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literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

The Given Case

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

The Given Case first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine in June 1899, and later the following year in the collection of stories The Soft Side (1900) published by Methuen.

The Given Case

The Given Case – critical commentary

Structural symmetry

The story is beautifully structured using a number of exactly symmetrical elements, with subtle differences between them. Two women have been engaged in relationships with two single men. Both women are formally committed to other men. Mrs Despard is married, but her husband is absent and estranged. Miss Hamer is engaged to Mr Grove-Steward, who is also absent, serving abroad.

It must be taken on trust that these two women have ‘encouraged’ the two single men – which is a Victorian euphemism for ‘flirting’. The two men now wish to marry them – which is at least a way of legitimising their relationships. As an additional feature of symmetry, each of the men appeals to the other’s lover for help in assisting their causes.

Colonel Despard returns to maintain the appearance of his marriage (it would seem) but not its substance. Mr Grove-Steward returns because he is alarmed by rumours of Miss Hamer’s behaviour which reach him in India. He wishes to preserve the contract he has made to marry her.

The story presents two essentially different responses to a similar social dilemma. To what extent does ‘flirting’ oblige participants to what now might be called ‘put up or shut up’? Mrs Despard dislikes her husband more than ever, but she sacrifices her lover for the security of an empty marriage to a man she does not love.

Miss Hamer on the other hand pities the distress she sees in her fiancé Grove-Steward, but sacrifices him for the sake of her new lover. This is certainly what James intended from his Notebook entry on this story:

I have the suggestion found in the Frenchman’s article in the Fortnightly Review about the opposition of the view of the Française and the Anglaise as to the responsibility incurred by a flirtation: one thinking of the compensation owed (where the man is really touched), the other taking the exact line of backing out. ‘It’s serious’ – they both see – but the opposed conclusion from that premise. This seems to me exactly treatable in my small compass.

The given evidence?

Despite the strengthening effect of this complex structure, the story has a central weakness – in that none of the ‘encouragement’ the two women have given their admirers has been dramatised. Thus we as readers have no way of knowing if the claims made by the two men claims are justified or not. We are being asked to take on trust that flirtation of some kind has gone on.

But even in a drama as small scale as this, the important social issues of breaking off an engagement or sacrificing oneself to a dead marriage can only be properly comprehended and appreciated if we know more details of the feelings and circumstances which have led up to them. It could be said that this is one of James’s tales which ought to have been longer in order to fulfil its own ambitions.

The Given Case – study resources

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

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

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

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

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

The Given Case The Given Case – HTML version at The Ladder

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

The Given Case

The Given Case – plot summary

Part I. Barton Reeve is in love with a married woman, Mrs Kate Despard, who is estranged from her husband. He complains to a friend Margaret Hamer that Mrs Despard has encouraged his attentions, but not enough to divorce her husband. He appeals to Miss Hamer to help him.

Part II. At a country house weekend party Philip Mackern makes an appeal to Mrs Despard regarding his passion for Miss Hamer, who is engaged to Mr Grove-Steward, a government officer serving in India. She reproaches him for his rash conduct, they argue, and she refuses to help him.

Part III. Reeve meets Miss Hamer and her sister Mrs Gorton in Hyde Park, Miss Hamer reports that Mrs Despard does indeed like Reeve. He once again chafes at her not being prepared to leave her husband. He accuses her of being ‘afraid’.

Part IV. Mrs Despard summons Mackern to reveal to him that Mr Grove-Steward is returning early from India, where news of Miss Hamer’s behaviour has reached him. Mackern wants to marry MIss Hamer, but Mrs Despard thinks that would be disastrous.

Part V. Mrs Despard complains to Miss Hamer that her husband has unexpectedly returned and asked for a reconciliation, which she does not want. She admits she has behaved badly by encouraging Reeve. Miss Hamer reveals that she might continue her relationship with Mackern.

Part VI. Reeve visits Mrs Despard and insists that she owes it to him to accept his offer of marriage. She admits she has made a mistake in encouraging him, but that she feels she must stay with a husband who she dislikes more than ever. They part company very painfully.

Part VII. Mackern goes to Mrs Gorton’s to speak to Miss Hamer. Mrs Gorton wants him to leave and reproaches him for compromising her sister’s reputation. But Mackern insists he has a right to present his case. When Miss Hamer arrives it’s to say that her fiancé cannot understand or tolerate her behaviour – and that she pities him. The implication is that she will now accept Mackern’s offer.

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

The Given Case Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Given Case Buy the book at Amazon US

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

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

More tales by James
More on literature
More on the novella
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The Glimpses of the Moon

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

The Glimpses of the Moon was first published in 1922 by D. Appleton and Company. It is one of the least well known of Edith Wharton’s full length novels – perhaps with good reason. It takes a subject she had written about many years previously in her short story The Reckoning (1902) – in which two characters draw up what we would now call a ‘pre-nuptial agreement’ and then have to live with its consequences.

The Glimpses of the Moon

The Glimpses of the Moon – critical commentary

It is worth noting that the essential subject of the novel (or the donnée as Henry James would call it) had already been used by Edith Wharton in a short story written twenty years earlier. Two people of limited means arrange a marriage of convenience on the understanding that they will agree to a divorce if a better prospect emerges for either of them at a later date. The short story version of this theme in The Reckoning is tightly constructed narrative in a triptych of scenes – the agreement, how it came about, and its consequences.

In the case of The Reckoning the motivation is to preserve a sense of individual autonomy within the constraints of a monogamous bond, but in The Glimpses of the Moon the motivation is financial – since neither Nick nor Susy has sufficient funds for long term survival within the social set amongst whom they wish to mix.

The Glimpses of the Moon is almost the opposite of the tightly constructed story. It is a long, rambling, and repetitive novel, with the dramatic situation stretched to breaking point and beyond. Nick and Susy separate quite early in the story. Their rationale for living independently is plausible enough, as are the temptations of the alternative partners who seek their favours. Susy has her friend the ultra-rich Earl of Altringham begging at her feet, and Nick is courted by the plain-but-intelligent heiress Coral Hicks. But the indecision, the ‘will-they, won’t-they’ , and the endless impediments which are placed in the way of any resolution – all drag on far too long, as if Wharton were trying to fill out the pages of a three volume Victorian serial novel.

Once the dramatic tension between Nick and Susy has been established, there’s rather a lot of uncertainty in the psychological motivation of the protagonists. Susy and Nick both doubt, suspect, and then forgive each other in a way which is credible in terms of human uncertainty, but does not make for a very satisfactory narrative.

This major weakness is compounded by the conclusion to the story line which is as rushed as it is improbable. We are asked to believe that two people who have spent the previous eighteen months living in a Venetian palace and on board a luxury yacht, suddenly find personal satisfaction staying in a provincial French boarding house for a weekend whilst looking after someone else’s five children.

This fairy tale resolution is simply not plausible, and it is brought about with no serious consideration for the important issues of the preceding narrative – in particularly that of money. Susy may well be prepared to give up cashmere shawls and dinners at the Hotel Luxe, but we know perfectly well that Nick’s couple of published articles will not be enough to live on. It is not enough to assume that they have had a change of heart in their attitudes to money and their place in society. They have no more means of economic survival than they had at the outset of the novel.

The Glimpses of the Moon – study resources

The Glimpses of the Moon The Glimpses of the Moon – New York Review Books – Amazon UK

The Glimpses of the Moon The Glimpses of the Moon – New York Review Books – Amazon US

The Glimpses of the Moon Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

The Glimpses of the Moon Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Glimpses of the Moon The Glimpses of the Moon – Kindle version at Amazon

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Glimpses of the Moon

The Glimpses of the Moon – plot summary

Chapter I.   Nick and Susy Lansing are on honeymoon, living in a borrowed villa on Lake Como. She is poor but socially ambitious, and a hanger-on amongst rich fellow Americans. She reflects on how her initial relationship with Nick was criticised socially and led to a split from him.

Chapter II.   Nick is talented but has no money, and he feels an affinity with Susy as a poor outsider. When they meet up again at the home of some unfashionable but artistic friends, she proposes to him a marriage of convenience. They will scrape together some money, live off their friends for a year or so, and agree to divorce if anything better comes along for either of them.

Chapter III.   After a month in Como they are forced to move on to Venice. Nick is prepared to make realistic sacrifices, but wonders if Susy will be capable of doing the same. She organises their transfer to Venice with opportunistic sharp practice, attempting to take with them some expensive cigars provided by their host, Charlie Strefford.

Chapter IV.   In Venice, the owner’s wife (Ellie Vanderlyn – a friend) has left her child behind, plus some letters to her husband to be posted on secretly, whilst she is absent with a lover. There is an explicit request attached that this be hidden from Nick. Susy feels morally compromised, but needs to stay somewhere for the summer.

Chapter V.   Small differences and secrecies begin to put a distance between Nick and Susy. After some weeks they are joined at the Palazzo by Charlie Strefford. He pumps Susy for information, but she merely reminds him about the terms of her marriage contract with Nick, about which Strefford is understanding but sceptical.

Chapter VI.   The summer goes on. Nick has begun to write a ‘philosophic romance’; Ellie Vanderlyn does not return as scheduled; and they are joined in Venice by the Mortimer Hickses, who are rich but unfashionable and unsuccessful, despite their yacht and an entourage.

Chapter VII.   Nick begins to find new and deeper happiness in his ‘work’ and his life with Susy, and he hopes they can stay in Venice for the rest of the summer. However, when more of their friends begin to visit, he puts his writing on one side.

Chapter VIII.   Ellie Vanderlyn suddenly returns , and since her husband might shortly appear it is important that her earlier absence not be revealed. Susy confides in Strefford that Nick should not find out that their stay in Venice was based on a plot to deceive Nelson Vanderlyn.

Chapter IX.   Vanderlyn arrives, but is only en route to join his mother somewhere else. Nick resumes his writing and meets Coral Hicks in a church, where they discuss archeology. When Ellie Vanderlyn departs for another assignation, she thanks Nick for his ‘co-operation’ in the deceit of her husband, which shocks Nick.

Chapter X.   Nick demands that Susy reveal the whole story of the deception to him. He argues that it is dishonourable. Susy claims that she did it to keep them both together. The question of the marriage ‘pact’ is re-opened in a painful manner.

Chapter XI.   Nick goes out alone, leaving Susy to dine with Strefford and others. They go out afterwards to a party at the Hicks’ Palazzo, but Susy goes home alone. She finds a letter from Nick waiting for her, to say that he has gone to Milan for a couple of days to think things through.

Chapter XII.   In fact he goes on to Gerona, where he meets Mr Buttles who is leaving employment with the Hicks entourage because of an unrequited passion for Coral. Nick also reads of an accident which has made Strefford into the Earl of Altringham, one of the richest men in England. He writes to Susy, honouring their agreement and offering her up to Strefford, then leaves on an extended cruise of the Augean with the Hicks entourage

Chapter XIII.   Susy retreats to the house of a friend at Versailles which she thinks will be empty, but finds its owner Violet Melrose at home promoting the reputation of painter Nat Falmer. Susy is terrified that Nick has abandoned her, but she receives a message from Strefford.

Chapter XIV.   When they meet in Paris Strefford discusses her situation sympathetically, but then offers to marry her. When she refuses, he also offers to lend her money. She refuses this too, and says she will wait to see if she hears from Nick.

Chapter XV.   Whilst in Paris she goes to see Grace Falmer, who is very pleased with her husband’s sudden success and who presents a very positive picture of married life. Susy procrastinates over making any plans, and resisting Violet Melrose’s attempts to bribe her into staying to look after the Falmer children.

Chapter XVI.   Nick is enjoying a sabbatical break on board the Hicks’s yacht, hoping to hear from Susy, who does not write to him. Coral Hicks suggests that he take son Buttle’s old job as secretary to her father. Nick reads in the paper that Strefford and Susy are socialising in England.

Chapter XVII.   Susy is alone in London, waiting to join Strefford and oppressed by the meanness of boarding house life. She meets Ursula Gillow, who invites her to stay at her home, so as to distract her husband). Susy reluctantly accepts, because she will meet Strefford there.

Chapter XVIII.   In Paris Susy meets Ellie Vanderlyn who snobbishly patronises her. Susy defends herself by revealing her situation in full. Ellie tells her she is getting rid of her husband Nelson for the super-rich Borkheimer. The two women quarrel over social morals.

Chapter XIX.   Strefford visits Paris to receive Susy’s answer to his proposal of marriage. She realises that the world she wishes for can only be gained by the wealth of the people she dislikes. Strefford flaunts his wealth and takes her to an exhibition which includes some of his own family’s art. treasures.

Chapter XX.   The Hicks are in Rome, having befriended an archeologist-Prince who is travelling with his mother. They pretend to be democratic and outsiders, but in fact they are sponging off the Hicks on behalf of themselves and their friends. Nick perceives that they are angling for a financial union with Coral to ‘replenish’ the family coffers. Nick feels that he himself has no future.

Chapter XXI.   Susy remains with Strefford, promising to look into a formal divorce from Nick. But she becomes more critical of Strefford. At the lawyer’s suggestion, she reluctantly writes to Nick, having so far failed to communicate with him.

Chapter XXII.   When Strefford reveals that he let off his villa in Como to Ellie and her lover, Susy feels contaminated by the deception, even though (or maybe because) she was implicated in it herself. She tells Strefford she is not the right woman for him.

Chapter XXIII.   On her way back to her hotel she meets Nelson Vanderlyn, who is in Paris for his divorce from Ellie.He takes a cheerful matter-of-fact attitude to his situation, but secretly he is a broken man. Susy writes a letter of renunciation to Strefford, and begins to reflect on the deeper issues of shared experience and understanding that keep people together in a marriage.

Chapter XXIV.   Nick meanwhile has written to Susy agreeing to a divorce, and he feels dissatisfied being a patronised employee of the Hicks. The wealthy Coral Hicks offers herself to him as she prepares to be married to the Prince, but he declines the offer, whilst respecting and even admiring her.

Chapter XXV.   Susy is looking after the Falmer’s children in Passy whilst their parents are in Italy – and quite enjoying the challenge. Strefford has been dismissed, but he tries to cling on. Nick agrees to come to Paris to see the lawyers.

Chapter XXVI.   Nick arrives, intending to go back and marry Coral, but his head is full of Susy. He goes to Passy and sees her at the door – but at that very moment Strefford arrives and is admitted.

Chapter XXVII.   Strefford re-asserts his plea to Susy, but she holds him off, and feels that Nick might be nearby (which he is). She writes to him, requesting a meeting, to which he sceptically agrees.

Chapter XXVIII.   They meet and talk without revealing their true feelings for each other, or the changes in their circumstances. – and so part without any resolution. Susy realises that she has had another lesson in what true love is – and feels that it is now too late.

Chapter XXIX.   Next day Susy is preparing to leave when Nick arrives – and suddenly everything is clarified between them with very little discussion. They decide to go away for a couple of days, taking the Falmer children with them.

Chapter XXX.   The excursion is a fairy-tale success. Nick has had some articles published, and they put all the events of the recent past behind them.

Principal characters
Nick Lansing clever but poor and unsuccessful
Susy Lansing (neé) Branch his new wife, poor and ambitious
Ursula Gillow her rich and successful friend
Fred Gillow Ursula’s husband
Ellie Vanderlyn another rich and successful friend of Susy’s
Nelson Vanderlyn a US banker based in the UK
Charlie Strefford English friend of the Lansings who becomes Earl of Altringham
Mortimer Hicks rich American yacht owner
Coral Hicks his intellectual but unattractive daughter
Mr Buttles polyglot secretary to Hicks
Nat Fulmer an American painter
Grace Fulmer his wife – a violinist
Violet Melrose ‘a wealthy vampire’

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

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

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.

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

More on Edith Wharton
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The Golden Bowl

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tutorial, characters, resources, video, further reading

The Golden Bowl (1904) comes as the climax of James’ late period. His writing is mannered, baroque, complex, and focused intently on the psychological relationships between his characters. There is very little ‘plot’ here in the conventional sense. The bowl in the title is a gift from one couple to another – but there’s a lot more to it than that of course. It will not be giving away too much of the story to say that it concerns an American heiress as she becomes aware of the secret affair between her new husband and her father’s young wife. As usual in many of James’s great novels, much of the drama is fuelled by relations between Europe and America (his ‘International’ theme) by class, social mobility, and by sex and money.

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

The Golden Bowl – plot summary

Prince Amerigo, an impoverished but charismatic Italian nobleman, is in London for his marriage to Maggie Verver, only child of the fabulously wealthy American financier and art collector, Adam Verver. Amerigo meets Charlotte Stant, a former mistress who he didn’t marry because both of them were seeking to marry into money. They go shopping for a wedding present for Maggie. They find a curiosity shop where the Jewish shopkeeper offers them an antique gilded crystal bowl. But the rather anti-Semitic Prince declines to purchase the bowl because he suspects it contains a hidden flaw.

Henry James The Golden BowlAfter Maggie’s marriage she is afraid that her father has become lonely. She persuades him to propose to Charlotte, unaware of the past relationship between Charlotte and Amerigo. Adam’s proposal is accepted, and soon after the wedding, Charlotte and the Prince find themselves thrown together because their respective spouses seem more interested in their father-daughter relationship than in their marriages. The Prince and Charlotte finally consummate an adulterous affair.

Maggie eventually begins to suspect Amerigo and Charlotte. This suspicion is intensified when she accidentally meets the shopkeeper and buys the golden bowl. Uncomfortable with the high price she paid for the bowl, the shopkeeper visits Maggie and confesses to overcharging her. At Maggie’s home he sees photographs of Amerigo and Charlotte. He tells Maggie of the pair’s shopping trip on the eve of her marriage and their intimate conversation in his shop. (They had spoken Italian, but he happens to understand the language.)

Maggie now confronts Amerigo, and then begins a secret campaign to separate the Prince and Charlotte while never letting her father know of their affair. She lies to Charlotte about not having anything to accuse her of, and she gradually persuades her father to return to America with his wife. Amerigo appears impressed by Maggie’s delicate diplomacy, after he had previously regarded her as rather naive and immature. The novel ends with Adam and Charlotte about to depart for America, while Amerigo can “see nothing but” Maggie and embraces her.

Study resources

The Golden Bowl The Golden Bowl – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Golden Bowl The Golden Bowl – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Golden Bowl The Golden Bowl – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Golden Bowl The Golden Bowl – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Golden Bowl The Golden Bowl – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Golden Bowl The Golden Bowl – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

The Golden Bowl The Golden Bowl – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Golden Bowl The Golden Bowl – etext of the 1909 edition

The Golden Bowl The Golden Bowl – audioBook at LibriVox

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James – biographical notes

Red button The Golden Bowl – Merchant-Ivory film site

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

The Golden Bowl

The Golden Bowl – characters
Adam Verver an American multi-millionaire art collector
Maggie his loving daughter
Prince Amerigo an impoverished Italian nobleman
Charlotte Stant an impoverished friend of Maggie
Fanny Assingham an inquisitive friend of the family
The Colonel her easy-going husband
The Golden Bowl – film version

2000 film adaptation

Merchant-Ivory pull out all the stops in their repertoire for creating lush period detail. Costumes, furniture, jewellery, and art objects all help to recreate a convincing fin de siècle atmosphere. The inclusion of original film footage from early last century adds tremendously to the period flavour. Nick Nolte plays the American millionaire Adam Verver, Kate Beckinsdale his daughter Maggie, and Uma Thurman the poor but scheming Charlotte. James Fox and Angelica Huston in supporting roles provide added depth. There is an odd use of ‘chapter’ titles – “Adam Verver’s rented castle” – which one associates more with the eighteenth century than the early twentieth, and as in their other productions, the sex is far more explicit than in the original. James implies: Merchant-Ivory shows.

Red button See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database

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.

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

 

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

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

 

Henry James 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.

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

© Roy Johnson 2010

More on Henry James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Good Soldier

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Good Soldier was first published simultaneously in London and New York by John Lane at The Bodley Head in March 1915. In fact the opening of the novel had appeared a year before in the first issue of Wyndham Lewis’s aggressively modern Vorticist magazine Blast in June 1914, under its original title of ‘The Saddest Story’. Ford was asked by his publisher to change the title of the novel on the grounds that sad stories would be difficult to sell during a time of war. Ford suggested the title The Good Soldier in a spirit of irony, but it was accepted and it stuck.

The Good Soldier – critical commentary

Narrative complexity

Although it is not as well known as other modernist classics, such as D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, or James Joyce’s Ulysses, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier certainly shares many of their values, and was written using a number of similar experimental techniques. The most obvious of those is the chronological complexity of the narrative.

Ford Madox Ford The Good SoldierThe story is related by a narrator John Dowell who is also a character in the story. But his account of events is extremely fragmented, and their temporal sequence is fractured in a way which makes great demands on the reader. The events themselves occur over a stretch of twenty-four years, essentially spanning the period between 1892 and 1916 – even though the novel was published in 1915. But these events are revealed to the reader in a series of scenes which shift backwards and forwards in time. Ford makes dramatic use of prolepsis and analepsis (flashes forwards and backwards).

Modern editions of the text often have a chronology included, to assist readers in reconstructing the sequence of the episodes. Dowell as narrator is fully aware of this shifting backwards and forwards of the story line, and indeed makes apologies for his uncertainty and lack of skill in reconstructing events.

Having said that, he is also very precise about certain dates, and at other times cannot remember if some something has happened or not. This was a technique which Ford Madox Ford called ‘impressionism’, and it was his attempt to reflect as a form of literary realism the fact that human beings cannot always remember things accurately. Nor can we always know the exact truth about events that have taken place.

It is interesting to note that this technique of narrative fragmentation was also a hallmark of Joseph Conrad, with whom Ford collaborated as a novelist in The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903, and The Nature of a Crime (1909). In addition to this Ford also exploits the modernist device of the unreliable narrator.

The unreliable narrator

Henry James and to a lesser extent Joseph Conrad are often credited as the first modern writers to exploit the technique which has come to be known as ‘the unreliable narrator’ – and Ford was acquainted with both of these fellow authors.

The unreliable narrator is a device which exploits the fact that when novel-length stories are delivered in the first person narrative mode, the reader has a natural inclination to believe that the truth is being told. After all, if the narrator is going to get the facts wrong or tell lies, why use this device in the first place? But modernist writers have embraced the idea that human beings do make mistakes in their perception of events; they are misguided in their judgement of others; and they may have motivations of which they themselves are unaware.

The skill of the modernist is to create a narrative in the first person mode whereby the narrator gives the reader enough information to form an independent judgement about events which differs from the narrator’s

Henry James did this in The Turn of the Screw, where all the ‘facts’ of the case are presented by the governess in a horror story – and the reader has just enough information to realise that she is neurotic and wrong in the judgements she makes. Her narrative tells one story, behind which the astute reader sees another which is quite different.

Vladimir Nabokov takes this literary device to an extreme in his novel Pale Fire, in which his narrator is editing a long poem written by a fellow college professor. The footnotes to the poem purport to explain its meaning, but what they reveal is that the narrator is a mad man.

Ford’s narrator John Dowell is unreliable in that he makes mistakes, forgets what he has previously said, and generally gives the impression of someone who is not sure of what is going on around him. After all, for the whole of his marriage to Florence she is having adulterous affairs with two other men without his knowledge.

The problem is that there are so many mistakes and contradictions, there becomes growing suspicion that these are errors on the author’s part – not simply Dowell’s. The text gives a distinct impression that Ford might be an author who is not incomplete control of the strategy he is adopting. For instance, he seems to forget from time to time that his narrator Dowell is supposed to be American. Dowell passes comments on Americans from a European perspective, in a voice which is suspiciously that of an author, not a fictional character.

And of course all of this is novelist’s sleight of hand on Ford’s part, because the logic of first person narratives is that narrators must have all the facts of the case at their disposal at the point of finishing the story. If they were genuinely unaware of some facts or circumstances in the earlier part of their account, they could go back and correct it later.

Dowell keeps shifting his approach to characters and events, and he claims to be relating his tale over a period of time – so gives the impression of doing just that. But in fact he knows the outcome of events right from the start of his account, as his suggestive hints reveal:

Permanence? Stability! I can’t believe it’s gone. I can’t believe that that long, tranquil life, which was just stepping a minuet, vanished in four crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks.

The four crashing days (no matter where they are finely placed in the complicated chronology of events) are the period in which he has learned from Leonora of his wife’s infidelity with first a blackmailer, and then the man he thought of as his best friend. He knew from the outset that he had been duped.

The conversational style

In addition to these complexities of narrative mode, Ford also develops a very conversational tone for Dowell’s delivery of the story. He actually says that he thinks of his account as addressing a listener directly. ‘I have stuck to my idea of being in a country cottage with a silent listener, hearing between the gusts of the wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea, the story as it comes.’

Dowell speaks directly to the reader; he uses lots of repetition; corrects himself after making mistakes; raises questions, confesses that he doesn’t understand the events he is relating; uses hesitation, ellipsis, and often leaves statements unfinished.

You are to remember that all this happened a month before Leonora went into the girl’s room at night. I have been casting back again, but I cannot help it. It is so difficult to keep all these people going. I tell you about Leonora and bring her up to date; then about Edward, who has fallen behind. And the girl gets hopelessly left behind. I wish I could put it down in diary form.

Credibility

The Good Soldier is also a very difficult novel to ‘interpret’. Even though all the information in the story comes to us from Dowell, he seems as a character to be incredibly dim and lacking in good judgement. His wife is having affairs with the blackmailer Jimmy and Dowell’s best friend Ashburnham for years without Dowell suspecting, and even when he does find out, he does nothing about it. Indeed, he even tells us he felt nothing about it.

And when giving an account of people’s occupations, he describes his own as ‘absolutely nothing’. He spends all his time with people who are poisonously hostile to each other; the lives of other characters all around him are wrecked by deception and adultery; and he does nothing.

In the end, the one character who he continues to admire and hold up as a paragon of virtue, is Ashburnham, his best and only friend, who has been cuckolding him for years. Ashburnham goes through the novel as a serial adulterer who gambles away half his family fortune and ends up cutting his own throat because of his suppressed lust for a young girl whose paternal care he has undertaken. Yet Dowell admires, even ‘loves’ Ashburnham right to the end – because he is kind to his tenants.

The Good Soldier – study resources

The Good Soldier The Good Soldier – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Good Soldier The Good Soldier – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Good Soldier The Good Soldier – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Good Soldier The Good Soldier – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Good Soldier The Good Soldier – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

The Good Soldier The Good Soldier – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

The Good Soldier The Good Soldier – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Good Soldier The Good Soldier – eBook formats at Gutenberg

The Good Soldier The Good Soldier – DVD of 1981 film version – Amazon UK

The Good Soldier – plot summary

Part I

American John Dowell and his wife Florence are living in Europe, ostensibly for the sake of her health, as she has a weak heart. At the German spa resort of Bad Nauheim they meet Captain Edward Ashburnham and his wife Leonora and strike up a close relationship with them. They all enjoy each other’s company, they go on excursions together, and are inseparable as friends.

Dowell as narrator present the Ashburnhams as an ideal if rather colourless couple, but then gradually begins to reveal all sorts of unsavoury details about their lives. Dowell discovers that Ashburnham has committed a string of sexual infidelities in the past, and has lost a lot of money gambling. His wife has forced him to make over all his money into her name. Their marriage was arranged, and he has been a slave to his sexual passions. He has also had to rent out the family estate at Branshaw Teleragh in Hampshire.

It gradually becomes apparent that Ashburnham is conducting an affair with Dowell’s wife Florence. Dowell claims to feel nothing about it, and both couples maintain a polite public appearance. Ashburnham’s wife Leonora also knows about the affair.

The Ashburnhams have recently arrived from India, where the Captain was serving in the army. Dowell reveals that Leonora has paid for the travelling expenses of Mrs Masie Maidan, her husband’s lover in India, so that she could accompany them to Europe. But when Mrs Maidan realises that Ashburnham has tired of her and has turned his attentions towards Florence Dowell, she plans to go back to her husband in India. However, she suddenly dies whilst packing her travelling case.

Part II

Dowell backtracks to recount the story of his courtship and marriage to Florence, after which she immediately begins to feign a bad heart. It transpires that her family , who disapprove of her marriage, have paid Jimmy, an old disreputable ‘admirer’ of Florence’s to stay in Europe, away from her.

When Dowell and Florence arrive in Paris for their honeymoon, Jimmy turns up and stays with them. Dowell fails to realise that Jimmy and Florence are lovers, right under his nose.

Dowell reveals that Florence deployed her new lover Ashburnham to get rid of Jimmy by ‘knocking [his] teeth down his throat’. In fact Dowell claims to empathise with the difficulties Ashburnham, Florence, and Leonora face in maintaining the veneer of respectability whilst all three are involved in this adulterous triangle. Dowell himself appears to be either unaware or untouched by what is going on around him. It is unclear if he is a complete fool, a bloodless psychopath, or a liar.

Florence is plotting to run off with Ashburnham when she is recognised as a former lover of Jimmy’s by an English guest at the hotel, and she commits suicide, not wishing to face the shame of such a revelation. Dowell appears unmoved by his wife’s death, and reveals that he is in love with Nancy, a young girl to whom the Ashburnhams act as guardian. He leaves for America.

Part III

Ashburnham and Leonora are left in Bad Nauheim, fighting over his growing obsession with Nancy. The narrative then leaps backwards again to cover the period of Ashburnham’s early marriage to Leonora which was arranged by their parents. Animus soon develops between them, and when Ashburnham kisses a girl in a railway carriage (the ‘Kilsyte affair’) it awakens his sex urges. These burst into life in his brief dalliance on the Riviera with La Dolciquita, the mistress of a Grand Duke. She demands money to be his mistress, and he loses money gambling to raise the funds to keep her.

Leonora has meanwhile seized control of the family’s finances with a London solicitor. She lets out the family home at Branshaw and arranges for her husband to be transferred to India, where they spend the next eight years, trying to recoup financially.

In India Ashburnham begins an affair with Mrs Basil, the wife of a fellow officer. The husband finds out, and blackmails Ashburnham on a regular basis, threatening to expose him. When Colonel Basil is transferred to the Boer War, Ashburnham begins an affair with Mrs Masie Maidan. Leonora has meanwhile managed to solve their financial problems and proposes a return to their Hampshire estate.

Part IV

The narrative loops back in time again to pick up the story shortly before Masie Maidan’s death in Bad Nauheim. Dowell explains Leonora’s motivation in trying to win back her husband, who is just starting an affair with Dowell’s wife. The Ashburnhams go back to their estate at Branshaw, where Leonora starts to harass Ashburnham over money matters.

Dowell returns from America to stay at Branshaw, where he reports on Leonora’s dejection and headaches. Ashburnham is meanwhile eaten up with unexpressed desire for Nancy, a young girl who has been in their care since her parents abandoned her. Leonora finally confronts Ashburnham about Nancy, then tries to prevent the girl leaving to rejoin her feckless mother. She would sooner hand her husband over to the girl than have her leave. In this confrontation Nancy reveals that she is in love with Ashburnham.

Dowell then switches to recount events from Nancy’s point of view – her youthful awakening to the knowledge of personal unhappiness, divorce, and her love for Ashburnham, who she thinks must love someone else, until Leonora reveals to her that her husband is dying for the love of Nancy herself. But she also reveals Ashburnham’s all infidelities, which kills off Nancy’s idealised vision of him. Ashburnham arranges for someone to take care of Nancy’s mother, then summons Dowell to Branshaw.

Dowell returns to his own point of view, and reveals the end of the story before describing the events that bring it about. Nancy goes to join her father in India, and on the journey there learns that Ashburnham has committed suicide (by cutting his own throat). She becomes slightly mad with religious monomania, and Dowell is despatched to bring her back to Branshaw. Leonora meanwhile sells the house to Dowell and marries the colourless Rodney Bayham. The novel concludes with Dowell living at Branshaw with Nancy, who is now so deranged he is unable to marry her, and at the very end of his narrative he describes the events leading up to Ashburnham’s suicide.

Principal characters
John Dowell the narrator – a wealthy American living in Europe
Florence Dowell his wife, a university graduate
Captain Edward (Teddy) Ashburnham an ex-Army county magistrate and Tory landowner
Leonora Ashburnham his Irish catholic childless wife
Nancy Rufford ‘the girl’ who has been adopted by the Ashburnhams
Mrs Rufford Nancy’s mother, who abandons her
Major Rufford a brutish army man with a loud voice
John Hurlbird Florence’s uncle, from whom Dowell inherits
Miss Florence Hurlbird Florence’s elder aunt in Connecticut
Miss Emily Hurlbird Florence’s younger aunt
Mrs Masie Maidan Ashburnham’s mistress in India
Bunny Masie’s husband
Jimmy Florence’s lover in Paris, a blackmailer
La Dolciquita the Spanish mistress of a Grand Duke, with whom Ashburnham has an affair
Colonel Basil a colleague of Ashburnham’s in India who borrows money from him
Mrs Basil Ashburnham’s sympathetic mistress in India
Rodney Bayham an admirer of Leonora’s who she marries
Further reading

Biographical

Red button Stella Bowen, Drawn from Life, London: Collins, 1941.

Red button Alan Judd, Ford Madox Ford, London: Collins, 1990.

Red button Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Red button Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford, London: The Bodley Head, 1972.

Critical commentary

Red button Richard A. Cassell, Critical Essays on Ford Madox Ford, Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987.

Red button Robert Green, Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Red button Samuel Hynes, Edwardian Occasions: Essays on English Writing in the Early Twentieth Century, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1972..

Red button Richard W. Lid, Ford Madox Ford: The Essence of His Art, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964

Red button Frank MacShane (ed), Ford Madox Ford: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1972.

Red button Martin Stannard (ed), The Good Soldier, New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, second edition, 2012.

Other novels by Ford Madox Ford

Red button Parade’s End – Wordsworth Classics edition

Red button Parade’s End – Kindle edition

© Roy Johnson 2013

The Great Condition

by

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

The Great Condition first appeared in The Anglo-Saxon Review for June 1899. It next appeared in the collection The Soft Side published in London by Methuen in 1900. James wrote the tale whilst staying at Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, the home of Daniel Curtis and his wife Ariana. The Anglo-Saxon Review was owned by Lady Randolph Churchill, the American-born mother of British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.

The Great Condition

Transatlantic steamer

The Great Condition – critical commentary

The crux of this tale is the fact that neither Braddle nor Chilver can ‘place’ Mrs Dammerel socially as they would be able to do if she were European. That is, they do not know anything about her social background, which class she belongs to, who her relatives might be, or the extent of her wealth. These unknowns are also intensified by their fear that something scandalous might be attached to her life history. This notion of social checking is based on the fact that the upper class and aristocracy in Europe acts as a cohesive social group in which a person’s provenance (and income) would be known to members of the group – or would at least be discoverable.

The tale also reveals what to contemporary readers will seem an astonishing lack of intimacy between two people who are preparing to be married. Braddle proposes to marry Mrs Dammerel, but

This issue reflects the fact that particularly amongst the upper classes, marriage in the nineteenth century and earlier was not regarded as a romantic or emotional attachment, so much as a financial arrangement and a class alliance. It had at its core a desire to preserve inherited wealth – which is why there is so much concern expressed about how much people were ‘worth’ or the size of their capital or annual income.

It is significant for instance that it is Braddle who wishes to search out any hidden secret from Mrs Dammerel’s past. He is young and rich: whereas Chilver is not so wealthy, and has less concern and less capital to preserve. After their marriage they live in a modest home in what was then an unfashionable outer-London suburb – Hammersmith. So clearly Mrs Dammerel brought little wealth to the marriage.

A psychological reading of the story will not fail to recognise that the situation of two men being in love with the same woman is a classic case of sublimated homo-eroticism. This is a theme which James treated (consciously or unconsciously) in many of his tales [see The Path of Duty (1884) and The Middle Years (1893) for instance] but it is interesting to note its presence here in the earliest part of his oeuvre.

The Great Condition – study resources

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

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

The Great Condition Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Great Condition Complete Stories 1874—1884 – 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

The Great Condition

The Great Condition – plot summary

Part I.   During a sea crossing from America, Bertram Braddle has committed himself to helping American widow Mrs Dammerel establish herself in England. But on reaching Liverpool late at night he is impatient to be in London the next morning and leaves her in the hands of his friend, Henry Chilver

Part II.   On the journey back from their visit to America, Chilver has observed with interest the close rapport Braddle struck up with Mrs Dammerel. Braddle has been to America to meet ‘well-connected’ people, and has now taken up with someone ‘unknown’ in society. Chilver also realises that he himself is in love with Mrs Dammerel.

Part III.   Ten days later the two men compare notes. Braddle wonders if Mrs Dammerel is ‘all right’ and admits that he is in love with her. Chilver feels a sense of loyalty to Braddle, and does not reveal his own feelings about Mrs Dammerel. Braddle fears that she might be concealing some episode or unseemly feature from her past. She has lost a husband and child, but Braddle cannot ‘place’ her socially as he would be able to with a European woman. She is a former singer who has given piano lessons. Chilver argues that proposing marriage might force her to reveal ‘the worst’ of her past.

Part IV.   Some weeks pass, and Braddle disappears. Chilver feels that he need no longer conceal his own interest in Mrs Dammerel. However, he receives a letter from Braddle announcing his engagement to her. Chilver wonders what she has revealed to Braddle, but when he visits them in Brighton there is no evidence of any revelation having been made. This only makes Chilver feel that there must be something to conceal. Braddle however tells him that she has revealed nothing – but simply accepted his proposal of marriage.

However, Braddle later reveals that Mrs Dammerel has admitted that there is ‘something’ in her past – but she will only reveal it six months after the marriage, by which time she is confident he will not want to know what it is.

Part V.   Braddle goes off in search of further information about Mrs Dammerel, during which time Chilver deepens his acquaintance with her and feels that he appreciates her without knowing any ‘secrets’ about her past. He almost convinces himself that her secret is the fact that she would prefer him as a husband – and so he proposes to her.

Part VI.   A year later Mrs Dammerel has married Chilver and the two men meet. Braddle has searched as far as the west coast of America and has found nothing about Mrs Dammerel. They try to re-establish their friendship. Braddle is rather nervous about it, and wants to know about ‘the great condition’ she has imposed, and what Chilver discovered after six months. Chilver tells him that he actually extended the period of not knowing up to one year.

Part VII.   When that year has elapsed, Braddle is visiting Chilver and his wife at their home in Hammersmith. He is surprised at how modest it is, and feels uncomfortable, even though the couple accept him as an old friend. Braddle asks Mrs Dammerel (now Mrs Chilver) if Chilver has requested the hidden information. He admits that he has been abroad searching for information about her. Finally she reveals to him on oath of secrecy what he wants to know – but invites him to infer it from his negative results – the fact that she has no secret past.

Principal characters
Bertram Braddle a rich young Englishman
Henry Chilver his older friend, a lawyer
Mrs Dammerel an American widow

The Great Condition

Interior Venice 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 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

The Great Gatsby

by

tutorial, commentary, plot summary, further reading

The Great Gatsby (1925) was the third novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, following This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922). Though not a great success on first publication, it has since gone on to be regarded as a great modern American classic. It certainly captures the surface glamour of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and ‘the Jazz Age’ – a term coined by Fitzgerald himself.

The Great Gatsby

first edition 1925

The Great Gatsby – commentary

The American Dream

This dream is a theme which runs through a great deal of American history and culture. It is the idea, born out of political egalitarianism, that all citizens of the USA, no matter what their status at birth, have the freedom to better themselves, make a success of life, and even to become rich and famous. This is summed up in the expression from the United States Declaration of Independence (1776) – that individual citizens have the ‘unalienable right’ to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’.

The idea that everybody can become rich and famous is patently untrue of course, but it is commonly held up as an aspirational model, reinforced by the fact that many immigrants and refugees have arrived in America and gained better standards of living than those they left behind.

Young Gatsby (Jimmy Gatz, to give him his real name) is an example of this phenomenon. He comes from a humble background, but is taken up by the rich yacht-owner Dan Cody, who shows him the lifestyle of a millionaire. Gatsby then re-invents himself. He supresses some elements of his biography, embellishes others, and creates a social smokescreen to hide the fact that he makes his money from the illegal business of bootlegging.

Gatsby also has romantic aspirations to fit this model of upwards social mobility. As a young man he falls for Daisy, who is a southern belle, the daughter of a rich family, a debutante and a socialite. It becomes part of Gatsby’s dream to recapture this youthful lost love by impressing her with his ill-gotten wealth.

But he is not allowed to forget that he is not intrinsically a member of the class to which Daisy belongs. This is what explains the class antagonism that springs into being immediately he meets Tom Buchanan (Daisy’s husband) who correctly spots that there is something ambivalent, incongruous about Gatsby. The two men confront each other in a contest over Daisy.

Following the car accident in which Tom’s mistress Myrtle is killed, Gatsby realises he cannot compete in this class war: ‘because ‘Jay Gatsby’ had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played out’. Buchanan eventually both wins back his wife and brings about the death of Gatsby.

In this sense the novel is a critique of or a corrective to the American Dream. It reveals that Jimmy Gatz cannot enter into the upper echelons of society, even if he has made a lot of money during prohibition, even if a former debutante (and current ‘flapper’) is attracted to him. And merely in thinking it possible he pays for the mistake with his life.

The narrative

The story is presented in first person narrative mode, with Nick Carraway recounting his engagement with the Buchanans and Gatsby at East and West Egg respectively. For the most part this is unproblematic, with Nick reporting on scenes in which he is a participant.

Fitzgerald is forced to bring variations to this approach in dramatising the character of Gatsby – and he does this rather cleverly. We are first given an account of Gatsby that is very ambivalent – that he comes from inherited wealth, has been to Oxford University, and is a war hero. The first claim is untrue, the second misleading, and the third true.

Gatsby’s real biography is only gradually revealed, and we learn via a combination of flashbacks, inference, and his dramatised statements to Nick that he is a complex mixture of arriviste, romantic, opportunist, semi-gangster, and generous man of honour. Fitzgerald handles this character development very well.

But towards the end of the novel he violates the rules of the first person narrative by having Nick relate in detail events where he wasn’t present. In the middle of Chapter VIII, the day after the car accident, Fitzgerald introduces a rather clumsy flashback into Nick’s narrative: ‘Now I want to go back a little and tell what happened at the garage after we left there the night before’.

The scene in the garage involves two people – George Wilson and a neighbour Michaelis. It features two minor plot elements: the revelation of a leash Myrtle bought for the dog Tom gave her, and George’s assumption that Myrtle rushed into the road to speak to her lover. But the events are related from the point of view of Michaelis and George, with closely observed details only available to participants:

The hard brown beetles kept thudding against the dull light, and whenever Michaelis heard a car go tearing along the road outside it sounded to him like the car that hadn’t stopped a few hours before …

Wilson’s glazed eyes turned out to the ashheaps, where small grey clouds took on fantastic shapes and scurried here and there in the faint dawn wind.

Nick Carraway was not present at the scene, and the events can only have been relayed to him later by Michaelis. But these are not the sorts of emotional and atmospheric details of a spoken report. They have the texture of a first-person narrative along with the remainder of Nick’s story.

Fitzgerald is not abiding by the logic of first person narratives, and this is a serious flaw in an otherwise carefully constructed novel. It might be considered a minor blemish, but it was a weakness he carried on even as far as his last novel, The Last Tycoon. That is a story narrated by a young woman Cecilia Brady who is in love with the principal character Monroe Stahr. Her narrative is spirited and amusing, but she presents detailed intimate scenes between Stahr and another woman of which she cannot possibly have any knowledge.

Symbols

In much of the critical comment on The Great Gatsby a great deal is made of the symbolism present in the work. It should be fairly obvious for instance that the ‘single green light’ that burns at the end of the landing stage of the Buchanan garden is a metaphor representing Gatsby’s enduring love for Daisy. He has shown his fidelity to the memory of her throughout his military service and in his post-war efforts to accumulate the wealth he thinks necessary to win her.

He has established himself in his palace directly opposite, on the other side of the Sound, so that he can be as near to her as possible. Even their separation by the waters of the bay is emblematic. She lives in the rich and fashionable suburb of East Egg amongst the traditional families of ‘old money’. Gatsby lives in arriviste West Egg and despite his fabulous wealth and his generosity, he is eventually unable to cross the gap that divides them.

I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him … Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.

This personal, individual disappointment of Gatsby’s failure to win the romantic love of his youthful dreams also serves to reinforce the more general theme of the death of the American Dream.

The other quite striking image which occurs in the story is the giant advertisement for an optician Doctor T.J. Eckleburg which dominates the ‘Valley of Ashes’ in the Queens suburb of New York. A pair of eyes stare out from ‘enormous yellow spectacles’ – ‘blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high’. They look out over the garage where Myrtle lives in her loveless marriage with George and where she is killed by Daisy driving Gatsby’s car.

The images of death and watchful eyes are also brought together in the scene where George recounts to Michaelis that he finally realises that Myrtle has been deceiving him and reproaches her just before she rushes into the roadway:

“God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!”

Standing behind him Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleberg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night.

“God sees everything”, repeated Wilson.

The Great Gatsby – study resources

The Great Gatsby – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Great Gatsby – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Great Gatsby – York Notes – Amazon UK

The Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Fitzgerald: Letters – Amazon UK

The Great Gatsby – DVD – Amazon UK

The Great Gatsby – plot summary

I.   The narrator Nick Carraway rents a house in West Egg, Long Island, next door to the rich and mysterious Jay Gatsby. Nick visits his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan across the bay at East Egg. He meets Daisy’s friend Jordan Baker over a dinner interrupted by a phone call from Tom’s ‘mistress in New York’. Tom is a racist and a bully.

II.   Tom takes Nick to pick up his mistress Myrtle at her husband’s garage in the Valley of Ashes in Queens. They go to an apartment in New York, are joined by neighbours, and all get very drunk. Tom hits Myrtle and makes her nose bleed.

III.   Nick is invited to one of Gatsby’s lavish parties where he meets Jordan and Gatsby, who imparts an ‘amazing thing’ to her. As the summer goes on, Nick becomes closer to Jordan and thinks he might be in love with her – but he believes she is a compulsive liar.

IV.   Gatsby tells Nick his (slightly false) life story of inherited wealth, an Oxford education, and war heroism. They have lunch in New York with a gambler Meyer Wolfsheim. Jordan reveals to Nick the earlier connection between Gatsby and Daisy when he was waiting to go to war.

V.   Gatsby arranges a meeting with Daisy at Nick’s house, at which he is first embarrassed. He offers Nick dubious ‘business opportunities’ which Nick turns down. Then Gatsby shows them over his own house, which demonstrates his immense wealth.

VI.   Nick then reveals more of Gatsby’s true origins. He was a lower-class boy James Gatz who was given an ‘apprenticeship’ by a rich man Dan Cody. Tom and Daisy attend another of Gatsby’s parties, where Tom remains sceptical about Gatsby, who wants to re-establish his past love with Daisy.

VII.   Nick and Gatsby go for lunch at the Buchanans on a hot day. Daisy flaunts her love affair with Gatsby. They all go into New York for the afternoon, calling at the garage, where Wilson is planning to take Myrtle away. In the Plaza hotel, Tom challenges Gatsby, who says that Daisy is going to leave him. Tom reveals more of Gatsby’s shady business dealings. On the way back Myrtle is killed by Gatsby’s car, which Daisy was driving.

VIII.   Next day Nick visits Gatsby, who reveals the true story of his earlier relationship with Daisy. Nick then recounts what happened at the garage the previous night. This culminates in Wilson setting out to locate the car that has killed his wife. Believing that Gatsby is Myrtle’s secret lover, he kills him then turns the gun on himself.

IX.   Nick arranges the funeral. Gatsby’s father arrives and reveals Gatsby’s youthful ambitions and his fidelity as a son. None of Gatsby’s associates attend the funeral. Nick says goodbye to Jordan, then meets Tom, who reveals that he told Wilson the car was Gatsby’s.

The Great Gatsby – characters
Nick Carraway the narrator, a bond dealer, ex-Yale
Tom Buchanan Nick’s rich college friend, a bully and racist
Daisy Buchanan Nick’s cousin, Tom’s self-absorbed wife
Jordan Baker a socialite and professional golfer
George B. Wilson a downtrodden garage owner
Myrtle Wilson George’s wife, Tom’s mistress
Jay Gatsby a super-rich bootlegger (real name Jimmy Gatz)
Meyer Wolfsheim ‘the man who fixed the World Series’

© Roy Johnson 2018

Twentieth century literature
More on biography
More on literary studies

The Great Good Place

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Great Good Place first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine in January 1900 – a remarkably productive year for Henry James. It was a period which saw the publication of Maud-Evelyn, Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie, The Abasement of the Northmores, The Third Person, The Tone of Time, The Tree of Knowledge, and the story which is widely regarded as his finest – The Beast in the Jungle. All of these (and more) he produced in addition to working on his next novel, The Sacred Fount (1901).

The Great Good Place

The Great Good PLace – critical commentary

In terms of literary categories, this is Henry James’s equivalent of the popular schoolchild’s approach to creative writing – to create a fantasy whose complexities and puzzles are resolved by the statement ‘and then he woke up and realised it was all a dream’.

This adult version is more successful than these juvenile escape from plot-logic creations because George Dane’s place of retreat is quite credible. It’s not unlike the non-religious retreats offered by St Deiniol (founded in 1889 by Gladstone) and Ampleforth Abbey in Yorkshire. James’s mise en scene is very unspecific and non-descriptive. As Dane talks with one of his fellow visitors, James describes the place via the metaphor of taking a bath:

He was in the bath yet, the broad, deep bath of stillness. They sat in it together now, with the water up to their chins. He had not had to talk, he had not had to think, he had scarce even to think… This was a current so slow and so tepid that one floated practically without motion and without chill.

George Dane enjoys the tranquility because it excludes the very things by which he has been oppressed in his everyday life – newspapers, journals, correspondence, and social engagements.

At this level the story operates at not much more than a wish-fulfilment on James’s part. By 1900 he had become famous and was socially lionized in a way which gave him grounds for mild complaint (so many dinner invitations!) though it also supplied him with the anecdotes and germs of ideas for many of the stories he wrote.

So he envisages an ideal space for quiet and reflection – part hotel, part gentleman’s club non-religious retreat, and health spa. In fact even at this metaphoric level the story is consistent and logical since the eight hours’ sleep that Dane enjoys refreshes him sufficiently to feel positive again. He sees his room, on awakening, as ‘disencumbered, different, twice as large’.

This reading sees the story as not much more than an innocent piece of fancy, one which turns on the well-worn fictional device of a very credible world turning out to be imaginary.

An alternative reading

However it’s impossible to read the story without also noticing the number of homo-erotic undertones. There are no women in the story at all, and Dane’s saviour is a ‘much younger man’ and an admirer who he has invited to share breakfast with him. Having resolved to avoid contact with people (‘Ah, if he might never again touch!’) the first thing he does contradicts this resolve:

Dane took his hand from his pocket, held it straight out, and felt it taken. Thus indeed, if he had wanted never again to touch, it was already done.

Then when the young man presents Dane with the possibility of relief from his concerns, the physical contact is strengthened:

The mere sight of his face, the sense of his hand on my knee, made me, after a little, feel that he not only knew what I wanted, but was getting nearer to it than I could have got in ten years.

In one sense it can be argued that it is this giving way to physical contact that brings Dane the relief he craves – for the net result of the encounter is that Dane sleeps for eight hours, dreams of his ideal place, and wakes up refreshed.

But pushing the interpretation a little further one could even argue that the story includes an almost subliminal sexual encounter between the two men. Dane feels his hand taken, he sees the beauty of the young face, feels the hand on his knee, feels that the young man is ‘indescribably beautiful’, and after the sexual encounter that follows (but is not described) he enjoys a long restorative sleep on the sofa.

It wasn’t after breakfast now; it was after—well, what? He suppressed a gasp—it was after everything.

This reading has the advantage that it fits with both interpretations of the story. George Dane is offered a restorative experience when the young man takes over his onerous responsibilities – or he enjoys a sexual encounter with a beautiful young man, after which he falls asleep and dreams that he has gone to heaven.

The Great Good Place – study resources

The Great Good Place The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Great Good Place The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Great Good Place Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Great Good Place Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Great Good Place The Great Good Place – Digireads reprint edition – Amazon UK

The Great Good Place The Great Good Place – eBook formats at Gutenberg Consortia

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

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

The Great Good Place

The Great Good Place – plot summary

Part I. George Dane is a successful professional man of letters who feels overburdened by the demands on his time of social engagements. His servant Brown has to keep reminding him of things he has forgotten, and thinks he might be ill. Nevertheless, he has invited a young admirer to breakfast.

Part II. He goes to the ‘Great Good Place’, which is a place of spiritual retreat where he enjoys the serenity and calm of a semi-monastic existence. He meets a fellow visitor (a ‘Brother’) who shares his feelings that it is a place of blessed recuperation.

Part III. He recounts to the ‘Brother’ how he has arranged with an ambitious young admirer to ‘change places’, allowing him the freedom to refresh himself spiritually whilst giving the young man the chance to take over the professional duties he previously felt to be so onerous.

Part IV. Dane revels in the tranquility and undemanding atmosphere of the retreat, which leaves him free to read in a library or sit in contemplation amidst cloistered gardens. He identifies himself with the presiding genius who created such a place which provides him with exactly what he requires.

Part V. Gradually he feels that he has recovered from his previous malaise and is ready to face the world again. He discusses his plan with another of the ‘Brothers’, but on shaking his hand notices the man’s resemblance to his servant Brown. In fact he wakes up to discover that he has been asleep on his sofa all day, and that the Young Man has completed all the outstanding paperwork at his desk.

Principal characters
George Dane a middle-aged man of letters
Brown his servant
— a beautiful young man and admirer
The ‘Brother’ fellow visitor at the retreat

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red button 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 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 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.
The Great Good PLace Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Great Good Place 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

The Harp and the Shadow

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

The Harp and the Shadow (1979) is one of the many novels by Alejo Carpentier in which he explores the history of Latin-America. He also deals with the ambiguous relationship between European culture and that of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. These themes were very close to his own experience, since although he was raised in Cuba, his parents were Russian and French, and he spent a lot of his life living in Paris – where he was eventually made the Cuban cultural ambassador. He spoke in French, but wrote in Spanish.

The Harp and the Shadow

The novel is a mixture of political history, social documentary, and the re-imagined character of a real historical figure – Christopher Columbus. Most of the events in the novel are related from his point of view.

The Harp and the Shadow – commentary

Who was Columbus?

Christopher Columbus is often thought of as ‘the man who discovered America’ or ‘the first man to make a sea crossing to the New World’. Neither of these claims are true, and Carpentier’s novel is his way of setting the record straight. At the same time, he is trying to imagine what would be the real problems and preoccupations of a fifteenth century seafaring adventurer.

The person known in the west as Christopher Columbus was born in 1451 in Genoa, which was then a small independent Mediterranean republic with its own language. It was not incoporated into what became modern Italy until 1871.

His name was Christophoro Colombo. He spent much of his adult life in Portugal and Spain, where he was called Christobal Colon. This is the name by which he is now known throughout the Spanish-speaking world. But the name was also Anglicised as Christopher Columbus

In north America his name is built in to the expression ‘pre-Colombian’ – which refers to art and archaeology in the Americas (north and south) which pre-dates the so-called ‘discovery’ of America. It is also worth noting that Columbus never set foot in what is now the United States of America. All his activity was in the Caribbean islands and on the South American coast.

Magical Realism

It was Alejo Carpentier who coined the term ‘magical realism’. The expression is used in literary studies to describe the mixture of realism and fantasy elements in a single text – two approaches to fiction which are normally kept in separate genres.

This approach originated in Latin-American fiction with Carpentier, the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Angel Asturias (1899-1974), and it was made most popular by the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) with his best-selling novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).

The Harp and the Shadow starts off in a reasonably conventional manner. The first two sections could easily be considered as parts of a historical novel. Section one concerns a real nineteenth century pope’s mission to Chile and his considering the beatification of Columbus on return to Europe.

Section two steps back temporally to the late fifteenth century and presents events from the perspective of Christopher Columbus as he organises and undertakes his voyage of ‘exploration’ to locate the East Indies by sailing westwards across the Atlantic.

But in the third part of the novel these two centuries are brought together. A nineteenth century papal tribunal is considering the application for his sainthood, but other historical figures make arguments for and against the decision. Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, and Leon Bloy (all French writers) participate in the debate. Even Columbus himself is present as the shadowy ‘Invisible One’

When the tribunal reaches its negative conclusion, Columbus then meets Andrea Doria, a fellow Genoan sixteenth century military commander, and they discuss the vagaries of fame and historical reputation.

As readers we are not expected to take these chronological liberties too seriously. They are fanciful, imaginative, and (sometimes) entertaining. But they are not arbitrary. or random. They are thematically linked and justified.

The whole novel is concerned with how history, from the perspective of Latin-America, sees the invasion of Christopher Columbus – not as a ‘discoverer’ (he discovered nothing that didn’t already exist) but someone who brought disease, greed, slavery, and imperialist domination to the continent from which it then had to spend the next two or three centuries liberating itself.

The world map

Columbus was sailing from Europe in a westerly direction, thinking that he could reach what are now known as the East Indies in Asia. These had already been visited and described by European explorers such as Marco Polo – but they had travelled by land routes in an easterly direction from Europe. Nobody at that time knew how big the earth was, and it had certainly not been circumnavigated or accurately mapped.

The first mistake of Columbus was to assume that on reaching what we now call the West Indies, that he had reached Asia. This accounts for his failure to understand where he was and his inability to locate all the spices which had been reported by earlier land explorers. His second mistake was to be blinded by his mistaken idea that there was a huge gold mine ‘just around the corner’, no matter where he found himself.

It is also obvious that he did not ‘discover’ America. Both continents of South and North America were already in existence, occupied by their native inhabitants. It is interesting that the indigenous population on both continents are still referred to as ‘Indians’. Columbus was merely amongst the first Europeans to visit what we now know as Latin-America. It is certainly worth noting that he never set foot in what is now the United States of America.

There is a third ironic mistake, though it is not discussed in the novel. Columbus lands in the West Indies and thinks he has reached the East Indies. Hence the ambiguous and double use of the term ‘Indian’ to describe the inhabitants. Explorers travelling in both easterly and westerly directions thought they were going to India.

Sea travel was very difficult and hazardous at that time, and Columbus must be given credit for his journeys if not his behaviour. But the fact is that he only reached the Caribbean, and his actual goal still lay at the other side of the world. Even discounting central America, he was still separated from his goal by the Pacific Ocean.

The Pacific covers half of the earth’s surface. He thought he had sailed half way round the world, but had only covered less than a quarter of its navigable surface. This is a misconception of distance that is still perpetuated today. It is very common for maps of the world to omit the Pacific Ocean, giving the impression that Central America and Asia are not very far apart – when in fact the distance between them is 12,000 miles.

Anti-heroism

Carpentier is clearly offering an anti-heroic account of Columbus – a figure to whom statues have been erected all over the Spanish-speaking world as a great pioneer. In the novel he is cut down to size as a human being riven with flaws. He confesses that his younger days were those of a rake – a regular visitor to brothels. He lies about his achievements in order to secure patronage. He makes mistakes in navigation and geography – and much of the time does not know where he is. Nevertheless, he inflates himself with artificial pride about his ‘achievement’.

He is fuelled by an infantile lust for easy riches – the dream of a ‘mother load’ of gold just beyond the horizon. When this dream fails he turns to the slave trade as another source of easy wealth – at other people’s expense. He fails completely to deliver the results promised to his patrons, and in an act of petty greed, he keeps the reward offered to the first man to sight ‘land’. As old age and death approach him at the end of his journeys, he is terrified of meeting his ‘confessor’. He has been hailed as a hero – but he knows what sins he has committed.

The Harp and the Shadow – study resources

The Harp and the Shadow The Harp and the Shadow – at Amazon UK – (text in English)

The Harp and the Shadow El arpa y la sombra – at Amazon UK – (text in Spanish)

The Harp and the Shadow The Harp and the Shadow – at Amazon US – (text in English)

The Harp and the Shadow El arpa y la sombra – at Amazon US – (text in Spanish)

The Harp and the Shadow Alejo Carpentier – further reading

Boroque Concerto

Alejo Carpentier

The Harp and the Shadow – summary

The Harp

The first part of the novel is set in the middle of the nineteenth century.

In the Vatican City, Pope Pius IX hesitates over making Christopher Columbus a saint. As a young man, Giovanni Maria Mastai-Perretti, he is scholarly but poor. Because of his knowledge of Castillian, he is appointed envoy to Chile, where Bernado O’Higgins has liberated the country from Spanish rule. The mission arrives in Uruguay, where Montevideo is full of horses and mud, but the upper classes have imported European culture and modern ideas. The group crosses the Argentinian pampas, climbs over the Andes, and descends into Santiago de Chile.

Bernado. O’Higgins is overthrown by Ramon Friere. Mastai pretends to be radical, but the mission is eventually forced to leave Chile. They return via Cape Horn, where Mastai conceives the idea of uniting Europe and the Americas by elevating Chistopher Colombus to sainthood. So – as the later pontiff Pius IX he signs the papers recommending the beatification of Columbus, whose blameless life has recently been revealed in a specially commissioned biography.

The Hand

The second part of the novel is set towards the end of the fifteenth century.

An old seafarer is in the last stages of his life, and is preparing to make a religious confession of his worldly sins. He reveals his youthful lusts and his knowledge of Mediterranean brothels. He lists his beliefs in fabulous sea beasts and medieval myths, plus his enthusiasm for maritime navigation.

He recounts being on board a ship bound westwards towards the end of the known world at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. He has gathered tales of earlier expeditions made by Vikings which had reached Greenland and even further west.

The old sailor is revealed as Christopher Columbus who confesses that he is an ambitious fake. He has constructed the myth of exploration westwards and promoted it in order to find sponsors. He operates from Portugal, and embellishes his reputation with exaggeration and lies. Despite repeated setbacks, he eventually wins the support of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, who have recently driven the Muslims and Jews out of Granada.

He sets off with an inexperienced crew who soon become discouraged because of the length of the journey. He falsifies the ship’s records to make the distance seem shorter. When they finally sight land Columbus is filled with a vainglorious sense of his own importance and his ‘achievement’.

They think they have reached the East Indes. Columbus hopes no other missionaries have already reached there. Worthless gifts are exchanged with the natives, but Columbus is immediately in search of gold. He takes hostages by force and they sail on to Cuba which he finds beautiful – but it doesn’t contain the spices and the gold he expects. He does not know where they are, and he fears going back empty-handed.

They sail on to Haiti (Hispaniola) laying claim to ownership of all the places they visit, but they still find no spices and no gold. Reading over his journal of the voyage, he is ashamed by his obsession with gold, and unconvincingly vows to make religious penances.

They sail back to europe where he is given a hero’s welcome and summoned to the court in Barcelona. There he displays the captured ‘Indians’ (who are dying) and describes his expedition as a great triumph. But Queen Isabella sees through his claims as a vain bluff. Nevertheless she commissions another expedition in order to compete with the Portugese.

On the second voyage Columbus still doesn’t find any gold, but instead he captures natives and turns them into slaves. He argues that this is equally profitable, and regards the captives as ‘rebels against the Crown’.

He makes further journeys, still finds nothing, and lapses into a delusion that he has located an ‘earthly paradise’ in the ‘orient’. He proclaims by decree that Cuba is not an island but a continent. He feels that he has been overtaken by rivals and has been dispossessed of a national identity. He then faces the final confession before death.

The Shadow

The third part of the novel takes place in the late nineteenth century.

In the Vatican under pope Leo XIII the petition for beatification for Columbus is being considered by a tribunal. His bones and remains have frequently been moved and cannot be authenticated. There is a debate about the validity of his claims, with contributions from Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, and Leon Bloy. The tribunal considers his illegitimate son and his involvement in slavery – for which two reasons he is denied sainthood.

Columbus meets Andrea Doria after the tribunal. They discuss the limitations of fame and justice as two Genoan sailors.

The Harp and the Shadow – characters
Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti a young clergyman, later Pope Pius IX (1792-1878)
Christobal Colon a seafaring navigator and explorer (1451-1506)
Bernado O’Higgins leader of the Chilean independence movement (1778-1842)
Queen Isabella I Spanish monarch and patroness of Columbus (1451-1504

© Roy Johnson 2017

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The Heir

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Vita Sackville-West’s 1922 novella

Vita Sackville-West knew a great deal about ownership and inheritance. She was raised at Knole, a country estate in Sevenoaks, Kent which dates back to the sixteenth century. She felt very passionately about its traditions and importance, and was deeply grieved when on her father’s death it passed to her younger brother. She sought emotional compensation by buying a ruined castle at Sissinghurst and created one of the most celebrated English country gardens with her husband Harold Nicolson. Both properties are now run by the National Trust.

The HeirShe also wrote a celebrated poem, The Land, about her feelings for the traditions of pastoral life and culture (it won the Hawthorden Prize in 1926) and her passion for Knole was also transformed by her then lover, Virginia Woolf into the main setting for the fantasy romance, Orlando. This recent publication The Heir is a relatively early and little-known work which deals with all these issues of continuity, tradition, history, and ownership which are almost the predominant leitmotif of her whole life.

Mr Chase, an insurance salesman from Wolverhampton, inherits a house and estate deep in rural Kent/Sussex. Everyone from the probate solicitors downwards encourages him in a plan to sell up and retire on the proceeds. But the house and its history begin to grow on him.

It’s a long short story – or as some might claim a novella – and if there’s a weakness it’s that the pace of Chase’s conversion to enthusiastic traditionalist isn’t properly dramatised. He arrives at the property he has never before seen, and from then on all matters rustic are cast in the most glowingly positive light.

West writes elegantly on the house and its surrounding lands, putting the wide range of her architectural and horticultural vocabulary to full effect. But the sale must go on – driven by the greedy, materialist ambition of the chief solicitor. Chase suddenly realises that he has fallen in love with the property, and feels on the day of the auction that it is ‘like seeing one’s mistress in a slave market’.

It would be invidious to reveal how the drama unfolds, but it is resolved by Chase also realising that a life materially reduced is better than one without any passion. You might say that this is a form of wish-fulfilment on West’s part, but it is a work written with a lot of feeling, and one which it is good to see back in print again.

© Roy Johnson 2008

artie shaw Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Vita Sackville-West, The Heir, London: Hesperus Press, 2008, pp.92, ISBN 1843914484

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The Hogarth Press

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The Hogarth Press 1917—1941

The Hogarth Press was established by Leonard Woolf in 1917 as a therapeutic hobby for his wife Virginia Woolf who was recovering from one of her frequent bouts of ill-health. It was named after Hogarth House in Richmond, London, where they were living at the time. Its first manifestation was a small hand press which they installed on the dining table in their home. They also bought two boxes of type, which was used to hand-set the texts they produced. Working from a sixteen page instructional handbook, they taught themselves how to set the type and print a decent page. What started as an amateur diversion became one of the pillars of European modernism.

The Hogarth PressThe Woolfs have proved endlessly interesting as individuals and as central players in the drama of Bloomsbury. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to their achievement as publishers. But with ten years research behind his endeavour, John Willis brings the remarkable story of their success as publishers to life. You might expect a book of this kind to be not much more than a long descriptive catalogue of publications, but in fact he generates interesting thumbnail sketches of Hogarth’s authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus

He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press, as well as the minute details of its finances which Leonard Woolf left behind as a legacy of his administrative skills and background.

The press is best known for its fiction, but it also ventured into poetry – supported by a £200 a year subsidy from Dorothy Wellesley. But despite attracting many of the brightest young talents of the inter-war years, none of these publications broke even. The whole enterprise was kept afloat by its best-selling stars, who just happened to be the one-time lovers Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West.

Leonard Woolf is rightly famous for his shrewd commercial judgements and his fanatical bookkeeping, yet the press also took on an amazing range of authors – from an unknown sixteen year old girl (Joan Adeney Easdale) to the ‘working class’ John Hampson (Saturday Night at the Greyhound) and arch modernists such as Gertrude Stein and Rainer Maria Rilke (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge).

What’s not so well known is that the Hogarth Press published a great deal on politics – from polemical essays on current affairs to substantial works of political and economic philosophy, particularly anti-imperialism and the promotion of internationalism, which was of particular interest to Leonard Woolf. A measure of his astuteness as a businessman was his publication of Mussolini’s article ‘The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism’ in 1933.

The Maurice Dobbs and the Sidney Webbs of this era published books and pamphlets arguing that Soviet communism offered a positive alternative to the nationalism and imperialism of the European powers which had led to the horrors of the First World War.

Their fundamental error, now more easily observed with the benefit of hindsight, is that they took all the data for their analysis directly from the Soviet regime itself, which we now know was based on lies, falsehoods, corruption, and deceit. They were bamboozled, and didn’t check their facts. Few escaped the God that Failed embarrassment – but Leonard Woolf was one of them, and he deserves to be more highly regarded because of it.

It’s interesting to note that many of the same issues which are being debated at the end of the first century of the twenty-first century were alive eighty years ago – educational reforms, anti-Imperialism, international finance, unemployment, and capitalism in crisis.

Willis’s account also features the strained and often difficult relationships which were created when Leonard Woolf took on assistants and partners in the firm – the best known of whom was John Lehmann, who had two periods of tenure. The partnership approach foundered because Leonard insisted on sticking to his independent commercial practises, and in the end he was proved right.

He was also right in his judgement that the English-speaking world was ready for psycho-analysis and the works of Freud. He took the bold step of publishing translations (some by friends, James and Alix Strachey) of the International Psycho-Analytic Library, as well as Freud’s Collected Papers.

This is a fascinating work which embraces literature, poetry, politics, feminism, international affairs, the mechanics of publishing, and a general account of cultural history in UK of the inter-war years – sometimes referred to as ‘the long weekend’.

There are three ideal audiences for this book: fans of Bloomsbury who want to know about one of its most productive enterprises; bibliophiles who are interested in a company which produced fine objects which were culturally significant but still made money; and cultural historians who might wish to ponder the significance of an enterprise which started out as a table-top hobby and became a major national cultural force.

© Roy Johnson 2005

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK

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J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41, London: University of Virginia Press, 1992, pp.451, ISBN: 0813913616

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