Mantex

Tutorials, Study Guides & More

>> Home / Tutorials

Tutorials

literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

Pandora

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Pandora (1884) is a story which combines three topics which regularly fascinated Henry James and are present in many of his tales and novels. Foremost is the relationship between Europe and America – his ‘International’ theme. Next comes the ‘new woman’ who emerged in America towards the end of the nineteenth century and behaved in a socially more liberated manner. And third is the social and moral tensions which arise in cases of class mobility – though James doesn’t always discuss this issue explicitly.

Transatlantic steamer

Nineteenth century transatlantic steamer

Its textual history throws an interesting light onto the publishing of fiction in the late nineteenth century. It first appeared in two instalments of the New York Sun on 1 and 8 June 1884. That’s a week between each part of the story – rather like a television drama today. It was then reprinted twice in book form, collected with other Henry James stories. This is a form of publication almost unthinkable today. Then, when James was honoured with the multi-volume New York edition of his collected works, it appeared again, heavily revised.

Pandora – critical commentary

The ‘new woman’

James presents Pandora as an example of the ‘new type’ of woman, the ‘self-made girl’ – but she is in fact a product of upward social mobility – an arriviste. She comes from a family in trade, not people of inherited wealth or ‘old money’ upper-class society to which she aspires. She is intent on prising the family away from their provincial origins of Utica in upper New York state, of which Mrs Dangerfield observes “You can’t have a social position in Utica any more than you can have an opera box”. In fact she adds that Pandora (by Mrs Dangerfield’s own standards) does not even have a ‘social position’. Yet she is on the way to acquiring one.

It is interesting to note that her fiancé Bellamy is also originally from the same upstate town, and he too started out in ‘some kind of business’ with not enough income to offer her marriage. They have been engaged since Pandora was sixteen. But he too has managed to climb upwards socially with his appointment to a diplomatic position in government.

To reinforce the argument that this is a class mobility issue, there is a strong suggestion that Bellamy has secured his appointment via Pandora’s influence during her conversation with the president of the ‘the world’s largest country’ [James’s words]. At the social gathering where she meets the president she takes her leave of him by saying “Well now, remember, I consider it a promise”.

Narrative structure

The story is neatly divided into two parts – each of which reflects the other. In the first part Vogelstein gets to know Pandora whilst on board a ship. When it docks she is due to be met by her fiancé Bellamy, but he is unavailable. In the second part they are again on board a river boat, but this time Bellamy does make his appearance to claim his bride-to-be.

At the start of part one, Vogelstein has just been appointed to the German legation in Washington – and so has travelled from Europe to America. At the end of part two, Bellamy has been appointed as ambassador to Holland – and will therefore be travelling from America to Europe to take up his post.

Inter-textuality

This is very much a conscious variation on the theme of the ‘new type’ of woman from James’s earlier success, Daisy Miller – so much so that he has his protagonist and narrator Vogelstein actually reading the story on board ship whilst journeying to New York – in a German pocketbook edition. He comments on the characters in the story and draws comparisons between Daisy and Pandora, as well as between Randolph Miller and Pandora’s brother, who he sees as what the young Randolph might have grown up to become.

there was for Vogelstein at least an analogy between young Mr.Day and a certain small brother … who was, in the Tauchnitz volume, attributed to that unfortunate maid. This was what the little Madison [Randolph] would have grown up to at nineteen, and the improvement was greater than might have been expected

Name and title

The Pandora of classical Greek mythology was the name for the first ‘all gifted’ woman, created by Zeus (King of the Gods) for the deliberate confusion of man. She was sent as a wife to Epimetheus with a box which she was forbidden to open. When she disobeyed this injunction, she released all the evils of the world. Only Hope remained inside the box.

It is not difficult to see these meanings linked to the repeated appearance of strong women in James’s stories as predatory creatures who might threaten men who have a fear of marriage. Vogelstein certainly perceives Pandora as an aggressive female, putting her into that category with other women he has encountered ‘they were apt to advance, like this one, straight upon their victim’.

It is also perhaps worth noting that Pandora is not her real but her ‘pet’ name. Just like the socially mobile Daisy Miller, whose real name is Annie P. Miller, Pandora is shedding part of her provincial identity as she climbs upwards. We do not learn her real name.

Pandora – study resources

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

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

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

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

Red button Pandora – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Red button Pandora – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Pandora Pandora – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

Pandora

Pandora – plot summary

Part I. Count Otto Vogelstein has just been appointed as secretary to the German legation in Washington. He is travelling from Southampton to New York on board the steamship Donau when he meets Pandora Day, a spirited young American woman and her family. Because of his lack of experience and his rather conventional social views, he is unable to place her socially. Mrs Dangerfield, an experienced American fellow traveller, warns him against closer acquaintance on the grounds that the family lack the necessary social cachet.

Henry James Daisy MillerPart II. Two years later he meets Pandora again at an exclusive society party in Washington which includes the American president. She has become even more attractive and socially confident. The hostess describes her to Vogelstein as a woman of a ‘new type’. He wonders what this type can be, and is told that it is an exclusively American phenomenon of a younger woman developing upward social mobility as a result of reading, natural talent, and foreign travel.

Vogelstein joins Pandora on a boating party up the Potomac river to the home of George Washington and feels himself drawn closer to her – even entertaining ideas of her qualities as a diplomat’s wife. However, he is cautious because he thinks she might be a pushy spouse, and might commit social gaffes in his aristocratic German social circles. However, on landing back in Washington, she is met by a man who turns out to be her long term fiancé who has just been appointed as American ambassador to Holland.

Principal characters
Count Otto Vogelstein a young man in the German diplomatic service
‘Pandora’ Day a young American woman
Mr P.W. Day her father from Utica in upstate New York
Mrs Day her mother
Mrs Dangerfield Vogelstein’s American confidante on board the Donau
Mr D.F. Bellamy Pandora’s fiancé from Utica (40)
Mr Lansing Bellamy’s friend, an immigration officer in New York
Mrs Bonnycastle social hostess and arbiter in Washington
Mr Alfred Bonnycastle her husband
Mrs Steuben a widow

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

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

Henry James What Masie KnewWhat Masie Knew (1897) A young girl is caught between parents who are in the middle of personal conflict, adultery, and divorce. Can she survive without becoming corrupted? It’s touch and go – and not made easier for the reader by the attentions of an older man who decides to ‘look after’ her. This comes from the beginning of James’s ‘Late Phase’, so be prepared for longer and longer sentences. In fact it’s said that whilst composing this novel, James switched from writing longhand to using dictation – and it shows if you look carefully enough – part way through the book.

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

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2012

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

Parallel Lives

by

studies of five unusual Victorian marriages

Parallel Lives made a big impact when it first appeared, and continues to be a source of inspiration to many biographers. I noticed an appreciative reference to it in Katie Roiphe’s recent study of unconventional literary relationships, Uncommon Arrangements, which deals with similar issues. Phyllis Rose has chosen to write about a series of fairly famous Victorian literary marriages in which the personal relationships were unusual by contemporary standards, and which she believes offer modern readers something to think about in our age of apparent sexual free-for-all.

Parallel Lives And I couldn’t help feeling from hints she drops at regular intervals throughout the book that she was working out some of her own personal issues at the same time. The subjects are Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle, Effie Gray and John Ruskin, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens, and George Elliot and George Henry Lewes.

What she is trying to show is that in an age when marriages were often made as financial and social contracts, the arrangements made to cater for personal satisfaction were often more subtle and successful than we might imagine today, when sexual or romantic reasons are given precedence.

The story of Ruskin’s wedding night fiasco is reasonably well known: the authority on classical beauty took fright when he saw a real woman in the flesh. What is not so well known is that he never consummated the marriage, and after several years of misery, being presented with his failure to deliver as the grounds for divorce, he offered to ‘prove his virility’ in court. How exactly he would have gone about doing this is the source of some amused speculation.

John Stuart Mill’s case is slightly different, although it shared one important feature. He fell in love with Harriet Taylor, whose husband thoughtfully allowed them to carry on their relationship because it was sexually chaste. Even when the tolerant Mr Taylor died and the couple were able to marry, the habit stuck, reinforced by Mill’s belief that men should subjugate themselves to women’s will – in order to compensate for the historical injustices they had suffered.

It’s hard to see why Phyllis Rose included the similarly well-known case of Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine Hogarth, except as she concludes “he provides a fine example of how not to end a marriage”. Their early life together is a portrait of his energy and bonhomie; then comes his disenchantment and the separation. But of the twelve remaining years secretly engaged with Ellen Ternan – nothing is made. Dickens took such rigorous pains to conceal his tracks, there’s still no hard evidence on the degree of their intimacy – though it’s almost impossible to escape the conclusion that it was complete.

Rose makes the case that George Eliot, a woman blessed with high intelligence but not good looks, was forthright and enterprising enough to seek out what she says every normal woman wants – a man to love and be loved by. The man in question was George Henry Lewes, married though separated from his wife. But because his wife had three children by his friend Thornton Hunt, all of them were regarded as scandalous libertines by society at the time. Eliot lived with Lewes happily ‘outside the law’ for twenty-four years, then when he died she married her financial adviser, who was twenty years younger than her.

The strangest case of all is the Carlyles – of whom it was said that the best thing about their being married to each other was that only two people were miserable, not four. In another apparently sexless union, Mrs Carlyle, Jane Welsh, devoted herself to promoting his ‘greatness’ and was treated dreadfully in return. Confiding her unhappiness to a diary which he edited after she died, Thomas Carlyle spent the rest of his life afterwards eaten up by remorse because of the unhappiness he had engendered.

There are plenty of unusual arrangements here, but no easy solutions. Fortunately for us, separation and divorce are much easier in the twenty-first century. But Phyllis Rose wants us to reconsider these examples of Victorian challenges to orthodoxy and view them sympathetically – even when the cost in some cases seemed to be personal happiness and sexual fulfilment.

© Roy Johnson 2002

Parallel Lives Buy the book at Amazon UK

Parallel Lives Buy the book at Amazon US

Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives, London: Vintage, 1994, pp.320, ISBN: 0099308711

More on lifestyle
More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group

Party in the Blitz

by

Canetti amidst English modernists during the war

The first three volumes of Elias Canetti’s memoirs cover the period 1905 to 1937. The Tongue Set Free traces his precocious childhood in Bulgaria, Manchester, Vienna, and Zurich; The Torch in my Ear describes his years in Frankfurt, Vienna, and Berlin as he mixed with German modernists and established his reputation as a writer; then The Play of the Eyes details his affair with Alma Mahler’s daughter as well as his friendships with writers such as Robert Musil and Hermann Broch. This fourth volume Party in the Blitz takes up the story when like many other European refugees he sought asylum in England (London, Hampstead) during the war.

Elias Canetti He is very grateful to England and the protection it offered him, and some of the better pages of this volume are devoted to an appreciation of English history and culture. There’s very little in the way of a continuous argument or a well-planned chronology – because the memoir is put together from journal entries, diaries, and fragments he left behind on his death in 1994. The lack of coherence can sometimes be disconcerting – William Empson’s parties and Margaret Thatcher’s Argentinean war policy discussed on the same page for instance.

Basically he takes a character or a topic and dredges up his ideas and impressions from fifty years previously. He seems to have known everybody who was anybody around that time – Dylan Thomas, Roland Penrose, Vaughan Williams, Herbert Read, Arthur Waley, Bertrand Russell, and J.D. Bernal.

The most amazing thing is that there’s no account of his own development as a writer or an intellectual. He doesn’t say what he was reading or writing; there is no sense of work completed that would lead to the Nobel Prize in 1981; and nothing he says is related to either his own cultural heritage or the development of European modernism in the first half of the twentieth century.

He is largely concerned with anecdotes and character sketches of completely inconsequential upper-class toffs and their servants amongst whom he seems to have spent his time. For a man who was supposed to be an intellectual and a writer, it’s amazing to note that the bulk of these pages are taken up by either attacking his contemporaries or driving round Britain in fast cars with dissolute members of the fallen aristocracy – people who he is pleased to relate, can trace their ancestry back to the Norman conquest.

He seems to be most sympathetic to people like himself – the self-confessed misogynist Arthur Waley; the womanizer Bertrand Russell; and a young Enoch Powell, smarting with anguish at the loss of India as part of the British Empire.

London in the war years was a centre for European emigres of all kinds – Kurt Schwitters and Oskar Kokoschka mingle with native artists Stevie Smith, Henry Moore, and Katherine Raine. There are pitilessly cruel portraits of Iris Murdoch, Katherine Raine, and Veronica Wedgewood – all of whom were his former lovers.

You could call Iris Murdoch the bubbling Oxford stewpot. Everything I despise about English life is in her. You could imagine her speaking incessantly, as a tutor, and incessantly listening: in the pub, in bed, in conversation with her male or female lovers … She invited me to Oxford, and met me at the station. She was wearing grotesque sandals, which showed off her large flat feet to terrible disadvantage … she would always come in slovenly academic gear, graceless in her wool or sacking dresses, never really seductive, sometimes in the wrong colours (she didn’t have the ghost of an aesthetic sense where her own clothes were concerned)

What he doesn’t take into account or ask himself is why if he found these women so repugnant, he should become sexually involved with them – as he was, with the full knowledge of his wife. Whilst he fills pages listing the shallowness and failures of his lovers, he says nothing whatever about his wife Veza, the woman to whom he was married throughout all these years. You would never know from these pages that she was a novelist in her own right, and that she had sacrificed much of her time to help him finish Crowds and Power.

But he reserves his most concentrated vitriol for T.S. Eliot, who he berates for embracing English traditions, working in a bank, and writing plays for money.

An American brings over a Frenchman from Paris, someone who died young (Laforgue), drools his self-loathing over him, lives quite literally as a bank clerk, while at the same time he criticises and diminishes anything that was before … and comes up with the end result: an impotency which he shares around with the whole country; he kowtows to any order that’s sufficiently venerable … tormented by his nymphomaniac of a wife …

And for all that Canetti obviously considers himself the great “Dichter”, the only two books he mentions in the four volumes of these memoirs are Auto-da-Fe which he had written by the time he was twenty-six, and Crowds and Power, a study that took him thirty years to bring to completion – a study that in the words of Clive James ‘advanced a thesis no more gripping than its title’.

These are memoirs written in spleen and resentment, and it’s possible that there might be even more to come. Canetti put a twenty-two year embargo on his diaries and personal writings that will not expire until 2024. But it seems unlikely that further revelations will endear him to a new generation of readers, even if that Nobel committee did give him a prize.

Party in the Blitz Buy the book at Amazon UK

Party in the Blitz Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2012

Elias Canetti, Party in the Blitz: The English Years, New York: New Directions, 2005, pp.249, ISBN: 0811218309

The Tongue Set Free Volume One of the memoirs — The Tongue Set Free

The Torch in My Ear Volume Two of the memoirs — The Torch in My Ear

The Play of the Eyes Volume Three of the memoirs — The Play of the Eyes

Party in the Blitz Volume Four of the memoirs — Party in the Blitz

Twentieth century literature
More on biography

Paste

by

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

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

Paste

The Necklace

Paste – critical commentary

Historical background

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

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

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

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

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

Literary tradition

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

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

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

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

Paste – study resources

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

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

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

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

Paste Paste – HTML version at Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

Paste

Paste – plot summary

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

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

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

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

Principal characters
Arthur Prime a prissy young man
Charlotte Prime his cousin, a governess
Mrs Guy a social events organiser

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

Patrick White – greatest works

by

Patrick White - portraitPatrick White was born in Australia but sent to be educated in England, which he disliked intensely. He settled to live in London during the 1930s and served in the RAF during the war. After the war he returned to live in Australia, eking out his small private income by farming. His novels offer great variety in their themes, subjects, and settings – but what they have in common is his use of powerfully rich language, his deeply psychological character portraits, the dramatic incidents of his stories, and a semi-mystical belief system which he invites us to contemplate without making his narratives depend upon it. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973.

 

The Tree of Man (1955)
This is White’s first major work. (He actually dis-owned some of his earlier work.) It is an epic account of a young farmer, Stan Parker and his wife Amy and their struggles to build themselves a life and a family in the middle of the Australian wilderness at the beginning of the twentieth century. The life they make is full of small triumphs and some bitter disappointments. This is a novel which has been compared with D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, yet the tale is recounted in a bare simple prose which gives no hints of the baroque complexities of his later style.
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon UK
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon US

 

A Fringe of Leaves (1976)
This novel is the re-telling of a true nineteenth century incident which has become a mythical Australian narrative. It’s the story of Mrs Fraser, an English woman who is shipwrecked on the island which now bears her name. She gets back to the mainland, only to be seized and held semi-captive by Aboriginal natives. She escapes from them and teams up with an escaped convict to make an epic journey on foot back to ‘civilization’. The implication of the novel is that she is spiritually transformed by her experiences of suffering and deprivation. It conjures up a very romantic evocation of the period, with all White’s touches of vivid and dramatic scene painting.
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon UK
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon US

 

Voss (1957)
This is another nineteenth century epic tale – this one based on the true story of the tragic and doomed journey made in 1845 by the German explorer Leichardt. He leads a group across the Australian desert, and is accompanied imaginatively by a young woman, Lara Trevalyen from her home in Sydney. She suffers with him, right up to the point of his death – and then keeps his memory alive. The scene painting of the Australian outback and desert is truly wonderful, and although an outsider, Voss lives on as an increasingly legendary, martyred figure. This is another of White’s novels which seeks to capture the essence of Australia, its national spirit, and cultural heritage.
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon UK
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon US

 

The Vivisector (1970)
This is the story of Hurtle Duffield, an Australian painter – a portrait loosely based on Sydney Nolan, with whom White was once friendly before they fell out because of a fairly trivial disagreement. It traces very convincingly the relationship between the artist’s experiences of life and their translation into artistic expression. What makes this novel particularly interesting is its dramatic conclusion as Duffield sinks into a psychologically chaotic old age. His memories from a past which we have fictionally shared are woven into his crumbling grip on the present. The fragmented narrative is demanding on the reader, but very impressively written, as we are invited to remember the origins of sane incidents which lie beneath his apparently deluded old age.
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon UK
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon US

 

The Twyborn Affair (1979)
This novel; presents readers with a real challenge. It’s White’s version of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Without giving away too much of the very intriguing story line, White is exploring the relationship between gender and sexuality. The same character experiences life in quite different ways with different sexual identities. The setting changes from the south of France, to an Australian sheep farm, then back to a brothel in London. It’s baffling and uncompromising at first reading – but eventually makes a kind of sense.
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon UK
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon US

 

Riders in the Chariot (1961)
Many critics see this as White’s greatest work. The story puts together four completely different characters – all outsiders in one way or another. It’s not difficult to see them as various aspects of White’s own complex personality. Himmelfarb is a refugee Jewish professor struggling to come to terms with his persecution and the murder of his wife by the Nazis. The other misfits are a half-caste painter, a spinster, and a washerwoman, Ruth Godbold, who finds a mystic feeling of togetherness with her living friends and the dead ones. It contains White’s most ferocious criticism of Australian gentility and ugliness, plus the subtle gradations of racism, ignorance, and hypocrisy in contemporary suburban society.
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon UK
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon US

Flaws in the GlassFaws in the Glass (1981) is an amazingly frank self-portrait. In this he reveals the truths about his homosexuality; his feelings of inhabiting different personae and sexual identities; his lifelong feud with his mother; his alcoholism, and his later political radicalism. Reading it will certainly help you to understand his complex fictions, but more importantly it lays bare his relationship with Australia. White reveals a great deal about the psychological processes through which his experiences and ideas are transformed into art. It is a fascinating if at times almost uncomfortable reading experience.
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon UK
Patrick White Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005

Patrick White biographical notes

by

Patrick White - portrait1912. Patrick White born in Sydney – his father was a wealthy sheep farmer. Both parents were indolent, snobbish, and never worked. White always felt very distant from them.

He was sent to England to be educated at a boarding school in Cheltenham College. He hated it, and reproached his parents:

“I resented their capacity for boring me and their dumping me in a prison of a school at the other side of the world.”

He spent adolescent holidays in Dieppe and Germany, and read mainly poetry as a youth, then went on to take a degree in French and German literature at Cambridge University.

1930s. His father finally made him an allowance of £400 per year, and he settled in bohemian London, making friends with the painters Francis Bacon and Roy de Maistre. He made a break with Australia which was part cultural, and partly to do with his struggle with sexual identity:

“I see myself not so much a homosexual as a mind possessed by the spirit of a man and woman according to actual situations or the characters I become in my writing.”

1939. Published his first novel, Happy Valley, which he later disowned. He emigrated to the USA, but returned on the outbreak of war to join the RAF. He served in the middle East in the Intelligence Corps, working as a censor.

“Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility carried out in a grand hotel amongst the bridge players and swillers of easy-come-by whisky. My chest got me out of active service and into guilt, as I wrote two, or is it three of the novels for which I am now acclaimed.”

1941. Published his second novel, The Living and the Dead, about which he later said “Perhaps it should not have been written”.

1945. He settled back in Australia with his Greek partner Monoly Lascaris, and they attempted a form of self-sufficiency on a smallholding, making a living from selling flowers, vegetables, milk, and cream.

1948. Published The Aunt’s Story and traveled widely throughout England, France, Germany, Egypt, Palestine, and Greece, as well as Australia and the USA. His spiritual life is particularly tempestuous.

“Those who are doomed to become artists are seldom blessed with equanimity. They are tossed to drunken heights, only to be brought down into a sludge of headachy despair.”

1955. Published The Tree of Man – a family saga, which focused on ordinary people at the beginning of the twentieth century. Stan Parker is a young farmer. He establishes a family and farm in the Australian wilderness, has children and grandchildren, but the land is eventually engulfed by suburb.

1957. Published Voss “Much of Voss was written in bed”

1961. Published Riders in the Chariot.

1966. Published The Solid Mandala

Flaws in the GlassFlaws in the Glass (1981) is an amazingly frank self-portrait. In this he reveals the truths about his homosexuality; his feelings of inhabiting different personae and sexual identities; his lifelong feud with his mother; his alcoholism, and his later political radicalism. Reading it will certainly help you to understand his complex fictions, but more importantly it lays bare his relationship with Australia. White reveals a great deal about the psychological processes through which his experiences and ideas are transformed into art. It is a fascinating if at times almost uncomfortable reading experience.

1970. Published The Vivesector.

1973. Published The Eye of the Storm. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature – but White, who guarded his privacy, did not attend the award ceremonies. He persuaded his friend, the artist Sidney Nolan, to accept it in Stockholm on his behalf.

1976. Published A Fringe of Leaves

“I first went to Fraser Island after Sydney Nolan gave me the story of Eliza Fraser and the wreck of the Stirling Castle. I went there on my own and began A Fringe of Leaves but gave up on deciding that Australian writers should deal with the twentieth century. Years later Manoly and I went to the island together and explored it more thoroughly. From two visits and a certain amount of necessary research, it became part of my life, and the novel I wrote as painful and sensual a situation as one I might have lived through personally whether as Ellen Roxburgh or Jack Chance.”

1979. Published The Twyborn Affair

1981. Published Flaws in the Glass

1986 Published Memoirs of Many in One

1990 Died, after a long illness.

© Roy Johnson 2005

Peggy Guggenheim

by

poor little rich girl

Peggy Guggenheim came from a family of rich Jewish business people who had made fortunes as immigrants in the nineteenth century from trade, mining, and eventually banking. Her father was a womaniser who died aboard the Titanic in 1913 – putting on his dinner clothes to go down in style. When she was nineteen she inherited five million dollars, though as Mary Dearborn points out in this fairly even-handed biography, everybody assumed that she had even more, and couldn’t understand that by Guggenheim standards she came from a ‘poor’ side of the family.

Peggy Guggenheim: Mistress of ModernismThe first thing she spent the money on was an operation to reduce the size of her nose. The procedure went badly wrong and had to be aborted, leaving her worse off than before. In 1921 she married Franco-American Laurence Vail, who introduced her to Bohemian life in the Latin Quarter and in Montmartre. She also met two of his ex-lovers who were to become lifelong friends – Mary Reynolds and Djuna Barnes. Her marriage (the first of many) was a mixture of restless Bohemianism and physical abuse from her husband.

They settled in a house near Toulouse, she had two children, and she sent $10,000 to support the 1926 General Strike in the UK. With Vail she mixed in a fast and arty set: the pages are littered with the names of the now famous – Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Isodora Duncan, Marcel Duchamp, and Ernest Hemingway – all of whom were happy to share her largesse. She managed to extricate herself from the abusive marriage with the help of her friend and neighbour, Emma Goldmann, the feminist and anarchist. No sooner was this accomplished than she paired off with the Englishman John Holmes who Mary Dearborn describes as “one of the most singularly unproductive men of letters that England may have every known”

There are interesting revelations of the sheer dilettantism which underpins the arty bohemianism of these people. At one point Peggy Guggenheim was trailing across the Atlantic trying to sell decorative lampshades made by her friend Mina Loy.

It’s a life of living in rented houses – in France, England, Switzerland – wherever is fashionable – making visits to America, endless parties, oceans of Champagne, violent rows, fights in restaurants, sexual infidelities – and nobody in sight engaging anything remotely like paid employment.

When John Holmes died unexpectedly (largely of alcohol poisoning) she replaced him with Douglas Garman, another would-be writer, and under his left-wing influence she even joined the Communist Party. A further succession of weekend (and week long) house parties ensued. And rather like the Bloomsbury Group they combined their promiscuity with a curious form of ‘keeping up appearances’ in a bid to preserve social respectability. In common with aristocratic practices, the children produced in these alliances were billeted in outhouses, sent off to boarding schools, raised by paid help, and put unaccompanied on trains to travel half way across Europe at holiday times.

When she got rid of her third abusive husband she began, at forty, what was to become her life vocation. Advised by Marcel Duchamp, she opened a gallery on London devoted to modern art – and surrealism in particular. She began serious collecting, and quickly ammassed a large collection of works by its foremost practicioners, most of whom she knew personally.

In fact many of them either had been or would become her lovers, because free of marriage, she began a mid-life career of sexual emancipation which few would be able to match. Her list of conquests is almost endless: Giorgio Joyce (son of James), Yves Tanguay, Roland Penrose, E.L.T.Mesens, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and even Samuel Beckett.

By 1940, living in France, she was under serious threat from the Nazis, even though they didn’t seem to realise that she was Jewish. So like many other people she moved to the south then emigrated to America – cleverly arranging for her collection of art works to be sent as ‘household effects’ to avoid tax. Having assembled the collection as a work of love, she wished to put it on show, and despite all the odds she did so in 1942 in New York.

Her concept was novel: it was not just a museum type exhibition, but a living gallery which promoted the work of new young American artists alongside her examples of European art. The gallery was designed to be interactive, and it was a huge success. New York life suited her: she continued to bed men at a prodigious rate, and at one time she lived with a homosexual man with whom she went out on fishing expeditions to pick up sexual partners who they shared.

She exhibited and established the reputations of Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock. This was the period in which abstract expressionism swept American modernism into the limelight, propelled by influential critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. [See Tom Woolf’s The Painted Word for a sceptical view of the same period.]

And yet almost immediately after the war ended, having established this influential presence in the USA, she closed up shop and decamped to Venice, where she opened the museum that now bears her name. Despite attempts from friends and family alike to deflect her from her purpose, she kept the collection intact, and it now stands as a testament to her personal vision.

In fact last time I visited the gallery it struck me how it encompassed quite a short period of art and a part of the modernist movement which now seems rather tacky – with all the mumbo-jumbo of ‘the unconscious’, the empty posturing of ‘manifestos’, and jejune works by second-rate painters. So the collection is quite an accurate reflection of her life, the later years of which were spent as the grand old lady of the international art scene. But behind the public front of naked sunbathing on the roof of her Grand Canal Palazzo, her gay assistants, and being punted around in the last private gondola in Venice, her real concerns were those of many other elderly ladies the world over – her pet dogs (Lhazo apsos) her wayward children (daughter dead from drugs) and the loneliness of old age.

Peggy Guggenheim Buy the book at Amazon UK

Peggy Guggenheim Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2009

Mary Dearborn, Peggy Guggenheim: Mistress of Modernism, London: Virago, 2004, pp.448, ISBN 1844080609

More on art
More on media
More on design

Phyllis and Rosamond

by

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

Phyllis and Rosamond (1906) is of particular interest because it is Virginia Woolf’s first short story. She had begun to write book reviews and essays two years earlier, and some elements of the exploratory essay and the intellectual study are present here: indeed, she would continue to blend philosophic reflections with narrative fiction throughout the rest of her career. The story was written in June 1906 and was never published in her own lifetime.

Phyllis and Rosamond

Virginia Woolf

Phyllis and Rosamond – critical commentary

The short story

Virginia Woolf began her writing life in the shadow of her father Sir Leslie Stephen, a famous nineteenth century essayist and biographer. Even her own first writings were essays and reviews, and it is interesting to note that she often blends other genres with that of the short story.

Phyllis and Rosamond begins in the mode of a discursive essay before it settles into any sort of dramatised narrative.

Let each man, I heard it said the other day, write down the details of a day’s work; posterity will be as glad of the catalogue as we should be if we had such a record of how the doorkeeper at the Globe, and the man who kept the Park gates passed Saturday March 18th in the year of our Lord 1568.

This is an approach to the short story she would often repeat – an idea or an observation of a quasi-philosophic nature, which is then illustrated by the story that follows.

And the story itself has very little drama, plot, or even suspense. It is an account of the tension between the imaginative nature of the two sisters and the stifling social conditions in which they find themselves. We are simply invited to contemplate their dilemma.

Woolf is picking up the baton of earlier writers of short stories – Maupassant and Chekhov (who she had read) – and continuing their narrative strategies of minimising overt drama in favour of a more contemplative and poetic juxtaposition of significant detail.

Themes

It is interesting to note that in this, the first of her many experimental short stories, Woolf flags up a number of the important large scale issues which were to emerge more fully developed in her later works – particularly studies such as A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Her consciousness of history, her interest in biography, and her perception of women’s role in society are all foregrounded in the very first paragraphs of this story.

And as such portraits as we have are almost inevitably of the male sex, who strut more prominently across the stage, it seems worth while to take as model one of those many women who cluster in the shade. For a study of history and biography convinces any right minded person that these obscure figures occupy a place not unlike that of the showman’s hand in the dance of the marionettes;

Woolf’s argument is that the lives of women such as Phyllis and Rosamond are worth recording, even though they are trapped in a lifeless stasis, waiting to become married. In fact she is arguing that this quasi-tragic waste of spirit and imagination is worth recording just because it is so common, so typical, and yet unrecorded.

The story conveys an acute sense of the intellectual and cultural stimulation Phyllis finds in the free-ranging discussion (which is not dramatised) compared with the boring rituals of her home life. Radical ideas are expressed, religious belief is challenged, and dangerous topics such as love and marriage are frankly explored.

This is a fictionalisation of the experiences which had led Virginia Woolf (and her sister Vanessa) to depart their Victorian home in Kensington two years before, and de-camp to what was seen at the time as the bohemian milieu of Gordon Square, Bloomsbury.

It is interesting to note that although she had made that cultural transition in her own personal life, she chose to fictionalise the more typical experience of women who were unable to make the transition.

It is a common case, because after all there are many young women, born of well-to-do, respectable, official parents; and they must all meet much the same problems, and there can be, unfortunately, but little variety in the answers they make.

Phyllis and Rosamund – study resources

Phyllis and Rosamond The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

Phyllis and Rosamond The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

Phyllis and Rosamond The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

Phyllis and Rosamond The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Phyllis and Rosamond Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Phyllis and Rosamond Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Phyllis and Rosamond Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

Phyllis and Rosamond The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

Phyllis and Rosamond The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

Phyllis and Rosamond The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Phyllis and Rosamund

Phyllis and Rosamond – story synopsis

Phyllis and Rosamond are two daughters of a prominent civil servant Sir William Hibbert and his wife Lady Hibbert. They live in the centre of London and are ‘daughters at home’. That is, they have no occupation or career of any kind, and can expect no change in life except to be married, which their mother is very eager should happen.

The story lists the suffocating ritual of everyday upper class life, from breakfast to bedtime, a period which is only punctuated by their mother giving them petty domestic jobs to perform. They draw comfort from each other in their shared sense of oppression and the few private moments during which they can share ideas.

Their father brings work colleagues home to lunch, an occasion which is an empty ritual during which Phyllis is expected to make meaningful contact with Mr Middleton, who is being cast as a potential suitor. The two sisters agree that the man has no imagination or intelligence at all.

Later in the day they make social calls with their mother – leaving visiting cards at other people’s houses in the hope of being invited there. Then tea at six o’clock is followed by dinner at eight.

Finally Phyllis escapes to join her sister at the Tristrams, who live in a ‘distant and unfashionable’ part of the city – Bloomsbury. The group of people assembled there are free-thinking radicals who are discussing ideas. Phyllis has a disturbing experience of tension. She is excited by the intellectual atmosphere but conscious of herself as looking like something from a Romney painting.

The group discuss art and even love and marriage. Phyllis thinks herself inadequate in this heady environment, and feels that it is almost impossible to enter a world where people can choose freely who they might love. The hostess Sylvia Tristram tries to engage the sisters, but Phyllis feels that she cannot be at ease either at home or in such a bohemian milieu, concluding wistfully that ‘We might have been something better’.

Principal characters
I the un-named narrator of the story
Sir William Hibbert a senior civil servant
Lady Hibbert his wife
Phyllis Hibbert one of their daughters (28)
Rosamond Hibbert her younger sister (24)
Mr Middleton Sir William’s secretary, suitor to Phyllis
Sylvia Tristram a Bloomsbury hostess

Gordon Square

Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Further reading

Red button Quentin Bell. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

Red button Hermione Lee. Virginia Woolf. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Red button Nicholas Marsh. Virginia Woolf, the Novels. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Red button John Mepham, Virginia Woolf. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Red button Natalya Reinhold, ed. Woolf Across Cultures. New York: Pace University Press, 2004.

Red button Michael Rosenthal, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Study. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Red button Susan Sellers, The Cambridge Companion to Vit=rginia Woolf, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Red button Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader. New York: Harvest Books, 2002.

Red button Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Between the ActsBetween the Acts (1941) is her last novel, in which she returns to a less demanding literary style. Despite being written immediately before her suicide, she combines a playful wittiness with her satirical critique of English upper middle-class life. The story is set in the summer of 1939 on the day of the annual village fete at Pointz Hall. It describes a country pageant on English history written by Miss La Trobe, and its effects on the people who watch it. Most of the audience misunderstand it in various ways, but the implication is that it is a work of art which temporarily creates order amidst the chaos of human life. There’s lots of social comedy, some amusing reflections on English weather, and meteorological metaphors and imagery run cleverly throughout the book.
Virginia Woolf - Between the Acts Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Between the Acts Buy the book at Amazon US

The Complete Shorter FictionThe Complete Shorter Fiction contains all the classic short stories such as The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, and The String Quartet – but also the shorter fragments and experimental pieces such as Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. These ‘sketches’ (as she called them) were used to practice the techniques she used in her longer fictions. Nearly fifty pieces written over the course of Woolf’s writing career are arranged chronologically to offer insights into her development as a writer. This is one for connoisseurs – well presented and edited in a scholarly manner.
Virginia Woolf - The Complete Shorter Fiction Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - The Complete Shorter Fiction Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Virginia Woolf: BiographyVirginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf – web links

Red button Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Virginia Woolf web links Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

Virginia Woolf web links Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Virginia Woolf web links Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Virginia Woolf web links Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

Virginia Woolf web links Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

Virginia Woolf web links BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

Virginia Woolf web links A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

© Roy Johnson 2013

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – short stories
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
Virginia Woolf – life and works

Pomegranate Seed

by

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

Pomegranate Seed first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on 25 April 1931. It was subsequently included in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction, The World Over (1936), and then in her collection, Ghosts, published in 1937, the last year of the author’s life.

Pomegranate Seed

original Saturday Evening Post illustration

Pomegranate Seed – critical comments

This is simultaneously a mystery tale, a ‘ghost story’, and more importantly a penetrating study in the psychology of jealousy. The mystery element is possibly the least important and successful, because once the authorship of the grey letters has been explained, there is very little more to say about the issue, and no reason to re-read the tale.

As a ghost story it is more successful. Even though there is no explanation of how the letters come to have been written by somebody who has died a year previously, they act as a convincing metaphor for the influence a former love object might still exert on someone from beyond the grave. This part of the story also meshes successfully with Charlotte’s inflamed jealousy over the puzzle of the letters and the effect they have on her husband. She is in fact quite correct in he supposition that they were written by a woman who is a ‘previous engagement’ in his life – since they are written by the woman to whom he was married for twelve years.

The rapid fluctuations in Charlotte’s feelings as she tries to interpret the evidence at her disposal is a very convincing portrayal of the agonies and uncertainties of jealousy – how trivial details are seized upon and magnified to enormous proportions in the search for emotional resolution, and how a hairsbreadth can sometimes separate an imagined betrayal from an insight into one which is all too real.

The title of the story Pomegranate Seed is an oblique reference to the Greek myth in which Persephone, the goddess of fertility, is abducted and taken to Hades, where she breaks her vow of abstinence by eating some pomegranate seeds. It is not too difficult to see the fertile Elsie Corder (who bears her husband two children) as this figure who eventually lures her former husband to join her in the afterlife. She has written to him regularly; her last letters are only two days apart; and the only word Charlotte can decipher in the last is “Come” – though it has to be noted that he does not read this letter, having already departed to join his dead first wife.

Pomegranate Seed – study resources

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

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

Pomegranate Seed Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Pomegranate Seed Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Pomegranate Seed Tales of Men and Ghosts – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Pomegranate Seed

Pomegranate Seed – story synopsis

Part I.   Charlotte Gorse has been married to New York lawyer Kenneth Ashby for a year, following the early death of his first wife Elsie after twelve years together. Charlotte’s marriage has been successful, but she is puzzled by the regular appearance of a handwritten letter addressed to her husband which appears to upset him and change his mood, but about which he reveals nothing. On arriving home there is familiar grey envelope with spidery handwriting waiting in the hall.

Part II.   She assume’s the letters might be from some woman in her husband’s past, is very tempted to open the latest, but instead spies on him when he arrives home. On seeing him kiss the letter, she challenges him and demands an explanation. He claims it is a business letter and refuses to divulge the name of its author.

Part III.   Charlotte tries to be sympathetic to her husband’s obvious distress, but all she can see is that he is trying to be evasive. She proposes a holiday, but he says he cannot go. She continues to harass him with questions, and finally he agrees to the notion of a holiday.

Part IV.   Next morning he leaves a message saying that she should prepare for the holiday the very next day. Charlotte at first feels triumphant because she has prevailed over the influence of the ‘other woman’. She tries to contact her husband throughout the day – without success, because nobody knows where he is. Finally, she goes to see her mother-in-law, where she thinks he might have called. He is not there, so the two women go back to Charlotte’s house, where they find another grey letter waiting. Charlotte decides to open it, but neither she nor Mrs Ashby can read the faint and spidery handwriting. They conclude that the letters have been coming from Kenneth Ashby’s dead wife, from beyond the grave, and that they ought to telephone the police.

Principal characters
Kenneth Ashby a New York lawyer
Mrs Ashby his mother
Elsie Corder Ashby’s first wife, who is dead
Charlotte Gorse Ashby’s second wife

Edith Wharton's house - The Mount

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

Further reading

Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman of her Time, New York: Viking, 1971,

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp.222. ISBN: 0820305138

Janet Beer, Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work), New York: Northcote House, 2001, pp.99, ISBN: 0746308981

Millicent Bell (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.232, ISBN: 0521485134

Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1992, pp.329, ISBN: 0824078489

Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, ISBN: 0810927950

Gloria C. Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, California: University of California Press, 1992, pp.223, ISBN: 0520075838

Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals, UPNE, 1990, pp.220, ISBN: 0874515246

Irving Howe, (ed), Edith Wharton: A collection of Critical Essays, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986,

Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.240, ISBN: 0521830893

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, London: Vintage, new edition 2008, pp.864, ISBN: 0099763516

R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975, pp.592, ISBN: 0880640200

James W. Tuttleton (ed), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.586, ISBN: 0521383196

Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991,

Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Work, Fact on File, 1998, pp.352, ISBN: 0816034818

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, New York: Perseus Books, second edition 1994, pp.512, ISBN: 0201409186

Edith Wharton's writing

Edith Wharton’s writing

Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the CountryThe 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.
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon US

Edith Wharton - The House of MirthThe 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.
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon US

The ReefThe Reef deals with three topics with which Edith Wharton herself was intimately acquainted at the period of its composition – unhappy marriage, divorce, and the discovery of sensual pleasures. The setting is a country chateau in France where diplomat George Darrow has arrived from America, hoping to marry the beautiful widow Anna Leith. But a young woman employed as governess to Anna’s daughter proves to be someone he met briefly in the past and has fallen in love with him. She also becomes engaged to Anna’s stepson. The result is a quadrangle of tensions and suspicions about who knows what about whom. And the outcome is not what you might imagine.
Edith Wharton - The Reef Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Reef Buy the book from Amazon US

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.

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

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

Poor Richard

by

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

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

Poor Richard

The American Civil War – 1861-1865

Poor Richard – critical commentary

The title

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

Interpretation

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

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

Poor Richard – study resources

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

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

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

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

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

Poor Richard

Poor Richard – plot summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poor Richard – principal characters
Richard Maule a poor orphan of twenty-four
Gertrude Whittaker a rich young woman of twenty-four
Fanny Maule Richard’s sister, a friend of Gertrude
Captain Edmund Severn a Unionist soldier of twenty-eight
Major Lutterel a recruiting officer of thirty-six with no money
Mrs Martin Captain Severn’s sister
Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

Get in touch

info@mantex.co.uk

Content © Mantex 2016