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The Portrait

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

The Portrait first appeared in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction, The Greater Inclination and Other Stories published by Charles Scribner’s in 1899. It is one of a numbers of stories Edith Wharton wrote on the relationship between art and life. She published a similar story The Verdict only a few years later.

The Portrait

Leon Riesener – Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863)

The Portrait – critical comments

The story is not so much about painting as about Lillo’s empathetic wish to protect Miss Vand’s feelings. He knows he can capture Vand’s villainous character but delays completing the face in the portrait. When confronted by Miss Vand and the incomplete work, he realises that she understands why it has not been finished – because Lillo does not want to reveal to her the corrupt side of a father on whom she dotes.

So he produces an uncritical and lifeless piece of work instead. This explains the mystery raised in the first part of the story – how could a talented painter produce such an unsuccessful piece of work?

In fact the story is split exactly into two in terms of structure. In part one the narrator presents the puzzle of Lillo’s ‘failed’ portrait; then part two is a monologue in which Lillo (acting as a second narrator) reveals the reasons for his having deliberately created a bad painting, which he calls a ‘lucid failure’.

The Portrait – study resources

The Portrait Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

The Portrait Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Portrait - eBook edition The Greater Inclination and Other Stories -Project Gutenberg

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Portrait

The Portrait – story synopsis

Opinions are divided on the merits of fashionable portrait painter George Lillo: some think he is too negative, others think he is searchingly realistic. His portrait of the notorious Alonzo Vard is considered a puzzling failure. Lillo invites the narrator to dinner, where he explains the provenance of this work.

Lillo has come from Paris to New York in the hope of doing something ‘big’ to establish a critical success. He is impressed by Vard°s dramatic appearance and his scandalous reputation as a powerful man of public affairs. He approaches Vard’s daughter, who worships her father and claims that all his finest qualities are only shown to her at home.

But when Lillo begins the portrait he realises that Vard is in fact shallow and vulgar, with no intellectual substance at all. He begins the portrait but is hesitant to present the truth because he doesn’t want to offend the doting daughter, who protectively attends all her father’s sittings.

Meanwhile Vard is involved in a political scandal which is reported by all the newspapers. On the day the news breaks, the sitting is interrupted by Vard’s secretary, who has arranged for his escape via a back door. Vard refuses to take it and walks out with his daughter on his arm.

There is a trial, and Vard is exonerated. Miss Vard visits the studio and sees the unfinished portrait. Lillo realises that she knows why it is incomplete. Later he feels obliged to finish off the painting in an anodyne manner so as not to offend her. This explains how and why he came to produce such a bad portrait.

Principal characters
George Lillo a fashionable portrait painter
I an un-named narrator – a friend of George Lillo
Alonzo Vard a dubious businessman
Miss Vard his devoted daughter

Edith Wharton's house - The Mount

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edith Wharton's writing

Edith Wharton’s writing

Other works by Edith Wharton

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

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

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

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

Edith Wharton – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

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

The Portrait of a Lady

by

tutorial, characters, resources, film, writing

The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is generally regarded as the masterpiece of James’s middle period. Isabel Archer, a young American woman with looks, wit, and imagination, arrives to discover Europe. She sees the world as “a place of brightness, of free expression, of irresistible action”. Turning aside from suitors who offer her their wealth and devotion, she follows her own path.

But that way leads to disillusionment and a future as constricted as “a dark narrow alley with a dead wall at the end”. James explores here one of his favourite themes – the New World in contest with the Old. In a conclusion that is one of the most moving in modern fiction, Isabel is forced to make her final choice.

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

The Portrait of a Lady – plot summary

Isabel Archer, originally from Albany, New York, is invited by her maternal aunt, Lydia Touchett, to visit Lydia’s rich husband Daniel at his estate near London, following the death of Isabel’s father. There, she meets her cousin Ralph Touchett, a friendly invalid, and the Touchetts’ robust neighbor, Lord Warburton.

Isabel later declines Warburton’s sudden proposal of marriage. She also rejects the hand of Caspar Goodwood, the charismatic son and heir of a wealthy Boston mill owner. Although Isabel is drawn to Caspar, her commitment to her independence precludes such a marriage, which she feels would demand the sacrifice of her freedom. The elder Touchett grows ill and, at the request of his son, leaves much of his estate to Isabel upon his death.

The Portrait of a LadyWith her large legacy, Isabel travels the Continent and meets an American expatriate, Gilbert Osmond, in Florence. Although Isabel had previously rejected both Warburton and Goodwood, she accepts Osmond’s proposal of marriage. She is unaware that this marriage has been actively promoted by the accomplished but untrustworthy Madame Merle, another American expatriate, whom Isabel had met at the Touchetts’ estate.

Isabel and Osmond settle in Rome, but their marriage rapidly sours due to Osmond’s overwhelming egotism and his lack of genuine affection for his wife. Isabel grows fond of Pansy, Osmond’s presumed daughter by his first marriage, and wants to grant her wish to marry Ned Rosier, a young art collector. The snobbish Osmond would rather that Pansy accept the proposal of Warburton, who had previously proposed to Isabel. Isabel suspects, however, that Warburton may just be feigning interest in Pansy to get close to Isabel again.

The conflict creates even more strain within the unhappy marriage. Isabel then learns that Ralph is dying at his estate in England and prepares to go to him for his final hours, but Osmond selfishly opposes this plan. Meanwhile, Isabel learns from her sister-in-law that Pansy is actually the daughter of Madame Merle, who had an adulterous relationship with Osmond for several years.

Isabel visits Pansy one last time, who desperately begs her to return some day, something Isabel reluctantly promises. She then leaves, without telling her spiteful husband, to comfort the dying Ralph in England, where she remains until his death.

Goodwood encounters her at Ralph’s estate and begs her to leave Osmond and come away with him. He passionately embraces and kisses her, but Isabel flees. Goodwood seeks her out the next day, but is told she has set off again for Rome. The ending is ambiguous, and the reader is left to imagine whether Isabel returned to Osmond to suffer out her marriage in noble tragedy (perhaps for Pansy’s sake) or whether she is going to rescue Pansy and leave Osmond.

Study resources

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – Cliff’s Notes – Amazon UK

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – Kindle eBook edition

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – eBook version at Project Gutenberg

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – audioBook version at LibriVox

Red button Preface to The Portrait of a Lady – for the 1910 New York edition

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – audio book (abridged, with music)

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button The Ladder – A Henry James web site

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

The Portrait of a Lady

The Portrait of a Lady – characters
Lord Warburton English peer and landowner
Daniel Touchett Vermont banker
Ralph Touchett young invalid – Isobel’s cousin
Lydia Touchett Ralph’s sister in Florence
Isabel Archer Ralph’s (maternal) cousin
Lilian Archer Isobel’s married sister
Edith Archer Isobel’s married sister
Edmund Ludlow Lilian’s husband
Caspar Goodwood rich Boston industrialist
Henrietta Stackpole feminist and journalist
Bunchie Terrier dog
Miss Molyneux Lord Warburton’s elder sister
Mr Bantling Bachelor friend of Ralph’s
Lady Pensil Bantling’s sister
Miss Climbers friend of Henrietta Stackpole
Madame Merle friend of Mrs Touchett’s from Florence
Mr & Mrs Luce friends of Mrs Touchett’s in Paris
Edward Rosier aesthete living in Paris
Gilbert Osmond asthete living in Italy for 20 years
Pansy Osmond Osmond’s 15 year old daughter
Countess Gemini Osmond’s sister
Gardencourt Mr Touchett’s estate
Lockleigh Lord Warburton’s estate
Palazzo Crescentini Mrs Touchett’s home
The Portrait of a Lady – film version

Jane Campion 1996 – Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich

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

The Portrait of a Lady – 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 Pretext

by

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

The Pretext first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine number 44 for August 1908. It was then reprinted in a collection of Edith Wharton’s stories The Hermit and the Wild Woman which was published by Charles Scribner’s later the same year.

The Pretext

cover design by Parish Maxfield

The Pretext – critical commentary

This is a rather sad, bitter-sweet tale of lost hopes and unfulfilled dreams in which a middle-aged woman is caught up in a doomed romantic liaison with a much younger man. The principal points of interest are the poignant manner in which Margaret Ransom examines her own fading appearance in the light of her awakening passion for Guy Dawnish. She has lived so long in the stiflingly conformist atmosphere of her university town and its conventions that she can hardly believe either in the romantic sensations she is feeling or the very idea that she might be the love object of a much younger man.

When it is time for him to return to England she forestalls any overt declaration of love so as to preserve all its unspoken potential to savour after he has gone. She suspects, and we as readers are given every reason to believe, that he has an undeclared ‘attachment’ back in England. This turns out to be true – but is only confirmed when he breaks off this ‘engagement’ because of the reported ‘significant attachment’ which has occurred during his study visit in America.

The story is given its first ironic twist when his aunt arrives in search of the person who has caused such social havoc by distracting him from his social path – that person being Margaret herself. The aunt simply cannot believe that a middle-aged woman can be the object of her young nephew’s affections.

The story teeters very close to farce as the aunt invents more and more explanations to account for her bewilderment – all resting on mistaken identity. But finally, when Margaret reveals that she is the woman the aunt is looking for, she comes up with the explanation that gives the story it’s name – that Margaret has been used as a pretext to cover Guy’s real love interest.

And this finally is where the story is given its second and most heart-wrenching twist. Margaret is so under-confident that she herself accepts this explanation, not daring to believe that the romantic episode was a reciprocated experience. The story ends with the prospect of her dull suburban life stretching into an indefinite future.

The Pretext – study resources

The Pretext Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

The Pretext Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Pretext - eBook edition The Greater Inclination and Other Stories -Project Gutenberg

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Pretext

The Pretext – story synopsis

Part I.   Margaret Ransom is the middle-aged wife of a lawyer in a New England university town. She has become romantically excited during the previous two years by her contact with Guy Dawnish, a young visiting Englishman, but she feels the pressure to conform to the Puritan traditions of the town and it’s social norms.

Part II.   Guy Dawnish has left her some personal photographs which emphasise his richly privileged English background. Margaret finds this romantic and fascinating. Dawnish is shortly due to return to England-and they are both invited to a university event where her husband will be speaking.

Part III.   Feeling oppressed by her husband’s speech, she leaves the hall with Guy, and they confront each other romantically in a secluded spot by the river. Not knowing how to deal with the possibilities between them, she urges him not to name or reveal his feelings, but to preserve their unspoken understanding of each other as a potential to help her face the future.

Part IV.   Guy goes back to England and writes polite letters. Margaret lives on her memories of their moments together. Then she hears from a friend visiting England that Guy has broken off a previous ‘understanding’ with an heiress because of an ‘unfortunate attachment’ he has formed during his American sojourn. Margaret regrets that she didn’t catch hold of her chance of happiness when it was presented to her.

Part V.   Margaret tries to busy herself in university social life, but then she is visited by Guy’s forceful aunt Lady Caroline Duckett who has come to America to investigate the person who has caused Guy to give up his engagement and caused such social disruption within his family. The aunt cannot believe that Margaret (as a middle-aged woman) is the person responsible and eventually presumes that Guy has used Margaret’s name as a cover for an attachment to someone else. Margaret is so lacking in self esteem that she accepts this idea herself, and prepares herself for a life with all her romantic hopes extinguished.

Principal characters
Robert Ransom university tutor in law
Margaret Ransom his romantic wife
Guy Dawnish young English academic visitor
Gwendolen Matcher Guy’s ‘intended’ in England
Lady Caroline Duckett Guy’s aunt from England

The Pretext

first English edition – Macmillan 1908

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edith Wharton's house - The Mount

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

The Princess Casamassima

by

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

The Princess Casamassima first appeared as monthly serial insallments in The Atlantic Monthly magazine between 1885 and 1886. It was published in book form as three volumes by Macmillan in 1886. The work is very unusual in James’s oeuvre in dealing with both the working classes and with revolutionary politics. It also features a character (the Princess) who had appeared as the American beauty Christina Light in Roderick Hudson, published ten years previously in 1875.

The Princess Casamassima

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)

The Princess Casamassima – critical commentary

The serial novel

Like most other nineteenth century novelists, James was accustomed to producing his novels first in the form of monthly magazine installments, then in book form – either as single or multiple volumes. The Princess Casamassima first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly over the space of a year in fourteen installments, then in three volumes, published by Macmillan in 1886.

It has to be said that one reason why the novel has not proved popular with general readers (or scholars) is that the pace of the narrative is glacially slow. Although there are sufficient characters and plot intrigue to provide psychological development and dramatic tension, much of the story is laboured beyond belief. It’s as if James felt uncomfortable with the subject he had chosen. It is also true that he was literally making up the story as he went along, having been held up in his writing schedule over problems with his previous novel The Bostonians which was published almost at the same time (1885-1886).

There is none of the light and shade or the dramatic tension one would expect in the serial form (as one gets to abundance in Dickens for instance). Journeys from one location to another are described in excessive detail; interaction between the characters is traced exhaustively, but does not lead anywhere (see below); and there is a great deal of repetition.

Politics

Conversely, many elements hinted at in the account of events, particularly related to the ostensible subject of social revolutionaries, are not actually realised. There are mentions of spies, informers, agents provocateur, hard-line anarchists, and police surveillance, but none of this is dramatised or even discussed by the principal characters.

One cannot expect James to be particularly well informed on matters of revolutionary politics, because very few people knew anything much about the subject at that time in the 1880s. It was generally assumed that revolutionaries were small, almost secret groups of bomb-throwing anarchists and desperadoes who had utopian dreams of dispossessing the rich and overturning society.

However, James did choose his subject consciously, so he must be held accountable for his failure to provide any knowledge of its workings. None of the meetings in the Sun and Moon are reported, and even the conversations of his two principal characters, Hyacinth and Paul, do not cover revolutionary politics or even social theory. Paul merely opines that ‘the democracy’ will eventually prevail, whilst Hyacinth volunteers for his fatal mission as an act of bravado.

However, James was not entirely unaware of the lives of lower-class people. His story In the Cage deals with the life and working conditions of a young woman who operates a telegraphy machine within a grocery store in London’s West End.

The Dickensian shadow

There are many elements of the novel that have powerful overtones of Dickens. For instance, Hyacinth’s melodramatic origins. He is the unrecognised bastard child of a French prostitute and an English Lord who has been raised by an impoverished dressmaker. His mother has murdered his father; and as a child Hyacinth is taken to a gruesome deathbed meeting with his mother in a prison.

Rosy Muniment, the irrepressibly cheerful invalid with a crippled spine who finds positives in everything that surrounds her is closely reminiscent of Fanny Cleaver (Jenny Wren) the doll’s dressmaker in Our Mutual Friend whose lament is “my back’s bad and my legs are so queer” and is unstoppably chirpy and optimistic, despite her disabilities.

Mr Vetch and Hyacinth are a very close parallel to Pip and Joe Gargery in Great Expectations. Mr Vetch does everything to protect and help Hyacinth get on in life, and is very loyal to his foster mother. When Hyacinth becomes involved with the aristocracy and develops snobbish and selfish values, Mr Vetch is uncomplaining and does not reproach an entirely unthankful protege – and even offers to lend him money from his hard-earned savings as Hyacinth is engaged in squandering his small inheritance on trips to Paris and Venice.

There is even direct reference to Dickens when Paul Muniment sees someone who reminds him of Mr Micawber.

Resolution

What reinforces this impression of torpor more than anything else is the fact that at the end of the novel there are so many unfinished or unresolved elements in the plot. We know that Hyacinth cannot contain the contradiction which exists within him – the pull between his love of ‘civilization’, luxury, plus an aristocratic lifestyle, and his fast-disappearing socialist sympathies. So he resolves the issue personally by shooting himself. But what happens to the other ‘revolutionaries’? We have no idea what happens to the Princess, to Paul Muniment, to Eustace Poupin, to Schinkel, or even to Hoffendahl’s plot to assassinate someone of importance.

Many of the other plot lines are also left in an unfinished or unresolved state. The relationship between Paul and Hyacinth is not brought to any closure – nor is Paul’s romantic dalliance with the Princess. We do not have any explanation for Mr Vetch’s unquestioning support for Hyacinth, even when he is betraying his own principles and drifting into a self-indulgent ‘appreciation’ of luxuries afforded to the upper class.

Even Hyacinth’s melodramatic origins are not resolved or examined in any way in the later parts of the novel. Where Dickens might have produced some sort of long-term dramatic connection resulting from this sexual link between upper and lower class, James leaves this whole melodramatic episode merely as a donnée to illuminate Hyacinth’s problematic origins. In a novel of this length and complexity, I think readers are entitled to expect resolutions or at least connections to be made between the various elements of the narrative. All we are given instead is a ‘surprise’ twist to the tale which is fairly easy to foresee and brings one of James’s longest novels to an abrupt and quite unsatisfactory stop.

The Princess Casamassima – Study resources

The Other House The Princess Casamassima – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Other House The Princess Casamassima – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Other House The Princess Casamassima – Digireads – Amazon UK

The Other House The Princess Casamassima – Digireads – Amazon US

The Other House The Princess Casamassima – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Other House The Princess Casamassima – Library of America – Amazon US

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

The Princess Casamassima

The Princess Casamassima – plot synopsis

Book First

Chapter I.   Prison office Mrs Bowerbank visits poor dressmaker Miss Amanda Pynsent (‘Pinnie’) regarding a possible visit for her adopted son Hyacinth Robinson to see his mother, who is dying in prison where she has been confined for the previous nine years for murdering he lover Lord Frederick Purvis, who is Hyacinth’s father.

Chapter II.   Pinnie seeks advice from her radical neighbour Theophilious Vetch. She worries about revealing to Hyacinth his true parentage. Mr Vetch takes a tough realistic view and thinks Hyacinth ought to know the truth.

Chapter III.   Pinnie and Hyacinth visit the gloomy penitentiary, but the meeting between Hyacinth and his mother is a disaster. He does not like the prison and does not know why he is there. His mother thinks he hates her. He submits unwillingly to her brief embrace, then they leave

Chapter IV.   Ten years later Pinnie receives a visit from Millicent Henning, Hyacinth’s childhood friend and the daughter of a dissolute neighbouring family who have been evicted. Millicent is now a pushy and vulgar young cockney woman. Pinnie thinks she made a grave mistake in taking Hyacinth to the prison; her business has declined, and she has fallen onto hard times.

Chapter V.   Hyacinth arrives home. He has become a bookbinder, has taught himself French, and although physically slight is attractive. But he is bitterly conscious of his low status in life. He is attracted to Millicent and walks home with her. She asks him about his ‘family background’ and mocks his lowly status. Nevertheless, he arranges to see her again.

Chapter VI.   In a narrative flashback, when Mr Vetch has a copy of Bacon’s Essays bound as a gift for Hyacinth, he meets French radical exile Eustace Poupin, whereupon the two families become weekend friends. Poupin finds a position for Hyacinth at the Soho bindery where he works and becomes his mentor.

Chapter VII.   Under the influence of Poupin, Hyacinth tries to understand social class and the revolutionary ethos. Via meetings of radical sympathisers in the back room of the Sun and Moon pub in Bloomsbury, he meets Paul Muniment, who takes him home to meet his disabled sister Rosy, where they also meet Lady Aurora Langrish, an aristocratic do-gooder.

Chapter VIII.   They discuss various degrees of radical ideas, ending with predictions on how the aristocracy might behave in the event of an uprising amongst the lower classes in England.

Chapter IX.   Rosy recounts to Hyacinth the history of their relationship with Lady Aurora, the upper-class ‘saint’ who spends her time amongst the poor. Hyacinth is very impressed by Rosy as she recounts her family’s poor working-class background. She supports the oppressed but wants the aristocracy preserved. Hyacinth wants to know more about the ‘party of action’ from his friends, but Paul keeps him at arm’s length in a good-humoured way.

Chapter X.   Some months later Pinnie is more than ever concerned about Hyacinth’s continuing relationship with Millicent. He sees the positive side of her vulgar plebeian nature, and seems unaware of any sexual attraction he might be feeling for her. He even visualises her in heroic fashion as Liberty leading the people at the barricades.

Chapter XI.   Hyacinth continues his relationship with Millicent, despite her having no taste in anything beyond vulgar acquisitiveness. He meanwhile feels excluded from the aristocratic lifestyle to which he instinctively feels he has the right. This produces a dichotomy in his political allegiances which he cannot resolve. He eventually unearths the true story of his origins. He asks Mr Vetch to secure tickets for a show and is asked about his membership of the First International.

Book Second

Chapter XII.   When Hyacinth takes Millicent to the theatre he meets Captain Sholto (an upper class fellow radical) who wants to introduce him to his friend the Princess Casamassima. Hyacinth is torn between feeling patronised and flattered.

Chapter XIII.   When he joins the Princess and Madame Grandoni in their box he is overwhelmed by their aristocratic glamour. The Princess reveals that she sends Sholto out into society to bring her ‘interesting’ people to study. She wants to ‘understand’ the common people and believes that social revolution is bound to be imminent.

Chapter XIV.   When Hyacinth reports these events to Paul, his friend refuses to trust or give any of his time to people he sees as his class enemies. He makes an exception for Lady Aurora because she makes a practical effort to help Rosy. Hyacinth takes Pinnie to see Rosy, who ‘commissions’ her to make a pink nightgown.

Chapter XV.   Hyacinth compare political notes with Lady Aurora. She reveals her deep-seated antipathy to her own class and the effort it has cost her to break free of it. Paul arrives with Captain Sholto and reveals to Hyacinth that Sholto is merely a tout for the Princess, who he regards as a ‘monster’. Sholto then invites Hyacinth back to his rooms in Westminster where they discuss the Princess, who was expelled from her home by her husband, who now wants her back again.

Chapter XVI.   Prince Casamassima arrives in London hoping to effect a reconciliation with his wife – but she refuses to see him. The Prince discusses the situation with Madame Grandoni, fearful that Christina will bring his illustrious name into disrepute. Hyacinth arrives, and Madame Grandoni warns him against his radical ideas and principles.

Chapter XVII.   When the Prince arrives, the Princess first complains about her husband, then she asks Hyacinth to help her ‘know the people’. She outlines her own life history and how she despises the emptiness of the aristocracy. Finally she invites him to visit her in the country. Hyacinth binds a copy of Tennyson’s poems in her honour, but when he goes to deliver it she has left town.

Chapter XVIII.   Madame Grandoni meets the Prince before leaving for the country. She explains that Princess Christina now thinks it was a mistake to marry for money and a title. She also realises that Christina now finds the Prince terminally boring. The prince quizzes her about Hyacinth and Sholto.

Chapter XIX.   Pinnie uses the creation of the pink dressing gown as an excuse to cultivate Lady Aurora. Hyacinth finally calls on Lady Aurora to collect the French books she has promised to lend him. He is slightly amused that she wishes to explore ‘pauperism’, and she reveals that she thinks Captain Sholto is vulgar.

Chapter XX.   Hyacinth is conscious of a double connection with the upper class – the Princess with whom he is a little in love, and Lady Aurora who he regards as a ‘saint’. He bumps into Sholto in a pub, and together they meet Millicent, with whom he has a lover’s tiff. Sholto takes them to a music hall, and Hyacinth wonders if there is a secret liaison between Sholto and Millicent.

Chapter XXI.   Paul Muniment and Hyacinth are regarded as natural leaders amongst the radicals at the Sun and Moon in Bloomsbury. Paul is sceptical and taciturn, whilst Hyacinth is admired because of his mother’s tragic history. Hoffendahl, a famous German revolutionary is visiting London. He has been imprisoned and tortured, but has refused to name names. The local conspirators debate the ethics and the practical strategies of personal sacrifice. Hyacinth wonders why Paul does not take him more into his confidence. When a provocateur accuses them of cowardice, Hyacinth makes a defiant speech. Then Paul invites him and two others to meet Hoffendahl.

Book Third

Chapter XXII.   Three months later Hyacinth visits Medley, the Princess’s rented estate in the country, and is impressed by its age and beauty. The Princess treats him lavishly, but he is conscious of the contradiction of her claiming to be concerned for the poor whilst living in a house with forty to fifty rooms. He has previously pledged himself to the revolutionary cause of Hoffendahl. When he mentions Lady Aurora, the Princess regrets that she is not the first titled lady he has known.

Chapter XXIII.   After lunch Hyacinth goes for a drive with the Princess and Madame Grandoni, then at high tea more visitors arrive. The Princess puts pressure on him to stay. He explains that he needs to go back to work the next day, but she flatters him and persuades him to stay on.

Chapter XXIV.   Next day the Princess quizzes him about his activities. He tells her he has pledged his life when it becomes necessary to act. The people at the Sun and Moon he now regards as inconsequential. He has been sold a vision of an international network of revolution about to be ignited. He claims to be cautious, but names everyone involved.The Princess reveals that she too knows Hoffendahl but has been kept at arm’s length because he doesn’t trust women. The Princess flatters Hyacinth, and he reveals his origins to her.

Chapter XXV.   A few days later Hyacinth meets Captain Sholto with whom he has been in rivalry regarding Millicent. Sholto reveals that he doesn’t believe in the revolutionary cause at all, and is only interested in regaining his place close to the Princess, to whose every whim he panders.

Chapter XXVI.   The Princess invites Sholto to say at Medley. He believes that Hyacinth will suffer at the hands of the Princess. Hyacinth realises that Sholto is an empty shell who fabricates the role of slave to the Princess because he has nothing else to do. The Princess is bored by his attentions, but tolerates him.

Chapter XXVII.   Hyacinth returns home from Medley to discover that Pinnie is dying, attended by the devoted Lady Aurora. He thinks that people by now might know the ‘secret’ of his birth, but he is no longer concerned. He becomes painfully aware of the sordid living quarters in which he has been raised. Mr Vetch explains that Pinnie wanted Hyacinth left undisturbed whilst he enjoyed his high social connections. He offers Hyacinth money and takes an unquestioning fatherly interest in him.

Chapter XXVIII.   Hyacinth tries to look after the dying Pinnie, who is pleased that he has made contact with the aristocracy. But she dies, leaving him all her meagre savings. Mr Vetch continues to be supportive, and Hyacinth realises that he owes him and Pinnie a debt of looking after them – and that this will not be possible if he should end up in jail. Pinnie has expressed the hope that Hyacinth would travel abroad – to Paris.

Book Fourth

Chapter XXIX.   Following his inheritance and a further advance from Mr Vetch, Hyacinth visits Paris and thinks about his mother’s father, the revolutionary watch-maker who died on the barricades. He is seduced by the glamour and the luxury of the centre of modern civilization and feels distant from his socialist allegiances. He thinks he has an unbreakable bond to the Princess and yet still feels tied to Millicent.

Chapter XXX.   Hyacinth continues to feel a slightly ambiguous admiration for his friend Paul Muniment. After Paris he travels to Venice, from where he writes to the Princess confessing his change of heart regarding the revolution. He now values the products of civilization too much to think of destroying them.

Chapter XXXI.   When he returns to London, he finds that the Princess has gone. Feeling that he has spent his inheritance on an experience he wishes to share with her, he worries that she might have changed. He goes back to work reluctantly and begins to have literary aspirations. Mr Vetch supports him as ever, and he begins to feel distant from his fellow workers.

Chapter XXXII.   When Hyacinth visits the Muniments, he finds the Princess there with Lady Aurora. She claims to have given up all her worldly goods, selling off everything to give to the poor. It is her idea of making a grand sacrifice.

Chapter XXXIII.   Hyacinth walks with the Princess back to her small rented house in Paddington. She protests poverty but seems to have retained servants. Hyacinth thinks this is a fad which will rapidly fade away. She also claims that she admires Paul Muniment for not coming to visit her.

Chapter XXXIV.   Hyacinth discusses the Princess with Lady Aurora, who is a great fan. They all meet for tea together in POaddington. The Princess offers to help Lady Aurora in her ‘work’ – albeit in a patronising manner. Nevertheless, the two aristocratic women seem to form a close relationship.

Chapter XXXV.   Paul and Hyacinth one Sunday travel out to Greenwich, where Hyacinth asks Paul if he is in love with the Princess. Paul is evasive in reply, and they speak instead of Hyacinth’s ‘contract with Hoffendahl. Paul thinks it might not happen; the issue tests their friendship; and Paul jokingly calls Hyacinth a ‘duke in disguise’. Paul does not believe in ‘the millennium’ (violent revolution) but in ‘the democracy’.

Chapter XXXVI.   Paul visits the Princess. She claims she wishes to help the ’cause’ and offers to replace Hyacinth in his contract with Hoffendahl. She also offers money, but Paul remains distant and sceptical, because he does not trust women.

Chapter XXXVII.   The Princess receives Mr Vetch as a visitor. He finds it very difficult to say why he has come, except that it relates to Hyacinth. He wants Hyacinth to reconcile himself to society, and believes he no longer has such radical beliefs as previously. He believes that Hyacinth has fallen in with dangerous conspirators and is about to perform some sort of rash act. The Princess denies all knowledge of any such pledge. Mr Vetch feels responsible, because he introduced Hyacinth to the revolutionaries via Poupin. He also wishes to check with Paul Muniment, but the Princess appeals to him to leave Paul alone.

Chapter XXXVIII.   Hyacinth binds books for the Princess and rises in status at the bindery. The Princess claims to have lost interest in this project and Hyacinth has to acquire more books ‘from store’ via her servant Augusta. He begins to feel that ‘the democracy’ will look after its own future, and continues to feel pulled between sympathy for his mother and his aristocratic father. Hyacinth and the Princess josh each other regarding their political commitments, and he suspects that she might be going ‘too far’. The Princess wonders if her ‘saint’ Lady Aurora might marry Paul Muniment, with whom she is in love.

Chapter XXXIX.   Rosy Muniment also thinks her brother Paul ought to marry Lady Aurora, and that he ought to stay clear of the Princess. When Paul visits the Princess she flirts with him and tells him about Mr Vetch’s anxieties and suspicions. She asks Paul to dissuade Hyacinth from making his grand self-sacrifice. Paul says that such a decision is Hyacinth’s own business. They leave for a meeting and are spied upon and followed by her husband the Prince.

Chapter XXXX.   The Prince visits Madame Grandoni and asks her for information on the Princess and Paul Muniment, suspecting his wife of having an affair. Madame Grandoni is divided in her loyalty, but she reveals that they are all involved in overthrowing society. The Prince wishes to avoid a ‘scandal’ since he is inordinately proud of his family name. When Hyacinth suddenly appears the Prince quizzes him about his political opinions and wants to know about the house the Princess and Paul have gone to. The conspirators return: Hyacinth is disturbed and goes home.

Chapter XXXXI.   Hyacinth goes into Hyde Park on Sunday with Millicent. She chides him for his inconstancy, his anti-social ideas, and his relationship with the Princess. She also correctly assumes that Paul has replaced him in the affections of the Princess.

Chapter XXXXII.   The same evening Hyacinth calls on Lady Aurora who is going out to a party and seems ready to rejoin her class. Then he goes to the Poupins where they are entertaining Schinkel.

Book Fifth

Chapter XXXXIII.   Although they welcome Hyacinth, he feels that there is something ominous afoot. He demands to know what is happening. They reveal that they think he has given up the cause, and Schinkel has a letter for him. They argue inconsequently.

Chapter XXXXIV.   Hyacinth goes out, followed by Schinkel, who tells him about having received a letter for him. Hyacinth takes the letter, but when he goes up to his room Mr Vetch is waiting for him, worried that he might be in trouble. Hyacinth promises him never to do anything to help the revolutionaries, and Mr Vetch leaves.

Chapter XXXXV.   Next day Hyacinth goes to the Princess’s house, only to find that Madame Grandoni has gone back to Italy. The Princess arrives, and they have a disagreement about his commitment to the ’cause’. She tells him that Paul thinks his ‘grand sacrifice’ will not be called in, because he has obviously changed his political allegiance. He claims not to have changed at all.

Chapter XXXXVI.   Paul visits the Princess to tell her that her husband is cutting off her allowance. He predicts that she will return to the Prince. He also reveals that Hyacinth has received instructions to assassinate somebody in a few days time at a grand party. The Princess claims she will try to carry out the act herself.

Chapter XXXXVII.   Hyacinth has three days left. He decides he would like comfort from Millicent, but when he goes to the shop where she works, she is serving Sholto. He feels that if he carries out the assassination he will be following in his mother’s footsteps. The Princess arrives at Hyacinth’s lodgings to find Schinkel also waiting for him. They break down the door, to find that Hyacinth has shot himself through the heart.

The Princess Casamassima

First edition – Macmillan 1886

The Princess Casamassima – principal characters
I an un-named narrator who occasionally appears
Miss Amanda Pynsent (‘Pinnie’) an impoverished dressmaker, foster-mother to Hyacinth
Hyacinth Robinson small, intelligent bookbinder of Anglo-French parentage
Mrs Bowerbank a large woman who works as a prison officer
Millicent Henning childhood playmate of Hyacinth who becomes a pushy cockney
Theophilous Vetch a radical fiddle player and neighbour
Florence Vivier a French prostitute, Hyacinth’s mother
Eustace Poupin French republican exile and master bookbinder
Mr Crookenden Soho bookbinder
Paul Muniment a chemist’s assistant and radical, Hyacinth’s friend
Rosy Muniment Paul’s sister, a cheerful invalid
Lady Aurora Langrish tall, plain, ill-dressed aristocratic ‘socialist’
Lord Frederick Purvis (‘Robinson’) Hyacinth’s murdered father
Princess Christina Casamassima a beautiful American woman
Prince Casamassima her estranged Italian husband
Captain Godfrey Gerald Sholto a ‘cosmopolitan’ friend of the Princess
Madame Grandoni German companion to the Princess – an old woman who wears a wig
Diedrich Hoffendahl a German revolutionary (who does not actually appear)
Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

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The Private Life

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

The Private Life was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in April 1892. Its next appearance in book form was as part of the collection The Private Life, published in London by Osgood, McIlvaine and in New York by Harper in 1893. It is one of a number of tales of James’s late period in which he explored the relationship between writers, their work, and their personal lives.

The Private Life

The Swiss Alps

The Private Life – critical commentary

We know that the origins of this tale lie in Henry James having admired then met Robert Browning (1812-1889) only to find that the celebrated poet, famous for his dense, complex, and highly intellectualised works, was something of a washout as a conversationalist. In other words, his talent went into his work – not into his public persona. James responded to this phenomenon by thinking of the public and private personae as two different people:.

This explained to the imagination the mystery: our delightful inconceivable celebrity was double, constructed in two quite distinct and ‘water-tight’ compartments – one of these figured by the gentleman who sat at a table all alone, silent and unseen, and wrote admirably deep and brave and intricate things; while the gentleman who regularly came forth to sit at a quite different table and substantially and promiscuously and multitudinously dine stood for its companion. They had nothing to do, the so dissimilar twins, with each other; the diner could exist but by the cessation of the writer, whose emergence, on his side, depended on his – and our! – ignoring the diner.

The Lord Mellifont character is almost the opposite. He is the public performer – ‘the man whose whole personality goes forth so in representation and aspect and sonority and phraseology and accomplishment and frontage’. He is urbane and controlling; he sets the tone for everyone else and orchestrates their conversations and social interchanges. But he has no individual substance. He is an empty shell – so much so that when left alone he ‘disappears’ – literally, in Blanche Adney’s experience on their excursion.

The weakness of these two similar conceits is that in neither case are the characteristics dramatised – despite James’s urgings to himself in the notebooks “Dramatise it, dramatise it!” We are told (by the narrator) about Clare Vawdrey’s greatness but not shown any evidence of it. We are told in the same way about Lord Mellifont’s urbane and sophisticated public persona – but not given any dramatised evidence of it.

The ghost story

This tale is often classified as one of James’s ghost stories. But its dramatic weakness also contributes to making the ‘two’ Clare Vawdreys and the ‘disappearing’ Mellifont both unconvincing, and actually unnecessary. It would be perfectly reasonable and persuasive to have a talented writer who does not shine socially, and the sort of pompous stuffed shirt we take Mellifont to be who is reduced to nothing when he is alone. James pulled off something of this sort in The Coxon Fund which he completed two years later.

The Private Life – study resources

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

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

The Private Life Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Private Life Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Private Life The Private Life – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Henry James The Aspern Papers The Private Life – Oxford Classics – 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 Private Life

The Private Life – plot summary

An un-named narrator recounts the annual holiday of a group of socialite London friends in Switzerland. He describes the celebrated novelist (and talker) Clarence (‘Clare’) Vawdrey, who takes a neutral attitude to all conversational topicsLady Mellifont is worried that her husband is missing with the slightly raffish actress Blanche Adney. However, Blanche eventually returns, hinting that something happened on their walk, whilst Lord Mellifont goes to dress for dinner.

Lord Mellifont is a host who sets and controls the tone of dinner and its conversations. Blanche |Adney hopes that Clare Vawdrey will write a play in which she will star as a tragic heroine. Vawdrey claims that he has written a ‘magnificent passage’ and the company clamour for him to read it after dinner. But when the performance is organised he can’t remember a word, and even admits that there is no manuscript.

However, Blanche wants the narrator to search for anything that Vawdrey has written, and she takes the author onto the terrace, leaving the narrator free to search his hotel room. But when the narrator goes into Vawdrey’s room the author is already there, writing in the dark., and he makes no response to the narrator’s interruption.

Next day the narrator goes out walking, but after dinner he tells Blanche about his mysterious experience. She confirms that she was with Vawdrey on the terrace at the time the narrator saw him in his room. The narrator concludes that there are two Vawdreys – an empty public version, and a substantial private one.

Blanche also reveals that Lord Mellifont is the opposite – a man who has no substance when alone, only in his public persona. The narrator and Blanche then compare their theories. Blanche claims she is ‘in love’ with the real Clare Vawdrey, and she recounts how Lord Mellifont ‘disappeared’ when she was not there to create an audience for him on their recent excursion.

They meet Lord Mellifont who is out doing some watercolour painting. He presents a picture to Blanche. The narrator and Blanche plot to ‘find’ Mellifont and Vawdrey alone to test their theories. The narrator takes the painting for Lord Mellifont to sign, but he is intercepted by Lady Mellifont, who says she will arrange the signature for him – which he takes as a sign of her embarrassment on her husband’s behalf.

He then goes off to take Vawdrey an umbrella. They shelter from a thunderstorm, and the narrator is very disappointed by the banal nature of Vawdrey’s conversation. When they return to the hotel Blanche tells the narrator that she has been with the ‘real’ Vawdrey and has told him that she loves him. She also claims to have possession of the great part he has written for her – but when the party returns to London this doesn’t appear to be the case.

The Private Life – principal characters
I the un-named narrator, a writer
Lord Mellifont a charming socialite
Lady Mellifont his timorous wife
Clarence (‘Clare’) Vawdrey a celebrated writer
Blanche Adney a comedy actress
Vincent Adney her husband, a composer and violinist
Ghost stories by Henry James

Red button The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)

Red button The Ghostly Rental (1876)

Red button Sir Edmund Orme (1891)

Red button The Private Life (1892)

Red button Owen Wingrave (1892)

Red button The Friends of the Friends (1896)

Red button The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Red button The Real Right Thing (1899)

Red button The Third Person (1900)

Red button The Jolly Corner (1908)

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.

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 2013

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

The Pupil

by

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

The Pupil first appeared in Longman’s Magazine for March—April 1891. It next appeared in the collection The Lesson of the Master published in New York and London by Macmillan in 1919.

The Pupil - Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

The Pupil – critical commentary

Towards the end of the nineteenth century (and into the twentieth) Henry James wrote a number of works whose subjects were dysfunctional families and the neglect of children. One thinks of What Masie Knew (1897) and The Awkward Age (1899) but the most obvious dramatic parallel is with The Turn of the Screw (1898). In that tale a governess looking after two young children frightens one of them to death by confronting him with what she thinks is the ghost of a former servant Peter Quint.

In The Pupil Pemberton is presented with the avaricious and socially demanding notion of the Moreens that he is now responsible for their son Morgan’s welfare. We know that Pemberton has sacrificed time, money, and intellectual energy on the boy’s upbringing – but to be confronted with a quasi-formal suggestion that he assume full responsibility for his charge causes him to hesitate. It is that hesitation which causes the boy to lose faith in his protector, and we are led to believe that the emotional strain precipitates his heart failure.

The homo-erotic theme

It is impossible to read the tale without noticing the very strong element of homo-erotic attachment between the teacher and his pupil. And the attraction appears to be mutual. Quite apart from the touching and glances that are exchanged between the pair, Morgan buys Pemberton a tie in Paris, and Pemberton later reveals that he has kept a lock of the boy’s hair as a souvenir.

I don’t think this has any particular bearing upon the meaning of the story as a whole, but it does show that from an early point in his writing career, James was giving expression to emotional relationships between men (as he was to do later between women in texts such as The Bostonians).

The Pupil – study resources

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

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

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

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

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

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

The Pupil

The Pupil – plot summary

Part I.   Pemberton, a young graduate of Oxford and Yale University, has spent all his inheritance on a European tour and is forced to seek employment as a private tutor to Morgan Moreen, the precocious younger son of a rich American family living in Nice. He is anxious about his salary and the boy in his charge.

Part II.   Pemberton discovers that the family are polyglot bohemians in an unusual manner and that the boy is supernaturally clever in a way that makes them want to keep a distance from their own son.

Part III.   Pemberton forms a very intimate understanding with Morgan which centres on judgements of the boy’s parents (and which also contains homo-erotic undertones).

Part IV.   After a year the family move to live in Paris, where Pemberton begins to notice that the family neglect their son, whose clothes become old and shabby. Pemberton and Morgan become flaneurs and share a degree of poverty. The Moran family fail to pay Pemberton any salary. He threatens to leave, but has no money to return to England. When they do pay him, he realises that he cannot make the break. He begins to see that the Moreens are ‘adventurers who don’t pay their debts. He also perceives that they are toadies and snobs.

Part V.   Pemberton feels that it would be improper to criticise his parents to the boy, but Morgan himself tells Pemberton that he ought to take flight from their negligence. Pemberton threatens that he will reveal their misdeeds to the boy, and Mrs Mooreen gives him fifty Francs and tells him he ought to be grateful to work for nothing.. They argue about responsibility for the boy, and he refuses the money.

Part VI.   Morgan tells him that a former nurse had left the family for similar reasons: they would not pay her. They discuss the idea of running away together. Morgan knows that his parents are lying and cheating, and wonders what resources they have to survive. They agree that Pemberton should leave at the first opportunity of locating alternative employment, and they feel better now that all the facts of the situation have been revealed and shared.

Part VII.   Morgan wonders why his parents are such louche arrivistes and wishes he could feel less shame on their behalf.The family moves to Venice. Morgan is now fifteen and taller. He feels more prepared to meet the world and thinks to attend Pemberton’s old college at Oxford. Mrs Moreen asks Pemberton to lend her money. When an offer of another tutoring post in England comes up, Pemberton leaves the Moreens.

Part VIII.   Pemberton takes up his post tutoring an ‘opulent youth’ and (rather improbably) sends money to Mrs Moreen. She replies telling him that Morgan is desperately ill. But when Pemberton travels to Paris he discovers that Morgan is not ill at all, and that Mrs Moreen has withheld his letters to Morgan and tricked him into returning. She accuses Pemberton of taking their son away from them, and that he now has full responsibility for staying with them. Morgan meanwhile wants to be taken away from his parents, who he regards as frauds.

Pemberton senses that the family fortunes are about to crash, and he resurrects the idea of running away with Morgan. He uses up all his savings, and the Moreens move to a cheap hotel. When the family crash does occur, they ask him to take charge of Morgan. But the emotional stress of the scene is too much for Morgan, and he dies on the spot.

Principal characters
Pemberton a young tutor, ex Oxford and Yale
The Moreens Americans living in Europe
Morgan Moreen their precociously talented but sickly son
Ulrich Moreen Morgan’s older brother (20)
Paula Moreen Morgan’s sister
Amy Moreen Morgan’s sister
Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 2013

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

The Purloined Letter

by

The Purloined Letter (1844) marks the third and final appearance of Edgar Allan Poe’s master-detective, the Parisian‘ gentleman’ Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin. He first appeared in The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) and then again in The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842). He is also quite clearly the original inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective, Sherlock Holmes.

Edgar Allan Poe

The story first appeared in the Christmas literary annual The Gift published in Philadelphia in December 1845. Poe received a payment of only $12.00 for its first printing, but the story was reprinted in many newspapers and magazines in the years that followed.

The Purloined Letter – critical comment

The short story

Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories are generally collected under the title of Tales of Mystery and Imagination. In them, Poe explored a wide range of topics and themes. He is most famous for his tales of Gothic horror – such as The Black Cat, The Pit and the Pendulum, and Ligeia. But he also invented the detective story; he wrote tales of science fiction (The Balloon Hoax); spoofs and satires (The Man Who was Used Up); and puzzles or cryptograms such as The Gold Bug.

He wrote prolifically for newspapers and magazines. As a result of his engagement with the shorter literary forms he developed a theory of short stories which is still relevant today. He claimed that a successful short story should follow a set of rules.

  • It should be read at one sitting
  • It should create a ‘unity of effect’
  • It should contain nothing superfluous
  • It should strike its note in the first sentence
  • It should be imaginative and original

The Purloined Letter is successful because it meets all these requirements. The mystery is focussed on one topic – the missing letter. There are no digressions. All parts of the tale relate to its discovery, and the story begins and ends ‘on topic’ – with the loss of the letter and its discovery.

The story has a perfectly reasonable premise. A potentially compromising letter has been stolen and cannot be located by the police. The problems this raises are then explored, and the letter is located by Dupin. The story ends with an explanation of how he found it.

Its aesthetic superiority is evident when compared with the other two Dupin stories. The Murders in the Rue Morgue depends upon a rather improbable premise – an escaped Orang-Outang armed with a cut-throat razor. The Mystery of Marie Roget offers an exhaustive analysis of evidence for a puzzling murder, but it is technically unresolved. The Purloined Letter has neither of these weaknesses.

Structure

The success of this story is principally explained by its sound structure. The narrative is in three distinct parts:

  • the problem and how it came about
  • the efforts that were made to solve it
  • Dupin’s explanation of his strategic success

The story also has an interesting structural feature. The missing letter does not suddenly appear at the end of the story as a coup de theatre, thus providing a resolution to the tale. It is unexpectedly produced half way through the story, when Dupin raffishly claims the 50,000 Francs reward for its discovery. This is a mark of Poe’s genius as a story teller.

The essence of the story is not about the social value of the letter to its addressee (the Queen) or someone else who might read it (the King). There is a suggestion that the compromising contents of the letter will reveal the fact that the Queen has been sexually unfaithful to the King. But Poe’s principal interest is about how the letter is discovered.

The ‘twist’ in the tale is that the letter was in full view of the police all the time. It was not, as the police suspected, concealed in any secret drawer, in the stuffing of a chair seat, or behind the wallpaper of D—’s room. It was fully on view – but it had been disguised as a letter of no importance addressed to someone else.

The French connection

Poe’s literary reputation has always been high in France, and there has been a great deal of literary analysis of The Purloined Letter by modernist critics of the 1960s and 1970s. This debate is summarised in the story’s Wikipedia entry.

This debate mainly centres on the symbolic significance of the letter in relation to the Queen who has received it and her husband the King who apparently is being deceived. However, this discussion ignores the fact that Poe is quite clearly more interested in how Dupin discovers the letter than in the social ramifications of its contents – which are not known anyway.

These approaches to literary of analysis flow from the various schools of criticism which were fashionable in France around that time. These took a stance that literary texts could have more or less any meaning that could be read into them, irrespective of the author’s intention or even an intelligent reader’s understanding of ‘the story’.

The two best known of these theories – structuralism and deconstruction – were popular and influential in Europe and America until the end of the twentieth century. But in recent years they have fallen out of favour, largely because they are now considered elitist and woefully obscure. They also have the weakness that they frequently lack common sense.

The Purloined Letter – study resources

The Purloined Letter Poe: The Ultimate Collection – Amazon UK

The Purloined Letter Poe: The Ultimate Collection – Amazon US

The Purloined Letter Poe: Collected Tales – Penguin classics – Amazon UK

The Purloined Letter Poe: Collected Tales – Penguin classics – Amazon US

The Purloined Letter Tales of Mystery and Imagination – illustrated – Amazon UK

The Purloined Letter Tales of Mystery and Imagination – illustrated – Amazon US

A Bundle of Letters

The Purloined Letter – story synopsis

Auguste Dupin and the narrator are joined by G— the chief of the Prefecture of the Paris Police. He reports the theft of a compromising letter by the minister D— in full view of its royal recipient and her husband.

D— has not yet acted on the content of the letter but the police chief has failed in all his attempts to recover it. He has even taken apart the furniture in D—’s rooms and searched adjacent houses. Dupin advises him to look more carefully.

A month later G— returns, still unsuccessful. A reward for the recovery of the letter has been doubled to 50,000 Francs. Dupin asks for a cheque to that amount, and in exchange he hands over the letter.

When G-— has gone, Dupin explains to the narrator that G—’s methods are indeed very thorough, but they are limited because he fails to put himself into the mindset of his antagonist. Dupin criticises mathematical logic because it is a self-enclosed system which cannot be applied in the moral universe.

He then describes his visit to minister D— in his office where he spots the letter, distressed, torn, and disguised, in a letter rack on the mantelpiece. Dupin deliberately leaves a snuff box behind, and returns next day to collect it. Whilst D—’s attention is distracted he takes the letter and replaces it with a dummy copy he has made.

© Roy Johnson 2017

More on Edgar Allan Poe
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Quicksand

by

tutorial. study guide, interpretations, further reading

The Quicksand first appeared in Harper’s Magazine in the issue for June 1902. It was collected in The Descent of Man (1904) and currently forms part of the publication The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

The Quicksand

The Metropolitan Museum – Frank Waller (1842-1923)

The Quicksand – commentary

Structure

The story is essentially a tale of reversed expectations – but one with a very subtle construction and some interesting ironic effects. At the outset readers are given every reason to notice the relationship between Mrs Quentin and her son Alan. They are very close to each other emotionally – even to the point of ‘excessive intimacy’.

Everything in the narrative suggests Mrs Quentin’s taking her son’s side when he is refused by a potential fiancée, Hope Feddo, because of his ownership of the muck-raking newspaper the Radiator. There is even a hint of maternal jealousy and rivalry in the remark, ‘Mrs Quentin at first was kept silent by the mother’s instinctive anger that the girl she had not wanted for her son should have dared to refuse him.’

This suggestion of positive prejudice is reinforced by Mrs Quentin’s reaction during their discussion of what to do. She is relieved to observe: ‘He was with her against the girl then!’

At this point it is natural to suppose that the story is one of a woman’s loyalties being tested. She wants the best for her beloved son, but she has reservations about his choice of fiancée. Nevertheless, she agrees to speak to the girl on his behalf.

Mrs Quentin’s scepticism about Hope then seems to be confirmed by the drab furniture amongst which she finds her living, and which is even translated metaphorically into her state of mind:

The girl’s mind was like a large light empty place, scantily furnished with a few massive prejudices, not designed to add to anyone’s comfort but too ponderous to be easily moved.

Mrs Quentin argues that Hope should not prejudge the future, but give life a chance. She raises the problem they both face – but in a brief and ambiguous manner.

Six months later Alan is still pained by the rebuff, and Mrs Quentin’s relations with her son have cooled. She feels a vague discomfort that we might be forgiven for thinking is a sense of guilt at not trying harder to argue Alan’s case.

But when she meets Hope in the Metropolitan Museum the girl reveals that she too has been unhappy. She now feels that she made a mistake in rejecting Alan’s proposal, even accusing herself of self-righteousness and vanity in her former attitude.

She has come to feel that her love for Alan can be put to use in helping him. At the same time she has realised from Mrs Quentin’s example that it is possible to disattend to the nature of the Radiator.

It is at this point that the reversal of expectations is presented. Mrs Quentin reveals that it is precisely because she can see Hope is a person with intelligence and integrity that she doesn’t want her to face the same difficulties she herself has had as a young woman.

Mrs Quentin married Alan’s father, the owner of the Radiator. When she realised it was a gutter press publication she asked him to sell the newspaper. He agreed, but wanted to first build its circulation to make it a saleable proposition.

Time passed, the paper was not sold, and they became locked in a vicious circle. When Alan was born she needed the money to keep him in luxury to which both he and his mother became accustomed.

When Alan inherited the Radiator she hoped he would sell it – but he didn’t. Mrs Quentin feels that she became locked into a dishonourable bond with the son she loved. She hoped he would marry a simple and unquestioning girl – but having met a woman with ideas, Mrs Quentin fears that Hope will be dragged down into a similar dishonourable compact. For this reason, she is presenting a warning message. It is a dramatic and very convincing revelation – from which young Hope flees in shock.

An alternative reading

There is another way of interpreting the details of the story, which is to look at what results from the actions of the participants. This also involves speculating on psychological motivation which might be hidden even from the characters themselves.

Mrs Quentin has a very deep emotional bond with her son Alan. She has raised him with devoted concern for his ‘delicate’ nature. They have travelled abroad together, in warm climates during the winter and cruising aboard a yacht in summer. So Alan has certainly been kept away from the masculine influence of his father.

Mother and son have become like lovers to each other – and they address each other in the language of lovers (Dear’ and ‘dear mother’). You do not need to be a qualified psychoanalyst to realise that a mother with an almost incestuous relationship to her son will not welcome the attentions of a rival in the form of a potential daughter-in-law.

Mrs Quentin therefore is very reluctant to act as her son’s emissary to the obdurate Hope Fenno. When she does make the visit she views Hope in a hostile manner (‘The girl’s mind was like a large light empty place’) and puts forward a largely unconvincing argument in favour of her accepting Alan. The argument is unconvincing because secretly she doesn’t want Hope to be persuaded.

When some time later Hope changes her mind, Mrs Quentin is forced to deploy a more powerful set of reasons why the young couple should not be united. She presents Alan as a driven work-obsessive who will never change, and she delivers her own biography as a combination of addiction to luxury and tragic failure in the fight against muck-raking journalism.

These arguments are delivered (she claims) with the aim of ‘saving’ Hope Fenno from a similar fate – but unconsciously she has the ambition of driving the girl away from her much-beloved son – and she succeeds. In this reading the story is one of sexual rivalry between a possessive mother and her prospective daughter-in-law.

The Quicksand – study resources

The New York Stories – NYRB – Amazon UK

The New York Stories – NYRB – Amazon US

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

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

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Quicksand

The Quicksand – story synopsis

I   Young Alan Quentin’s proposal of marriage has been rejected by Hope Fenno because she disapproves of the muckraking newspaper the Radiator he has inherited from his father. His mother Mrs Quentin consoles him and promises to plead his case with the young woman.

II   Mrs Quentin interviews Hope and argues that her objections to the newspaper might dissolve with the passage of time. Hope remains unconvinced.

III   Six months later the two women meet again. Hope has changed her mind and wishes to ‘support’ Alan, as Mrs Quentin did when her husband was alive. However, Mrs Quentin reveals that she wanted to be rid of the newspaper, but became enmeshed in a lifelong betrayal of her own values because of the luxury its income provided. She wishes Hope to be spared a similar destiny. This information scares Hope away.

© Roy Johnson 2018

Edith Wharton – short stories
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The Razor

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

The Razor first appeared in September 1926 in the Russian emigré newspaper Rul’ published in Berlin. The paper had been established by Vladimir Nabokov’s father in 1921.

In his list of stories collected for publication in single volume form, Nabokov listed The Razor under the heading ‘Bottom of the Barrel’, but it seems to me no less worthy than many of the other shorter and lighter pieces from the early period of his output as a writer. His first novel, Mary was published the same year.

The Razor

Vladimir Nabokov

The Razor – critical commentary

This is a short and relatively lightweight story – but it pursues its central conceit with admirable restraint and brevity. Every element in the dramatic situation raises the expectation that Ivanov will exact revenge. He has his adversary completely at his mercy. He is on his own, unobserved in the shop. The customer has put him through an ‘interrogation’ which he must have expected to lead to Ivanov’s death.

The artistic success of the tale lies not in the generation of tension – ‘don’t move please, or I might cut you prematurely’ – but in the fact that the customer never speaks. We can only imagine his terror. Even the details of the ‘interrogation’ are not dramatised – so we are spared any gruesome details, but by default encouraged to guess what they might be.

And in the end Ivanov does nothing, but simply dismisses his former tormentor. He triumphs over any desire for revenge. Technically, this is an anti-climax in the narrative, but in fact it is a very satisfying resolution.

Moreover, although the dramatic tension might seem rather artificial, the situation in the story is perfectly realistic. Berlin was the ‘first centre’ of emigration for Russians of both colours – Red and White – fleeing from the consequences of the 1917-1918 revolutions. Former aristocrats (like Nabokov himself) were forced to earn a living by doing menial jobs.

The Razor – study resources

The Razor The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

The Razor Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

The Razor The Paris Review – 1967 interview, with jokes and put-downs

The Razor First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection of phtographs

The Razor Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

The Razor Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

The Razor Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Princeton University Press, 1990.

The Razor Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton University Press, 1991.

The Razor Laurie Clancy, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

The Razor Neil Cornwell, Vladimir Nabokov: Writers and their Work, Northcote House, 2008.

The Razor Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: An Illustrated Life, Overlook Press, 2005.

The Razor Norman Page, Vladimir Nabokov: Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1997

The Razor David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

The Razor Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories   Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories   Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

The Razor – plot summary

Ivanov is a White Russian emigré working in a barber shop in Berlin. His nickname as a military Captain had been ‘Razor’ because of his sharp features.

One quiet summer morning whilst the other staff are absent, a man comes into the shop for a shave. Ivanov recognises him as someone who has previously interrogated and (by implication) tortured him.

He shaves the man and menaces him by reminding him that a single slip of his razor would produce a lot of blood. He then proceeds to recount the events of his interrogation, all the while shaving his victim.

Ivanov reminds the man that both corpses and people sentenced to death are shaved, and asks him if he can guess what is going to happen next.

The man is clearly terrified, He keeps his eyes tightly shut and doesn’t utter a word. But Ivanov finally whisks the cloth from around his neck and bundles him out of the shop.

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

PninPnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.
Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin Buy the book at Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin Buy the book at Amazon US

Collected StoriesCollected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.
Vladimir Nabokov - Collected Stories Buy the book at Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov - Collected Stories Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2014

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Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is the first novel that Vladimir Nabokov wrote in English. He began its composition in late 1938 whilst living in Paris, having left his exile in Berlin the year before. Around this time, amidst the diaspora of Russian exiles, he realised that he would probably lose his Russian-speaking audience. He switched to writing in English, which was technically his third language (the second being French, the traditional lingua franca of the Russian aristocracy). The novel was first published by James Laughlin’s newly-founded New Directions press in America in 1941.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – commentary

This is one of a number of works in which Nabokov made use – for comic and satirical purpose – of biographical details from his own life. He had already used his Russian background and European exile for the substance of Glory (1932) and The Gift (1937) and he continued to do the same later in his career with the burlesque Pale Fire (1962) and the parodic Look at the Harlequins (1974).

Nabokov inserts all sorts of small details from his own life into the narrative – references to exile from Russia, his interest in butterflies, his personal habits of a cold bath each morning, writing in bed, undergraduate life at Cambridge, and the fact that he had a brother, from whom he was rather distant.

The novel also plays teasingly with the relationship between literature and ‘real life’, it parodies the literary genre of biography at a number of levels, and it is a variant on the theme of ‘the unreliable narrator’ which he had exploited so successfully in his earlier novella The Eye (1930).

The book purports to be a biography of Sebastian Knight, written by his half-brother V. But it is mainly about V’s efforts to gather information – including several passages of quite inconsequential events and detailed accounts of his failure to unearth accurate evidence. Moreover, V’s first person narrative is deliberately self-contradictory. He observes:

As the reader may have noticed, I have tried to put into this book as little of myself as possible.

Quite the opposite is the case. His ‘biography’ is a ragback of personal anecdotes and memoirs from his own childhood, plus scenes he imagines from his half-brother’s life, extracts from Sebastian Knight’s own books, and episodes that have no bearing on Sebastian Knight at all.

As a biography, it omits huge sections of Sebastian Knight’s childhood and youth; it fails to give any account of important figures in his life (such as Clare Bishop and the Russian lover); it misinterprets his artistic achievement; ignores the fact of his boorish behaviour; and ends on a note of grotesque bathos when the narrator offers a gripping account of a journey across France that reveals nothing whatever about the subject of his study.

The narrator rejects other people’s opinions and memories of Sebastian Knight if they do not agree with his own; he burns two packets of private correspondence which would (we assume) have revealed important details of Knight’s relationships with the two important women in his adult life; and he fails to interview people who knew him well.

Running through the whole work is a petulant rant against a rival biographer Mr Goodman, whose publication The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight he excoriates as a worthless sham. We have no way of knowing if this is true or not, because he does not quote from it.

We note in addition that as preparation for the biography, the narrator takes a correspondence course in creative writing. Nabokov is deliberately creating an unreliable and an untalented narrator – which would be an interesting literary strategy if he made any coherent or persuasive use of it. But his intention seems to be only to tease and amuse. This is certainly a novel which paved the way for his overwhelmingly successful use of these tricksy devices in later works such as Lolita and Pale Fire, but The Real Life of Sebastian Knight remains a lightweight rehearsal for these later triumphs.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – study resources

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – GradeSaver Notes – Amazon UK

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – GradeSaver Notes – Amazon US

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1 – Amazon UK

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Vladimir Nabokov: American Years – Biography: Vol 2 – Amazon UK

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Nabokov’s first English editions – Bob Nelson’s collection

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – summaries

1   Following the death of the writer Sebastian Knight, a biography is being written by V, his un-named half-brother. The chapter deals with the two marriages of their father, and his death in a duel fought over the honour of Sebastian’s mother, his first wife.

2   The narrator recalls childhood memories of Knight; he quotes from Knight’s memoirs; and he criticises another biographer for factual inaccuracies. He also visits their old Swiss governess, but finds her memories defective.

3   Sebastian, the narrator, and his mother escape from the revolution into Finland. From there, Sebastian goes to Cambridge, whilst the narrator and his mother go to Paris. The narrator recalls Sebastian’s youthful escapade with a ‘modernist’ poet, and his two visits to Paris as an Anglophile undergraduate.

4   The narrator prepares to write the biography by taking a correspondence course in authorship. After Sebastian’s death the narrator visits his rooms in London and goes through the mundane contents of his desk, uncovering vague evidence of a Russian lover..

5   Sebastian’s life as a student at Cambridge. He feels isolated and becomes introspective. He is poor at games, lives eccentrically, and graduates with a first class degree in English Literature.

6   The narrator visits Mr Goodman, Sebastian’s ‘assistant’ and literary agent. Goodman claims to be a close friend of Sebastian’s and tries to dissuade the narrator from writing his biography – because he has just written one of his own.

7   The narrator criticises Goodman’s biography, The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight, as a rag-bag of feeble anecdotes which he calls The Farce of Mr Goodman. He quotes passages from Sebastian Knight’s autobiographical work Lost Property as evidence of his rich, individualistic inner life.

8   The narrator meets Sebastian with Clare Bishop in Paris, then he appeals to Helen Pratt for information. He makes two attempts to interview Clare Bishop, but is put off by her husband.

9   Sebastian writes and re-writes his first two novels, living with Clare Bishop as typist, then they go on holiday to Germany where a doctor in Berlin diagnoses him with heart disease.

10   The narrator offers enthusiastic accounts of Sebastian’s early two novels. The first is a pathetic jumble of detective story cliches; the second is a ridiculous exploration of all possible causes of a coincidental meeting.

11   Sebastian ignores his own literary success; he behaves boorishly towards Clare and their friend Sheldon; and he insults his half-brother when they meet in Paris.

12   Sebastian leaves Clare and disappears abroad for some time, possibly with a Russian lover. On return he is forced to employ Goodman to look after his chaotic literary affairs. He has his portrait painted by Roy Carswell.

13   The narrator travels to the German hotel where Sebastian stayed, in search of the identity of his Russian lover. The manager refuses to give him any information, but a man he meets on a train agrees to act as a private detective.

14   The man produces four possible names. The first turns out to be a false lead, but it does produce contact with an old friend who reveals that Sebastian was not popular at school.

15   The narrator calls on one Russian contact in Paris, but the woman is not there. Her husband recounts his earlier Bohemian existence with his first wife.

16   At another address the woman is also absent, but her friend Mme Lecerf flirts with V and gives an account of a flighty young woman who might be Sebastian’s former lover.

17   The narrator travels to Mme Lecerf’s house to meet her friend. She continues to flirt, and V finally concludes that she is impersonating her friend, and he leaves.

18   The narrator paraphrases Sebastian Knight’s final work, The Doubtful Asphodel – but does so using poetic images and cod-philosophising about ‘the meaning of Life’.

19   The last months of Sebastian’s life following the disappearance of his Russian lover. The narrator receives a letter from him, saying he is in a sanatorium. He delays the arrangements for departure, then receives a telegram saying the case is hopeless.

20   The narrator gives a vivid and protracted account of his overnight rail journey to Paris, then a taxi ride to the sanatorium. He keeps a bedside vigil whilst Sebastian is sleeping – then discovers it is the wrong patient. His brother died the day before.

Sebastian Knight’s publications

The Prismatic Bezel (1925)

Success (1927)

Lost Property

The Funny Mountain

Albinos in Black

The Doubtful Asphodel (1936)

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – characters
Sebastian Knight a young Anglo-Russian novelist
V his un-named younger half-brother and biographer
Clare Bishop Sebastian Knight’s lover in London
Helen Pratt Knight’s friend in London
Mr Goodman Knight’s biographer and literary agent
P.G. Sheldon a poet and friend of Sebastian and Clare
Roy Carswell artist who paints Knight’s portrait

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Vladimir Nabokov – web links

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews, tutorials, study guides, videos, web links, and essays on the Complete Short Stories.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, list of major works, bibliography, and web links

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Lolita USA
A ‘geographical scrutiny’ of Humbert and Lolita’s journey across America. Essay and photographic study by Dieter E. Zimmer.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Vladimir Nabokov Writings – First Appearance
An illustrated collection of first editions in English. Photographs with bibliographical notes compiled by Bob Nelson

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Vladimir Nabokov at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, plot, box office, trivia, continuity errors, and quiz.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Zembla
Biography, timeline, photographs, eTexts, sound clips, butterflies, literary criticism, online journal, scholarly essays, and an online annotated version of Ada – housed at Pennsylvania State University Library.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Nabokov Museum
A major collection housed in Nabokov’s old family home (now a museum) in St. Petersburg. – biography, photos, family home, videos in English and Russian.

© Roy Johnson 2016

The Real Life of Sebastian KnightThe Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov held the unique distinction of being one of the most important writers of the twentieth century in two separate languages, Russian and English. This volume offers a concise and informative introduction into the author’s fascinating creative world. Specially commissioned essays by distinguished scholars illuminate numerous facets of the writer’s legacy, from his early contributions as a poet and short-story writer to his dazzling achievements as one of the most original novelists of the twentieth century. Topics receiving fresh coverage include Nabokov’s narrative strategies, the evolution of his world-view, and his relationship to the literary and cultural currents of his day. The volume also contains valuable supplementary material such as a chronology of the writer’s life and a guide to further critical reading.   The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Buy the book here

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