Basil’s patience under strain, and it has to be said it the reader’s credulity too.

Mrs Sherwin is a ‘silenced’ woman and a bag of nerves. She is a second level of mystery – but it is obvious to the reader that she is being threatened into silence by her domineering husband. As a character, she seems to be signalling her disquiet to the reader above the heads of the other characters.

Mr Mannion is an additional mystery. He appears at first to have no ‘background’, and is only a clerk, yet acts in a superior manner. His employer Mr Sherwin rates him very highly. His background and the sources of his malevolent motivation are only revealed later in the novel

The double, twinning, and parallels

Underpinning both the structure and the characterisation of the novel is a pattern of twinning or parallels – commonly referred to in literary studies as the double. The most obvious case is that of the two women towards whom Basil is attracted – his sister Clara and his ‘wife’ Margaret Sherwin.

The two women are opposites. Clara is fair-haired and virtuous, loyal, pure, and long suffering. Margaret is dark-haired and scheming, duplicitous, sensual, and cruel. They represent the two sides of Basil’s attitude to sexuality.

He is drawn to Clara in a lofty, spiritual, and almost intellectual sense. She represents everything that is good and untainted in woman – though it has to be said that short of incest, there is no way this relationship can lead towards anything productive. It is interesting nevertheless that at the end of the novel Basil has gone into a very premature retirement, living with his sister.

But he is drawn towards Margaret by libidinous impulses that he simply cannot control. It is worth noting that the moment he recognises the force of these desires, he starts to feel guilty – towards his family and towards Clara in particular.

When Basil dreams, this division is symbolised by his struggle with two women. One is a fair creature in pure white robes trying to lead his towards heaven; the other is a dark-haired seductress who is dragging him into the woods.

I was drawn along in the arms of the dark woman, with my blood beating and my breath failing me, until we entered the secret recesses that lay amid the unfathomable depths of trees. There she encircled me in the folds of her dusky robe

This ‘twinning’ or ‘doubling’ is repeated in the figures of Basil and his arch-rival Robert Mannion. Both of them have been burdened by a negative legacy from their fathers. Basil is cursed by his father’s obsessive ancestor worship and his desire to keep the family‘s name and ‘honour’ free from any lower class contamination.

Basil is the younger, not the elder son – but for the majority of the novel his profligate brother Ralph is absent from the narrative. Mannion’s life has been blighted by the reputational disgrace of his own father, which has pursued him, thwarting his ambition.

Interestingly, Mannion’s father’s disgrace and execution was brought about by Basil’s father. This gives Mannion one powerful motive in his desire to wreak vengeance on Basil.

Both Basil and Mannion are attracted to Margaret Sherwin, and both of them try to ‘educate’ her – without success. Mannion is attracted to her physically but despises her morally. Basil appears to be different, but following the revelation of her duplicity he ends up hating her as well.

Both men have literary aspirations. Basil starts out writing a historical romance, but is side-tracked by his obsession with Margaret. Mannion too seeks fame in writing, but is reduced to hack work for third-class newspapers.

So the two men are locked in an antagonistic union. Basil’s ‘marriage’ to Margaret is destroyed by Mannion’s scheming seduction, and yet Basil’s family has been responsible for the destruction of the confidential clerk’s prospects in life. The two men have every reason to hate each other, and a logical conclusion to the novel might have left Basil in a state of permanent insecurity – but Collins kills off Mannion in a Cornish cliff top scene.

Just in case this ‘doubling’ of characters were not enough, Collins reinforces the effect with dramatic scenes that are significantly paralleled. The very day Basil’s twelve months of celibate waiting are over, his expectations of physical union with Margaret are thwarted by Margaret’s elopement with Mannion. Basil traces them to the seedy ‘hotel’ where he is forced to listen to Mannion and Margaret consummating their illicit relationship in the room next door.

In a similar climactic scene, Basil visits Margaret in the small room where she is dying of Typhus. He forgives her as she expires in a delirium, mocking his attentions and affection. But in another room next door Mannion is a silent witness to this tragic ‘goodbye’. The two men are locked into their conflict right up to the point of Mannion’s death

Literary relativism

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, who was very fond of paradoxes and what might be called the metaphysics of literature, posited the notion that gifted writers could create their own predecessors. What he meant was that a writer in, say, the twentieth century, could express an idea or a feeling that caused readers to newly interpret the work of a writer from a previous age. The contemporary reader looks at the earlier work and sees meanings which were not previously evident to readers at the time the work was created. The words are the same as they have always been, but new meanings are revealed in them

What he was saying is that work created in the present can cause us to see elements of the same feelings, situations, and tensions in work of the past – but which were not previously evident. The idea is offered in a playful and entertaining manner – but it carries with it an important nugget of cultural history.

It is quite common for gifted writers to anticipate moods, feelings, problems, and situations in their work – consciously or unconsciously – which readers at a later date to perceive as prophetic. A classic case in point is Franz Kafka, who was a product of the extremely bureaucratic Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg empire in the early twentieth century. His work anticipated many of the intellectual nightmares of German fascism and Russian Stalinism which engulfed Europe in the 1930s, long after he was dead.

In Basil Wilkie Collins was exploring psychological states and existential crises that were explored later by writers such as Dostoyevski and Kafka. Basil’s narrative is an anguished account of his being trapped in a contradictory and very stressful emotional dilemma that is largely of his own making. And the more he tries to solve the problem he faces, the worse it becomes.

Basil’s state of anguish is very similar to that of Dostoyevski’s first person narrators – from the Underground Man to The Gambler; and Basil’s conflict with his father over his dishonouring of the family name is very reminiscent of the many well-known instances of father-son conflict in Kafka’s work. This is not to claim that Wilkie Collins was somehow being prophetic of later states of being – but it has to be said that he creates a distinctly modern form of existential angst in Basil.

It should also be noted that this particular variety of anxiety, like those of Dostoyevski and Kafka, has a distinctly sexual element in its foundation. Basil sees Margaret Sherwin with her mother on an omnibus ride in London – and falls obsessively in love with her at first sight. He knows nothing about her, except that she is good looking and has dark hair and eyes. And then apart from her social status as the daughter of a linen draper, he learns very little more about her, yet he is prepared to accept the bizarre arrangement of an unconsummated ‘marriage’ followed by twelve months of celibate courtship. Eventually, he is driven to the lengths of attempted murder in pursuit of his obsession.

Problems

This is the first really serious work in what was to become a prodigious output from Collins as a novelist – the ‘King of Inventors’ as his definitive biographer Catherine Peters called him. It is arguably the first ‘sensation novel’ – a genre that combined realistic fiction of English social life with domestic crime, mystery, suspense, and effects which would shock the reader. Nevertheless, it has to be said that there are some problems of narrative logic and credibility in the plot of Basil.

The main problem is that no convincing reason is provided for Sherwin’s strange proposal of a secret marriage followed by a twelve month period of marital abstinence – or Basil’s acceptance of this odd arrangement. Sherwin claims his daughter is too young to be married = she is only seventeen – and it might be thought that he sees Basil as an upper class social catch. But Basil is the younger son of the family and stands to inherit nothing.

The second important weakness is the characterisation of Margaret Sherwin. She hardly exists as a fictional character at all, and is only presented through Basil’s obsession with a love object. She does not act in the narrative; she is not dramatised; she hardly speaks; and we are given no access to her thoughts or motivation.

This is a weakness in the obvious sense of the novel having a character who simply fails to ‘come to life’, but in terms of Wilkie Collins anticipating the psychology of modernism, it is not altogether surprising. The story is intently centred on Basil’s psychology as an individual dealing with threats from all quarters of his life. This is why it is possible to see Collins’ narrative as a precursor of modernist concerns with the existential state.

Basil – study resources

Basil – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Basil – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Basil – Independent Publishers – Amazon UK

Basil – Independent Publishers – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Wilkie Collins – Kindle eBook

Basil – plot synopsis

Part I

Basil is writing his confession at the age of twenty-four in Cornwall. He recalls his rich but austere, ancestor-worshipping father and his elder brother Ralph who is profligate and has no interest in the inheritance of the family estate. His younger sister Clara is a beacon of virtue – selfless and unassuming. Basil is writing a historical romance.

On an omnibus ride he sees Margaret Sherwin and is immediately attracted to her. He follows her home and discovers that she is a shopkeeper’s daughter. He feels burdened by his duty to marry only into his own class, but is tormented by his desire for Margaret. He dreams of a dark-haired woman taking him off into a wood.

Next day he bribes a servant and intercepts Margaret on her way to market, spilling out his love for her. She dismisses his attentions, but it does not deter him. He writes to her but she refuses his entreaties on the grounds of their differences in rank. He then obtains an interview with her father, to whom he proposes a secret marriage which will be revealed at a later date.

Basil immediately feels guilty at concealing the plan from his family. At a second meeting Mr Sherwin proposes an immediate ‘private’ marriage followed by a twelve month supervised courtship, because Margaret is only seventeen. Basil’s father puts him under a code of honour to respect the family tradition before leaving for his estate. Clara wishes to share any of his sorrows or difficulties. Basil and Margaret are married in virtual secrecy, after which he goes home alone.

Part II

Basil is allowed to meet Margaret every day under the nervous supervision of Mrs Sherwin. He decides to educate Margaret in works of literature, but she only wants to hear trivial gossip about his family. They are joined by Sherwin’s confidential clerk Mr Mannion, who is cold, handsome, and mysteriously superior. He knows all about the secret marriage.

Basil goes home with Mannion, who is subserviently friendly and offers to help Basil ‘manage’ Mr Sherwin. Basil has brief glimpses of Margaret’s petulance. Mannion discretely helps him to overcome Mr Sherwin’s strictures.

Basil is summoned to the country by a letter from his sister. His father remains distant and severe. Clara guesses that Basil is involved with a woman. On his return to London, Margaret and Mannion both seem to be ill.

At the end of his year-long probation Basil finds that Margaret has gone to an aunt’s party with Mannion, He follows them and traces them to a seedy hotel of assignation. Realising he has been duped, he waits for Mannion to leave the hotel, then launches an attack to kill him.

Part III

Basil then has a nervous breakdown, during which he thinks back over previous events and how he has been duped. He is cared for by Clara. Mannion is not dead but has lost one eye and is horribly disfigured. He refuses to say anything about himself or what happened.

Basil receives a letter from Sherwin claiming that Margaret is innocent. This is followed by a second letter threatening to expose him. Basil’s father demands to know what secret Basil has been keeping from him. When he learns the truth he turns on Basil savagely and disowns him completely for disgracing the family name. Clara appears and pleads for clemency, but it is refused.

Basil confronts Sherwin, who argues that he must accept Margaret since she is legally his wife. Mrs Sherwin however supports Basil’s claims of duplicity, but then dies shortly afterwards. Basil discovers that Mannion has been sending letters to Margaret.

Basil reads Mannion’s long confessional letter describing his father’s crime of forgery against his employer (who was Basil’s father) and his being hanged as a result. Mannion is dogged by his bad family reputation, but eventually finds work with Sherwin and rises in status. He also covets Margaret, though Mrs Sherwin suspects his intentions.

Mannion has groomed Margaret, whom he secretly despises, and he has plotted revenge on Basil throughout his probationary twelve months ‘courtship’. Now horribly disfigured, Mannion threatens to pursue Basil and discredit his family’s name once he is out of hospital.

Basil’s brother Ralph suddenly arrives and offers to help him by negotiating with Sherwin and buying his silence. He is followed by a visit from Clara who offers shreds of comfort from home. Ralph returns with with the news that Margaret has joined Mannion at the hospital. Ralph has counter-threatened Sherwin, who has agreed to compromise.

Ralph and Basil go to the hospital where they learn that Margaret was followed by Sherwin who is in pursuit of her. Mannion is regarded as a monomaniac, and there is an outbreak of Typhus on one of the wards.

A week later Basil learns that Margaret is dying of Typhus she accidentally contracted during her visit. Dr Bernard invites Basil to visit her, which he does, watching through the night whilst she mocks him in her fever. But he eventually forgives her – shortly before she dies.

At Margaret’s graveside Basil is confronted by Mannion who menaces him again, threatening to blight his life and his family. Ralph advises Basil to leave London so as to protect Clara from Mannion. Basil goes to a remote village in Cornwall.

Journal

Basil lives in isolation, peacefully at first, until the villagers turn against him. He feels that Mannion’s evil influence is pursuing him, so he leaves. Whilst walking along the coastline in a storm he is confronted by Mannion, who then falls to his death into a chasm. Basil cannot get the image of Mannion out of his mind, and he has a nervous breakdown.

Letters

Cornish people check Basil’s papers and send word to his family in London. Ralph, Clara, and Dr Bernard rescue Basil, who is reconciled with his father. Nine years later Basil retires to a country cottage with Clara to live in obscurity. Following their father’s death Ralph becomes a reformed head of the family, and Basil consigns his confession to Dr Berard for publication.

Wilkie Collins

Basil – principal characters

Basil	a young man of 24
—	his father, a proud ancestor-worshipper
Ralph	Basil’s profligate older brother
Clara	Basil’s devoted younger sister
Stephen Sherwin	a nouveau-riche London linen draper
Mrs Sherwin	his nervous and downtrodden wife
Margaret Sherwin	their dark-haired and attractive daughter
Robert Mannion	Sherwin’s confidential clerk
Dr John Bernard	a friend of Ralph’s

Basil – further reading

William M. Clarke, The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins, London: Ivan R. Dee, 1988.

Tamar Heller, Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Sue Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship, New York: AMS Press, 1982.

Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Walter C. Phillips, Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists, New York: Library of Congress, 1919.

Lynn Pykett, Wilkie Collins: New Casebooks, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1998.

Nicholas Rance, Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists: Walking the Moral Hospital, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1991.

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Because of the Dollars

August 30, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Because of the Dollars was written in 1914, and first appeared as part of Joseph Conrad’s collection Within the Tides published by J.M. Dent and Sons in 1915. The other stories in the volume were The Partner, The Inn of the Two Witches, and The Planter of Malata.

Because of the Dollars – critical commentary

This story features a very typical Conradian dramatic situation – an honourable protagonist in an isolated and vulnerable position, threatened by ruthless villains, and usually with the added complication of a woman on hand for whom the hero feels a gentlemanly sense of responsibility. It’s a situation he used in novels from Lord Jim (1900) to Victory (1915). In this instance there is the additional consideration of a sick child thrown into the plot.

Fortunately for Davidson, he is at least armed with a revolver, and his prime foe the Frenchman has the disadvantage of having no hands. This however does not stop him killing the innocent woman in question, Laughing Anne, who ironically has tied the seven pound weight to his arm stump with which he kills her.

But even after he survives the attempt to rob him of his dollars, his travails are not over. Honourably taking it on himself to look after Laughing Anne’s son Tony, he runs up against the suspicions and ire of his own wife. She suspects that the child is Davidson’s. This is an interesting point, since Laughing Anne is more or less a prostitute, and she does know Davidson from the past. The connection is not impossible, but does not seem to be substantiated by anything else in the text.

Moreover, Mrs Davidson has been flagged up by Hollis earlier in the story as a less than completely sympathetic character:

What I noticed under the superficial aspect of vapid sweetness was her convex, obstinate forehead, and her small, red pretty, ungenerous mouth.

Davidson himself however is universally regarded as ‘a good man’ – so the tale is a cautionary reminder that even good men may suffer misfortune and injustice in pursuit of doing The Right Thing.

Because of the Dollars – study resources

Because of the Dollars – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

Because of the Dollars – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook –

Because of the Dollars – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Because of the Dollars – plot summary

Part I. An un-named outer narrator and his friend Hollis see captain Davidson on the harbour front of an Eastern port. Hollis relates the background story of his character and life, explaining why he is known as ‘a good man’ . Davidson is the commander of the Sissie , which is owned by a Chinaman. When a new printing of dollars is issued, Davidson collects packages of the old silver dollars from people in the ports where he calls. His wife thinks that transporting currency might be dangerous, but he believes that nobody else can take his place. He also wishes to call on Bamtz, a loafer who has taken up with fellow drifter, Laughing Anne. When Davidson first called at the remote island of Mirrah he was recognised by Anne as an old friend. She explains that she has settled with Bamtz for the sake of her child Tony.

Part II. In a quayside bar the blackmailer Fector overhears Davidson’s plans to collect in the old dollars, and he recruits thugs Niclaus and the Frenchman (who has no hands). After collecting dollars, Davidson arrives late at night at the Bamtz house to find the three men with Bamtz, waiting for him. Anne’s son Tony is ill with a fever. Whilst she and Davidson attend to him she warns him about the Frenchman, who that day has asked her to tie a seven pound weight to the stumpt of his right arm.

At night the thugs attack the ship to steal the silver, but Davidson is armed with a revolver and scares them off. The Frenchman realises that Anne has given their plans away, and in the melee that ensues he bludgeons her to death with the weight. Davidson feels that she has somehow died to save him, and he feels guilty. However, he rescues the child.

Davidson buries Anne at sea and gives the child to his wife to look after. However, his wife suspects that the child is actually his, and she turns against both of them. Eventually, even though he tells her the whole story, she leaves him and goes back to her parents. The boy is sent to a church school in Malacca, where he eventually does well and plans to become a missionary. Davidson is left alone with nobody – which is where the story began.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

Because of the Dollars – principal characters

I	an un-named outer narrator
Hollis	his friend
Davidson	commander of the Sissie
Bamtz	a loafer with a beard
Laughing Anne	a drifter from Saigon – a ‘painted woman’
Fector	a blackmailer and ‘journalist’
Niclaus	a dead beat
the Frenchman	a thug with no hands

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.
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Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
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Heart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
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Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
Joseph Conrad complete tales

Benito Cereno

August 3, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Benito Cereno (1856) was published in the collection The Piazza Tales which Melville wrote after the disappointing reception of his masterpiece Moby Dick which had appeared in 1851. Like many of his other works Benito Cereno is rich in ambiguities, symbolism, and profound meanings beneath its surface narrative. It’s based upon a documentary record of historical events written by the real Amasa Delano in 1817, but of course Melville dramatises ‘the capture of a ship’ to make it richer in suggestive allusion.

The events of the story are an exercise in sustained irony (a device also used by another mariner-novelist, Joseph Conrad). The first time reader is invited to see circumstances exactly as Captain Amasa Delano encounters them, as he goes from his own ship to offer help to a striken fellow captain. Everything he confronts is baffling, contradictory, and uncertain. He struggles to interpret what he finds, but is hampered by his own inclination to believe the best of everybody he meets. The truth of the situation is only revealed very dramatically at the very last minute.

Benito Cereno – critical commentary

Narrative

Most of Benito Cereno is told from the point of view of Amasa Delano. We encounter the puzzling conditions on board the San Dominick as he does; we have things presented to us as he sees them, and we do not have any other point of view by which to achieve a fictional triangulation to assess what is going on (except in a second or subsequent reading).

Melville’s narrative technique sometimes takes us into Delano’s thoughts, almost in a form of interior monologue, and at times Delano even addresses himself, as if thinking out loud.

The novella is set in 1799 – only a few years after the start of the slave uprising in San Domingo (now Haiti).

Present day readers cannot fail to notice that two of the Spanish crew of the San Dominick are killed by what is now called ‘friendly fire’. That is, when the Americans attack the San Dominick in order to recapture it from the rebel slaves, they mistakenly kill two Spanish sailors who are on their own side in the conflict.

The Novella

Benito Cereno was published as part of The Piazza Tales (1856); it is about 25,000 words long; and it could be regarded as a long short story – but it fulfils many of the criteria for being classed as a novella.

Unity of place

Almost the whole of the story takes place in one location – on board the San Dominick. Captain Delano goes to inspect the ship, climbs aboard alone, and stays there until his boat comes (for the second time) to take him back to the Bachelor’s Delight.

Even the depositions in court (which constitute the ‘explanation’ for what happened) are scenes which took place on board the San Dominick prior to its encounter with the Bachelor’s Delight.

Unity of action

The essential drama of the story unfolds in more or less one continuous action. Moreover, these events are compressed into the shortest possible chronological sequence – less than one whole day. Captain Delano goes on board the San Dominick in the morning, He takes a ‘frugal’ lunch with Captain Cereno. And when his boat ‘Rover’ comes back for the second time to take him back, he returns to the Bachelor’s Delight. The action of the story is concentrated in an almost Aristotelian manner to produce unity of time and action.

Unity of atmosphere

The whole of the narrative is shrouded in mists, becalmed seas, and symbols of mystery and ambiguity. The skies are gray, the San Dominick looks like a ‘white-washed monastery after a thunder-storm’. Nothing is quite what it seems. Delano is constantly baffled by the contradictions and mysteries he encounters. The ship’s figurehead is wrapped in a shroud; Captain Cereno shows no gratitude for being given help on his doomed ship; the slave Atufal is still in chains when others have been released. The tension and sense of menace increase until the moment in the ‘Rover’ that Captain Delano realises what is happening.

Even the events described in the court depositions intensify this atmospheric unity – since they enhance the macabre and grotesque nature of what has taken place aboard the doomed ship.

Unity of character

There are a number of minor named characters in the story – but essentially the whole drama is focussed on three people – Delano, Cereno, and Babo. Captain Delano is the naive, good natured protagonist, seeking to interpret the ambiguities of the world he encounters – and failing to do so at every turn until the truth is finally thrust upon him. Cereno is a good man totally in thrall to an evil power – almost a warning of what Delano’s naivety can lead to if he doesn’t wake up. And Babo is that evil power incarnate. He has been ruthless in taking control of the San Dominick; he has murdered his former ‘owner’, and had his skeleton nailed to the prow with an ironic warning inscribed ‘Follow your leader’. Babo orchestrates events on board the ship, including the menacing shave for Cereno.

The main issue

The event is one from many curious incidents recounted by mariners and others from events at sea. Melville’s work as a novelist draws on many of these recorded events. But these particular events are more than just curious: they embrace large scale political issues. The relationship between America, Europe, and colonialism for instance. America at the time of the story had just fought a war of independence, changing itself from a colony of Britain to an independent state. It had also been engaged in conflicts with England, Spain, and France regarding the slave trade.

The first successful slave uprising had started in San Domingo (now Haiti) in 1791. Slavery was not abolished formally in Great Britain until 1833 and in the USA until 1865, and it is interesting to note that the practice of slavery was first begun in the Spanish colonies around 1500.

So the story does not deal with small scale accidental matters, but forces of great geo-political importance. Benito Cereno, a Spaniard is in charge of a ship whose primary cargo is slaves, ‘owned’ by another Spaniard (Alexandro Aranda).

We do not know where the slaves are from, but it is significant that immediately after seizing control of the San Dominick the rebellion leader Babo wants to be taken back to Senegal – on the west coast of Africa. In other words, he has enough ‘race memory’ to know where he might have originally come from.

Benito Cereno – study resources

Benito Cereno – Oxford World Classics edition

Benito Cereno – Dover Thrift edition

Benito Cereno – Penguin Classics edition

Benito Cereno – Cliffs Notes

Benito Cereno – Norton Critical Editions

Benito Cereno – free eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Benito Cereno – Kindle eBook edition

Herman Melville at Wikipedia

Benito Cereno – plot summary

Amasa Delano is the good-natured captain of the Bachelor’s Delight, an American sealing ship sailing off the western coast of Chile in 1799. His ship is approached by another, the San Dominick, which is drifting aimlessly and appears like a ghost ship. Delano goes to inspect it and discovers a puzzling state of affairs on board. The captain, Don Benito Cereno appears to be in a state of collapse, there are very few crew members on board, and a cargo of ‘negro slaves’ has been let loose to act in a somewhat menacing fashion.

Benito Cereno explains to Delano that most of the crew were lost during terrible storms at sea, which also damaged the ship; but his explanation doesn’t entirely satisfy Delano, who nevertheless sends his boat back to the Bachelor’s Delight to fetch emergency supplies for the survivors.

Throughout Delano’s visit to the San Dominick, Benito Cereno is accompanied by a very attentive negro servant who never leaves his side. Indeed, he is so solicitous of his master’s wellbeing that Delano at one point offers to buy him for his own use.

Delano continues to be disturbed by the inexplicable goings-on around him – such as a group of slaves who are sharpening hatchets, and Benito Cereno’s lack of thanks for the assistance he is being offered. But Delano repeatedly interprets what he see in a positive and generous light.

When the relief supplies have been distributed, Delano sends the boat back to the Bachelor’s Delight, leaving him alone with the members of the San Dominick. He watches Babo shave Benito Cereno, then dines with them, the servant being present throughout. Delano then takes charge of the San Dominick and steers it towards the Bachelor’s Delight in a safe mooring. He invites Benito Cereno to join him on board for coffee – but Benito Cereno refuses.

When a boat arrives to collect him Delano is still puzzled by Cereno’s coldness and lack of response to a generous offer of help. But when Delano gets into the boat, Cereno suddenly leaps from the San Dominick, closely followed by Babo bearing a knife. Delano is convinced they are going to kill him, but it quickly becomes apparent that Babo intends to kill Benito Cereno.

Babo is seized, they regain the Bachelor’s Delight, and then a party of men sets off and recaptures the San Dominick, which is taken to investigative governmental courts in Lima, Peru.

The second part of the story is a sequence of depositions made to the court which record the true sequence of events regarding the San Dominick and the fate of those on board. Starting with a general revolt of the ‘cargo’ of slaves, Babo and his henchman Atufal take charge and command Benito Cereno to sail for Senegal, which is half way round the other side of the world, in West Africa. Members of the Spanish crew are murdered or thrown alive into the sea.

Alexandro Aranda (the ‘owner’ of the slaves) is murdered, and his skeleton is nailed to the front of the ship as a figurehead. After storms and damage to the ship, they arrive at Santa Maria at the same time as the Bachelor’s Delight. Babo arranges the deceptive appearance on board the San Dominick and threatens everybody on board with instant death if they reveal the truth of what has happened. He even puts Atufal in chains as a deceptive ploy, and plans to seize arms and capture the Bachelor’s Delight.

The tribunal recognises Babo as the principal culprit, and sentences him to death. Benito Cereno retreats to a monastery, where he dies three months later.

Principal characters

Amasa Delano	American captain of the Bachelor’s Delight, a sealing and general trading ship
Don Benito Cereno	young captain of the San Dominick, a first-calss Spanish general trading ship
Babo	former slave and ‘attendant’ to Benito Cereno
Don Alexandro Aranda	‘owner’ of the slave ‘cargo’ on the San Dominick
Atufal	Babo’s assistant, a slave and ‘former king’

Theatrical adaptation

Poster for 1965 play by the poet Robert Lowell

Benvolio

May 26, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Benvolio first appeared in magazine form in The Galaxy for August 1875. It was then reprinted in book form amongst The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales in 1879.

Benvolio – critical commentary

The fairy tale

James playfully opens this story with the sentence “Once upon a time (as if he had lived in a fairy tale) there was a very interesting young man”. Thus he simultaneously quotes a traditional fairy tale and pretends to distance himself from it. But what follows piles up one cliché of the genre after another

There is no attempt whatever to locate the character or events within the framework of realistic fiction. No place names or geographic location are specified. The names of the characters are either generic (the Professor, the Countess) or are ‘invented’ (Benvolio – which is not actually his real name).

All the details of the story are from the stock repertoire of the fairy tale: the Countess has a ‘court’ and she takes Benvolio to her country estate where there is ‘bear hunting’; messages arrive on ‘parchment’. None of the interaction of the characters is dramatised: everything is given in generalized summary (‘as the years went by’). The young women are beautiful; the Professor is naturally a wizened old man; and journeys to the other side of the world are accounted for within a single sentence.

The atmosphere of a late Renaissance period is reasonably well summoned up (not unlike Virginia Woolf’s similar efforts in Orlando) – with the exception of minor anachronisms such as mention of bookshops, publishers, and magazines.

Theme

But to what end? It is very difficult to say if James was exploring any serious theme or ideas in this tale or not. The principal issue (which he drags out to inordinate length) is Benvolio’s divided attraction to the worldly glamour offered by the Countess and the somewhat puritanical life of research and editorship symbolised by Scholastica.

The only way of making sense of this is to take a reading (supported by so many other of James’s tales) which sees this as a psychological exploration of what James himself saw as the dangers that women represented to him as a writer.

He knew that the worldly life of dinner parties and invitations from aristocratic ladies to weekends at country estates took him away from his work – though it gave him a great deal of his material in terms of gossip and anecdotes. On the other hand, marriage to a bluestocking or a librarian might lead to the drying up of his inspiration. After all, as soon as Benvolio settles with his scholastic muse, his talent evaporates.

In this reading Benvolio is yet another cautionary tale against the dangers of women and emotional commitment. Whatever sense is made of the story, it is without doubt one of the most laboured, repetitive, and unsuccessful in all of James’s hundred-plus tales.

Benvolio – study resources

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

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

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

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

Benvolio – eBook versions at Gutenberg

Benvolio – facsimile of original text

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Benvolio – plot summary

Part I. Benvolio is a rich, poetic young man who is full of contradictions. He lives in comfort, writes, and reflects philosophically. But he gradually becomes blas&eacute and feels that he needs more purpose in his life. He decides that he will write about great ideas and truths, and begin to engage with the world.

Part II. He engages with a beautiful and rich widow, the Countess, then falls in love with her – but will not propose marriage. She is much sought after, and cannot understand his reticence. He doesn’t think she has all the qualities required in a wife. She decides to keep him at bay, and he discovers that other women are not nearly as interesting. One romantic night he breaks into her castle to see her – but still does not propose. So she leaves him.

Part III. Benvolio stays at home during the summer months. He buys a Venetian painting, then becomes enchanted with a girl who sits in his shared back garden. He thinks she might be reading one of his own books. But when rain sets in he pines for the Countess. When he sees the girl in a bookshop he impulsively offers to deliver all the books she has ordered.

Part IV. He delivers the books and meets the girl and her father, the Professor, an old blind man. They live in an adjacent house owned by the Professor’s brother, who is a miser. Benvolio engages in philosophic discussions with the Professor, and he grows to rate highly the qualities of the girl, Scholastica.

Part V. However, he also perceives limitations in Scholastica and goes back to the court of the Countess, where he develops his talent for dramatic poetry. He writes a masterpiece in which the Countess is the star. On going back home he returns to his back garden and feels guilty that he has neglected his neighbours. He tells Scholastica all about the Countess.

Part VI. He also tells the Countess all about Scholastica, and feels personally divided between the studious and social life. His new comedy is a great success. The Countess becomes jealous of his attentions to Scholastica. She proposes a winter holiday on her estate where Benvolio finally declares his complete love for her. But when they return to town they quarrel. He wishes to marry, but she is not sure, and suggests that they travel.

Part VII. He takes a cold leaving of Scholastica and travels in Italy with the Countess. However, they quarrel over Scholastica again and he returns home alone to discover that the Professor has died. He offers to help Scholastica edit the Professor’s papers. Meanwhile her uncle gives her an allowance but threatens to cut it off if she marries ‘a poet’. Benvolio meets the Countess again and writes new verse dramas.

Then Scholastica’s uncle withdraws her allowance. The Countess arranges for Benvolio to be sent on a diplomatic mission, and engineers a job abroad for Scholastica. However, Benvolio tells the Countess that her main attraction was as a contrast to Scholastica, and after six months he sails off to bring Scholastica back home. But his subsequent literary productions are ‘dull’.

Principal characters

Benvolio	a rich and poetic young man (not his real name)
Madam	the person to whom the story is addressed
The Countess	a beautiful young widow (not her real name)
The Professor	a learned and blind old man
Scholastica	his pretty young daughter, ‘a learned maiden’ (not her real name)

Henry James travelling with Edith Wharton

Benvolio journeys with the Countess?

Other works by Henry James

The Bostonians (1886) is a novel about the early feminist movement. The heroine Verena Tarrant is an ‘inspirational speaker’ who is taken under the wing of Olive Chancellor, a man-hating suffragette and radical feminist. Trying to pull her in the opposite direction is Basil Ransom, a vigorous young man to whom Verena becomes more and more attracted. The dramatic contest to possess her is played out with some witty and often rather sardonic touches, and as usual James keeps the reader guessing about the outcome until the very last page.
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What Masie Knew (1897) A young girl is caught between parents who are in the middle of personal conflict, adultery, and divorce. Can she survive without becoming corrupted? It’s touch and go – and not made easier for the reader by the attentions of an older man who decides to ‘look after’ her. This comes from the beginning of James’s ‘Late Phase’, so be prepared for longer and longer sentences. In fact it’s said that whilst composing this novel, James switched from writing longhand to using dictation – and it shows if you look carefully enough – part way through the book.
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The Ambassadors (1903) Lambert Strether is sent from America to Paris to recall Chadwick Newsome, a young man who is reported to be compromising himself by an entanglement with a wicked woman. However, Strether’s mission fails when he is seduced by the social pleasures of the European capital, and he takes Newsome’s side. So a second ambassador is dispatched in the form of the more determined Sarah Pocock. She delivers an ultimatum which is resisted by the two young men, but then an accident reveals unpleasant truths to Strether, who is faced by a test of loyalty between old Europe and the new USA. This edition presents the latest scholarship on James and includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times.
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Henry James – web links

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

The 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
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