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The Sacred Fount

September 23, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

The Sacred Fount was first published simultaneously as a single volume by Charles Scribners and Sons in New York and Methuen in London in February 1901. It comes from the ‘late period’ in James’s development as a novelist, and has puzzled readers and critics ever since, because of the obscurity of its subject matter and the extremely complex manner in which the events are related.

On the surface, it is the simple story of a number of people who travel to a weekend party at a country estate (Newmarch). But the narrator of events perceives hidden relations going on between some of the visitors – and he tries to work out the truth of these liaisons by psychological means alone, eschewing what he calls the ignoble methods of “the detective and the keyhole”.

the first English edition 1901

The Sacred Fount – critical commentary

The original idea

When he first began writing The Sacred Fount Henry James thought the narrative would take the form of a short tale – as he did with many of his other novels – most of which became anything other than short. This is how James described what he called the donnée of his tale.

The notion of the young man who marries an older woman and who has the effect on her of making her younger and still younger, while he himself becomes her age. When he reaches the age that she was (on their marriage) she has gone back to the age that he was.

Mightn’t this be altered (perhaps) to the idea of cleverness and stupidity? A clever woman marries a deadly dull man, and loses and loses her wit as he shows more and more.

Both of these ideas are incorporated into the novel. The Narrator thinks Guy Brissenden’s vital juices are being drained by May Server or Lady John, leaving him looking much older than his twenty-nine years. They on the other hand appear much younger and more vivacious than their middle-age would suggest.

Gilbert Long on the other hand has always been something of a nonentity and dolt, but has suddenly developed intelligence and wit – as a result (it is supposed) of his secret sexual relationship with a clever woman. The Narrator spends the next three hundred pages trying to uncover the identity of this women.

‘The Sacred Fount’ as a concept is the source of youth at which older people are refreshing themselves – draining vital fluids from their younger partners. It is easy enough to spot here the notion of vampyrism which has influenced a lot of critical comment on the novel – the older person feeding off the life forces of someone younger, or the same thing in intellectual terms.

Problems of interpretation

The main problem with this as the plot for the novel is the reader is at no point presented with any impartial evidence or dramatised interchanges between the characters on which to form an independent judgement about such matters.

If fact one of the major weaknesses associated with the novel is the lack of characterisation. People are named perhaps given an age – and that’s it. There is no way a reader can form a picture or make any distinction between Grace Brissenden or May Server. They are both either ‘very beautiful’ or look younger than they did previously. Similarly, the men are merely names – Gilbert Long, Guy Brissenden, and Ford Obert. Who might be relating to whom is left unrecorded – except in the Narrator’s overheated imagination.

Not only are the characters not developed as fictional constructs, but everything in the narrative is mediated by the un-named, first-person Narrator. He tells us about the appearance and the interchanges between the other characters – so at a very simple, technical level, we only have his opinion or his interpretation of events.

But more than this, it rapidly becomes apparent that he is one of James’s unreliable narrators – not unlike the Governess in The Turn of the Screw (1898) written three years earlier.

The other characters do not see or do not agree with his observations. He actually imagines, invents, and ‘constructs’ other people’s conversations – thinking what the might or could be saying to each other. But then he draws his analytic conclusions from this evidence that he has constructed himself.

When the Narrator challenges and quizzes people about his suppositions, they give their own account or opinions of events – which turn out to be the exact opposite of what he suspects.

The Narrator is entirely self-congratulatory and vain: he describes himself as having ‘transcendent intelligence’ and ‘superior vision’ – yet the fact is that nobody else agrees with claims he is making, and of course at the end of the novel he turns out to be wrong.

The Narrator puts all his arguments in the form of elaborate metaphors, obscure allusions, and extravagant figures of speech. His interlocutors repeatedly ask him what he is talking about, and Mrs Brissenden finally tells him she thinks him crazy.

He even tells lies – for instance, claiming to Mrs Brissenden that he has not discussed with other people the issues of the secret liaisons he suspects – when in fact he has discussed them with just about everyone else he meets.

Rebecca West issued one of her wittiest sneers when she wrote that the narrator “spends more intellectual force than Kant can have used on The Critique of Pure Reason in an unsuccessful attempt to discover whether there exists between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more interesting among these vacuous people than it is among sparrows.”

Leon Edel described the novel as “a detective story without a crime—and without a detective. The detective, indeed, is the reader.”

The Sacred Fount – study resources

The Sacred Fount – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Sacred Fount – Library of America – Amazon US

The Sacred Fount – Kindle edition

The Sacred Fount – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Sacred Fount – audiobook at Librivox

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James – biographical notes

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

The Sacred Fount – plot summary

Chapter 1. The Narrator travels by train to a country weekend party at Newmarch with Gilbert Long, and Mrs Grace Brissenden, commenting on the changes in their appearance. Mrs Brissenden thinks that the changes to Gilbert Long are the result of his relationship with Lady Jane.

Chapter 2. The Narrator sees Lady Jane with Gilbert Long at Newmarch. He also meets Guy Brissenden, Grace’s much younger husband, and is astonished at how much older he appears – whereas his wife looks much younger. However, when he discusses these changes with Gilbert Long, his friend does not see them at all. The Narrator theorises that the older person in a couple can become younger – but only at the expense of the younger partner becoming older.

Chapter 3. The Narrator discusses his theory with Mrs Brissenden and the case of Gilbert Long and Lady John, where he thinks there he thinks there has been a transfer of intelligence, making him the cleverest guest but one [the cleverest by implication being the Narrator himself]. He suggests that they should search out the biggest fool at the party to discover the source of Long’s improvement – but there must be evidence of relations between them. They make further observations which prove fruitless, and the Narrator entertains the notion that his suppositions might be in bad taste.

Chapter 4. Mrs Server thinks that Lady John is only interested in Ford Obert. The Narrator and May Server discuss a painting of a man holding a mask, guessing of whom it reminds them. The Narrator talks with Ford Obert about his theory, who has similar suspicions of Mrs Server. They agree to limit their observations to psychology alone, yet they recognise that theoretically it’s none of their business which other parties in these presumably illicit relations are creating the effects they claim to be observing.

Chapter 5. The Narrator discusses with Mrs Brissenden their observations regarding Mrs Server. They disagree, and still have no evidence for their claims and no known lover. They go out into the garden and find Mrs Server with Guy Brissenden. His wife claims that he is being used as a red herring by Mrs Server to deflect attention from her real lover.

Chapter 6. The Narrator reflects that whilst Mrs Server keeps appearing with different men, he himself is not one of them. He wonders briefly if he might be in love with her, and if the rest of the company are wondering about her as he is. Next he comes across Lady John and Guy Brissingham in a remote part of the gardens. He imagines their thoughts and intentions regarding each other, and concludes that Lady John is using Guy Brissenden as a red-herring too.

Chapter 7. The Narrator quizzes young Guy Brissenden on Lady John and Mrs Server, but Brissenden contradicts every one of his suppositions. They agree that Mrs Server is very happy, but don’t know why. Guy Brissenden wants to ‘help’ Mrs Server, and thinks she might be hiding something. He asks the Narrator to help him find out what it is, but the Narrator refuses without giving any explanation.

Chapter 8. The Narrator congratulates himself on the accuracy and the success of his observations. He then meets Mrs Severn in a garden. They barely speak to each other about the ideas that concern him – which he interprets as a sign that she wants a respite from the strain of acting a part of gaiety. When they do speak it seems to be at cross purposes, about different people – which he interprets as a cover for the truth he thinks she is hiding. He tells Mrs Server directly that he believes Guy Brissenden is in love with her. , by whom they are shortly joined. The Narrator makes his excuses and leaves them together.

Chapter 9. After dinner that night the Narrator talks with Gilbert Long, congratulating himself that he knows Long’s secret (and that Long knows that he knows) but they cannot discuss it openly. A visiting pianist gives a recital, during which the Narrator assumes that all the guests are reflecting privately on the relationships he thinks he has uncovered. He then challenges Lady John, but she answers him in an oblique manner. When she asks him who he is so concerned about, he refuses to answer her. Moreover, he believes that Lady John does not and can not know all the subtle connections between the guests which he perceives.

Chapter 10. As a return to London is in prospect for the next day, the Narrator wonders if all the changes and effects he has observed in the guests might disappear and everything return to normal. By midnight he resolves to escape the problems of analysis by leaving on an early train next morning. But then seeing Gilbert Long alone on the terrace all his curiosity is re-awakened. He then meets Ford Obert and goes in search of Mrs Brissenden who has promised to have a word with him.

Chapter 11. He follows Obert into the library, where he challenges him directly about his interest in Mrs Server. They agree that she has changed, but Obert claims she has reverted to an earlier state of being. Obert claims he has been watching the Brissendens and has reached to same conclusions as the Narrator. However, the Narrator will not accept this admission because he believes that Obert cannot have all the relevant ‘information’. They agree that Mrs Server’s lover may not actually be there at the house. Suddenly Guy Brissenden arrives to say that his wife want to speak to the Narrator, who thinks that maybe Gilbert Long and Mrs Brissenden have been or still are lovers.

Chapter 12. When he meets Mrs Brissenden she looks very young, and he hopes that all will be revealed. But she has nothing of any consequence to tell him. In fact she expects him to make all the revelations. But she does believe that May Server is not involved in the puzzle they have been trying to solve. The Narrator is suddenly quite sure that Gilbert Long is Mrs Brissenden’s lover and that she is protecting him. He challenges her to say who has brought about the remarkable change in Long. In response, she accuses him of being too fanciful and over-analytical.

Chapter 13. When she singularly gives him no concrete information, he interprets this as proof that he is correct in his suppositions. He then invites her to advise him how to get rid of his over-active imagination (which he believes has led him to the truth) – but this is a trick designed to get her to reveal her ‘secret’. But she suddenly declares that she thinks him crazy. He then interrogates her relentlessly about exactly which point in the day she changed her mind about him. Finally she reveals that Gilbert Long has been the centre of her attention – but only as a negative example of the Narrator’s idea of a stupid person being elevated intellectually by a romantic liaison. She declares that Gilbert Long was not transformed at all: he was always stupid and remains so now.

Chapter 14. The Narrator is forced to admit that his theory was all wrong. However, Mrs Brissenden admits that she has been lying and covering up – and that Lady John is the woman in question. Her husband has revealed to her the liaison between Long and Lady John. The Narrator concludes their lengthy nocturnal debate and goes to bed chastened.

Henry James – caricature by Max Beerbohm

The Sacred Fount – principal characters

I	the un-named narrator
Newmarch	the country estate where the weekend party takes place
Gilbert Long	a visitor at the party
Mrs Grace Brissenden	a woman of 42
Guy Brissenden	her husband of 29
Lady John	a visitor at the party
Ford Obert	a painter
Mrs May Server	an attractive weekend visitor
Lord Luttley	a weekend visitor
Compte de Dreuil	French visitor
Comptess de Dreuil	his American wife

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
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The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
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Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Henry James
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The Sandman

October 4, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, web links, and further reading

The Sandman was first published in 1817 as one of the stories in a collection called Die Nachtstucke (The Night Pieces) by E.T.A. Hoffmann. He was a German writer who formed an important link between Romanticism and the Gothic fiction of the later nineteenth century. His novel The Nutcracker and the Mouse was the basis for Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker, and two of his other stories were turned into the ballet Coppelia.

The Sandman – commentary

The horror story

The Sandman was written in 1815 and has become famous as an early nineteenth-century horror story – for a number of reasons. First it is an excellent, if sometimes rather puzzling story in its own right. Second, it was used as the basis for a popular opera by the Jaques Offenbach in 1861 and then turned into an English ballet filmed by Michael Powell in 1951. Third, it was the subject of an essay written by Sigmund Freud in 1919 called The Uncanny in which he offers an interpretation of the story in psycho-analytic terms. This has become celebrated as an explanation of horror stories and their attractions.

The principal element of the story that has attracted most attention is that of a human being who falls in love with a work of art – in this case a mannequin or mechanical doll. This is a story which goes back as far as Greek mythology. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with the statue of a beautiful woman (Galatea) that he had carved. This idea has been the basis of stories, poems, stage plays, paintings, operas, and ballets – as the Wikipedia entry demonstrates.

However, this is only one element of The Sandman, and as you will see from the interpretation that follows, not its most important part. Olimpia the mechanical doll is an attractive feature of the story, but its deepest meanings are centred in the psychology of the protagonist, Nathaniel.

Pygmalion and Galatea

The narrative

There is an interesting anomaly in Hoffman’s approach to the form of this narrative. The story begins as the exchange of three letters. The principal character Nathaniel writes to his friend Lothar describing the childhood origins of his fears and the menacing figures of Coppelius and Coppola (the Sandman). But he mistakenly mails the letter to his sweetheart Clara, who is Lothar’s sister. She replies suggesting that the evil figure Nathaniel sees in Coppelius is largely imaginary – a figment of his imagination. Nathaniel then reports to Lothar that he has taken up studies with Spalanzani, who has a very attractive daughter, Olimpia. Following this introduction the story reverts to a traditional third-person narrative mode.

The interpretation

The story lends itself to a variety of interpretations. In his essay discussing the story, The Uncanny, Sigmund Freud has no hesitation in equating the Sandman’s threats to tear out Nathaniel’s eyes with an unconscious fear of castration. Freud also assumes that the source of this threat will be Nathaniel’s father. And it is true that the father and Coppelius not only act in unison, but are fused in Nathaniel’s mind.

When Nathaniel feels he is being threatened by the two men (both dressed in long black smocks) his father “looked like Coppelius”. And even though the father is horribly disfigured as a result of the household explosion, he returns to his normally serene appearance in his coffin: “his features were once again as mild and gentle as they had been during his life”. There is therefore a strong case to be made for a psychological transference between the father and Coppelius as castration threats on Nathaniel’s part.

But this explanation seems to leave a number of important questions unanswered. For instance, why does Nathaniel fall in love with an automaton? And why does he end up killing himself? These questions are answerable with a slightly more nuanced, though still psycho-analytic interpretation.

This approach sees Nathaniel as in fear of female sexuality. He claims to be in love with Clara, but when she moves to live in his father’s house, he has the most serious attack of subliminal fear centred on the figure of the Sandman. Moreover, Clara is not particularly attractive, and he finds her cold and unresponsive. In fact he is attracted to women who are impassive.

This explains the curious detail of Nathaniel mailing the first letter by ‘mistake’ to Clara instead of Lothar. Nathaniel is not aware that the figure of Coppelius (later Coppola) is a metaphor of his sexual fears. He thinks of him merely as an ugly and menacing figure who is threatening to put hot coals in his eyes. But at an unconscious level Nathaniel wishes to avoid the sexual intimacy that marriage to Clara would involve. So he gives a full account of the origins of his psychological problem and mails it to the person for whom it has the greatest relevance – Clara, the woman he fears he is expected to marry.

The poem he writes about their marriage reveals his secret fears – that the event will be to him a form of death. This is in fact the second ‘warning’ he conveys to her. She dismisses the poem out of hand, offering him a perfectly reasonable explanation for his fears – telling him they lie within himself (which is true). But he rejects her suggestions. In fact he rejects them twice – just as he twice selects a cold and unresponsive female as the object of his love.

The second instance of his choosing is even more intractably unresponsive, since she is in fact an automated doll. Nathaniel also falls in love with Olimpia by viewing her through a pocket telescope – a device guaranteed to keep him at a distance from the object of his affection and the source of his secret fears.

Nevertheless, Nathaniel actually decides he wants to marry Olimpia, but when he approaches her, wedding ring at the ready, he collapses into another nervous fit, apparently brought on by the appearance of the evil Coppelius, the embodiment of his fear of female sexuality. But his fainting fit is his unconscious (but well-conceived) avoidance strategy for what he fears most – sexual intimacy.

Having recovered from his indisposition a second time, he is presented via an inheritance with a ready-made family home and estate. All he needs to do is marry Clara, who is still reassuring him. He takes her up the town hall tower to look into their future – the countryside, where their home is located.

At this very moment it looks as if his fate is sealed: he cannot escape matrimony and its sexual implications. So he conjures up the vision of Coppelius again (using the pocket telescope he has bought from him). Anyone sceptical about this interpretation should observe carefully what happens next.

Nathaniel sees Woman and Marriage as a threat – so his first impulse is to remove the cause of this existential fear. He tries to throw Clara off the tower into the market square below. But this manoeuvre is thwarted by the arrival of Clara’s brother Lothar, who eventually saves her.

It should be noted however, that Nathaniel whilst climbing the tower has locked behind him not just one but two doors leading to the parapet. This suggests rather strongly that he has gone up the tower with some sort of pre-meditated evil intention.

Having failed to remove the source of the threat by killing Clara, he then takes the only alternative open to him – he removes himself from the threat by plunging to his death below.

As if to underscore this interpretation of events, the story concludes some years later with a pastoral idyll in which Clara is happily married to a handsome young man with whom she has two young children. This is the very scenario which embodies all Nathaniel’s poorly suppressed fears. So the story is not about a man who falls in love with a mechanical doll, but a parable of the fear of domestic intimacy and the socio-psychological price that must be paid to enjoy it.

The Sandman – study resources

The Sandman – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

The Sandman – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Tales of Hoffmann – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Tales of Hoffmann – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Freud: The Uncanny – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Freud: The Uncanny – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Sandman – story synopsis

Nathaniel writes from university to his friend Lothar after a disturbing incident involving someone he recognises from the past. He recalls childhood memories of being sent to bed early with the threat that ‘the Sandman is coming’. He is told that the Sandman throws sand into children’s eyes, which jump out of their heads and are fed to his own offspring, who have hooked beaks like owls which they use to pluck out the eyes of naughty children.

Nathaniel’s mother tried to reassure him that there was no such person as the Sandman, but the image remained alive in Nathaniel’s mind. He heard the Sandman climbing the stairs to visit his father, and one night hid in the room to confirm his fears. The Sandman turned out to be a hideous lawyer Coppelius who threatened to put burning coals into Nathaniel’s eyes. His father pleaded for mercy, and Nathaniel fell into a swoon. Coppelius disappeared from the town.

A year later Coppelius reappeared for what Nathaniel’s father said would be the last time. That night the father was killed in an explosion, and Coppelius again disappeared

Nathaniel mistakenly posts his letter to Clara, Lothar’s sister. Clara in her letter of reply suggests that Nathaniel’s continuing fears are imaginary. She argues that Evil lies within the Self, and it is in Nathaniel’s own power to shake off the Sandman’s pernicious influence.

Nathaniel replies to Lothar rejecting Clara’s advice. He reports on a new enthusiasm for Professor Spalanzani and his beautiful daughter Olimpia.

An outer narrator then takes over the narrative, describing the difficulties of representing uncanny experiences. The story backtracks to describe Clara and her brother Lothar moving to live in Nathaniel’s family home. Nathaniel is engaged to marry Clara, but he leaves to study at the city of G***. When he returns home, Clara continues to argue that Nathaniel can overcome the malign influence within himself. He is irritated by her coldness and unresponsiveness.

Nathaniel writes a dramatic poem describing his wedding to Clara and Coppelius’s disruption of it that reveals Clara to him as an image of death. Nathaniel reads the poem to her: she tells him to throw it in the fire. They quarrel; Lothar rebukes him; but all three are eventually reconciled.

On his return to G*** Nathaniel lives opposite Spalanzani and his statuesque daughter Olimpia. Nathaniel is visited by Coppola, who tries to sell him spectacles. Nathaniel buys a telescope from him instead. When Spalanzani gives a ball. Nathaniel dances with Olimpia and makes overtures of love to her, oblivious to everyone else’s amusement.

Following this he reads his poetry to her and eventually decides to marry her. But when he arrives at her house with a wedding ring, Coppelius is arguing with Spalanzani over possession of Olimpia, who is revealed as a mechanical automaton. Nathaniel goes mad with fury and is taken off to a lunatic asylum.

Nathaniel awakes from a dangerous illness in his father’s house where he is being tended by Clara. The family unexpectedly inherit an estate from a distant relative. Clara and Nathaniel climb the tower of the town hall to view the countryside. Nathaniel finds the telescope in his pocket and immediately tries to throw Clara off the tower. She is saved by Lothar, but Nathaniel sees Coppelius in the crowd below and throws himself off the tower to his death. Some years later Clara is happily married with two small children.

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The Secret Agent

February 12, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Secret Agent (1907) is a short novel and a masterpiece of sustained irony. It is based on the real incident of a bomb attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1888 and features a cast of wonderfully grotesque characters: Verloc the lazy double agent, Inspector Heat of Scotland Yard, and the Professor – an anarchist who wanders through the novel with bombs strapped round his waist and the detonator in his hand.

Joseph Conrad

The English government and police are subject to sustained criticism, and the novel bristles with some wonderfully orchestrated effects of dramatic irony – all set in the murky atmosphere of late Victorian London. Here Conrad prefigures all the ambiguities which surround two-faced international relations, duplicitous State realpolitik, and terrorist outrage which still beset us a hundred years later. The sub-title of the novel is ‘A Simple Tale’ – which itself is deeply ironic, because the story is anything but simple.

The Secret Agent – critical commentary

Conrad is celebrated for his use of irony, and he lays it on very thick indeed inThe Secret Agent. In fact he employs several types of irony throughout the novel, much of it for grim effect.

comic irony
narrative irony
situational irony
dramatic irony
tragic irony

Comic irony

This occurs where there an obviously funny disparity between something intended and the result. For instance the ‘terrorists’ who group themselves around Verloc are all hopelessly inadequate beings who have very little political effect. But Conrad depicts them as comic grotesques. Michaelis is almost obscenely overweight, and he has lost the power of consecutive thought whilst in prison. The Professor is a small shabby figure who lives in abject poverty and does nothing except walk round London with an explosive device strapped to his body. Ossipon is a failed medical student who pathetically sponges off shop girls, and by the end of the novel is ‘ready to receive the leather yoke of the sandwich board’. Karl Yundt is a pathetic old man with a whispy beard who appears to do nothing of any consequence.

These are comic caricatures – and all of them are light years away from their declared aim of overthrowing society. They are all well known to government authorities and under regular supervision by the police force they profess to scorn. Moreover, they are being led by a man who betrays them – Verloc, a double agent.

Admittedly, it is a grim form of comedy – but that is very much Joseph Conrad, and many critics have observed that this is one of his more pessimistic novels.

Narrative irony

This occurs when the narrator says something about the narrative or a character which the reader knows is not true. Conrad’s characterization of Verloc uses this device all the way through the novel. We the readers know that Verloc is an overweight, lazy, incompetent, self-indulgent failure. But Conrad in his third person omniscient narrative mode gives an account of Verloc which is couched in positive terms. Conrad achieves this effect by slipping into Verloc’s own point of view – an indirect form of narrative.

He was tired. The last particle of nervous force had been expended in the wonders and agonies of this day full of surprising failures coming at the end of a harrassing month of scheming and insomnia. He was tired. A man isn’t made of stone. Hang everything! Mr Verloc reposed characteristically, clad in his outdoor garments. One side of his open overcoat was lying partly on the ground. Mr Verloc wallowed on his back. But he longed for a more perfect rest – for sleep – for a few hours of delicious forgetfulness. That would come later. Provisionally he rested. And he thought: “I wish she would give over this damned nonsense. It’s exasperating.”

Here are two (maybe three) forms of irony active at the same time. The narrative gives us Verloc’s point of view: “A man isn’t made of stone”. We know however that he is lazy, self-indulgent, and vulgar. (He spends most of his time indoor dressed for the street.) He wishes for a ‘more perfect rest’ – and he is shortly going to get it when Winnie murders him with the carving knife. And what he calls “damned nonsense” is the fact that he has just killed her beloved brother with the bomb.

Situational irony

This occurs where there is a disparity between intention and result. It could be argued that the scenes in the home of the lady protector of Michaelis offer examples of these. The guests include Michaelis, who the police regard as a dangerous terrorist; the police themselves, in the form of the Assistant Commissioner, who is supposed to be tracking down the anarchists; and Mr Vladimir from the Russian embassy, who has instigated the bomb plot in the first place.

So – the characters who are supposed to be at the opposite ends of society are in fact mingling socially. The intention is to preserve the power of the ruling class and its appearance of solidity. The result is that it deals with its own enemies. Our own society has provided plenty of similar examples – from Lord Profumo mixing with Russian spies and prostitutes at Cliveden in 1963, to Tony Blair cozying up to Muammar Gaddafi and Rupert Murdoch.

Some people might argue that these are examples of dramatic irony: but in fact all the characters in the un-named lady’s house know what is going on in these scenes. They keep up a polite diplomatic front of being sociable, even though some of them are sworn enemies.

Dramatic irony

This occurs when the reader knows something that a character does not. There is a superb example of this at the end of the novel when Winnie is fleeing the scene of her crime and she bumps into Ossipon. Her state of distress leads him to believe that it is caused by the bomb explosion at Greenwich, which he believes has resulted in Verloc’s death. He is only too keen to take advantage of an attractive woman in her bereaved state.

What he does not realise is that her distress is caused by the death of Verloc – but because she has just murdered him. We as readers know that, but Ossipon does not – and when he discovers Verloc’s body with the meat cleaver sticking out of it, he vomits all over the floor. This is another example of what might be called double irony (see below).

Tragic irony

This is a form of dramatic irony which occurs when a character’s actions lead to tragic consequences, contrary to the characters desire or intentions. For instance in the dramatic finale to the novel Winnie wishes to escape from the scene of her crime. She entrusts herself and all the money she has got into the hands of Ossipon. But unknown to her he is a persistent user of women, and even worse, he has categorised her as a ‘degenerate … of a murdering type’ likely to cause him trouble. So he steals her money and abandons her – which leads to her suicide.

In fact it could be argued that there is a sort of double irony operating here – because although Ossipon’s belief in Lombroso’s crackpot theories of phrenology are obviously not shared by Conrad, it is in fact true that Winnie has been a dangerous woman with a knife, and she has committed a murder.

The Secret Agent – study resources

The Secret Agent – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon UK

The Secret Agent – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon US

The Secret Agent – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Secret Agent – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Secret Agent – Modern Library – Amazon UK

The Secret Agent – Modern Library – Amazon US

The Secret Agent – Master Guide (Palgrave) – Amazon UK

The Secret Agent – 1996 film adaptation on DVD – Amazon UK

Sabotage – Hitchcok’s 1936 film adaptation – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Secret Agent – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Secret Agent – audioBook at LibriVox

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

The Joseph Conrad Society

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

The Secret Agent – plot summary

The novel is set in London in 1886. Adolf Verloc runs a shop which sells pornographic material, stationery, and contraceptives. This is a cover for his activity as a secret agent. He lives there with his young wife Winnie, his ailing mother-in-law, and his young brother-in-law, Stevie. The boy has a mental disability which causes him to be very excitable. Verloc’s wife looks after Stevie, treating him more as a son than as a brother. Verloc’s contacts are a group of anarchists of which Comrade Ossipon, Michaelis, Carl Yundt, and ‘The Professor’ are the most prominent. Although largely ineffectual as terrorists, their actions are known to the police. The group produce anarchist literature in the form of pamphlets entitled FP, an abbreviation for The Future of the Proletariat.

Verloc is summoned to a foreign embassy in Knightsbridge (strongly implied to be Russian) where he is employed as a secret agent. Mr. Vladimir, the First Secretary in the embassy reproaches him for filing reports which they regard as useless. He instructs him to carry out some bomb outrage as an agent provocateur to provoke the English establishment into authoritarian repression of what they regard as wishy-washy liberals. He suggests the destruction of Greenwich Observatory as an attack on rationality and science.

Verloc later meets his friends, who discuss politics and law, and the theories of various forms of resistance to the State. Stevie, Verloc’s young brother-in-law, overhears the conversation, which greatly disturbs him.

Comrade Ossipon later meets The Professor, who describes the nature of the bomb which he carries in his coat at all times: it allows him to press a button which will blow him up in twenty seconds, and those nearest to him. After The Professor leaves the meeting, he stumbles into Chief Inspector Heat. He is a policeman working on the case regarding a recent explosion at Greenwich, where one man was killed. Heat informs The Professor that he is not a suspect in the case, but that he is being monitored because of his terrorist inclinations and anarchist background.

Knowing that Michaelis has recently moved to the countryside to write his memoirs, the Chief Inspector informs the Assistant Commissioner that he has a contact, Verloc, who may be able to assist in the case. The Assistant Commissioner later speaks to his superior, Sir Ethelred, about his intentions to solve the case alone, rather than relying on the effort of Chief Inspector Heat.

On Verloc’s return from a business trip to the continent, his wife tells him of the high regard that Stevie has for him and she implores her husband to spend more time with Stevie. Verloc eventually agrees to go for a walk with Stevie. After this walk, Mrs. Verloc notes that her husband’s relationship with her brother has improved. Verloc then tells his wife that he has taken Stevie to go and visit Michaelis, and that Stevie would stay with him in the countryside for a few days.

As Verloc is talking to his wife about the possibility of emigrating to the continent, he is paid a visit by the Assistant Commissioner. Shortly thereafter, Chief Inspector Heat arrives in order to speak with Verloc, without knowing that the Assistant Commissioner had left with Verloc earlier that evening. The Chief Inspector tells Mrs. Verloc that he had recovered an overcoat at the scene of the bombing which had the shop’s address written on a label. Mrs. Verloc confirms that it was Stevie’s overcoat, and that she had written the address. On Verloc’s return, he realises that his wife knows her brother has been killed by Verloc’s bomb, and confesses what truly happened. A stunned Mrs. Verloc gradually goes mad, ultimately attacking her husband with a knife, stabbing him to death.

After the murder, Mrs. Verloc flees her home, where she chances upon Comrade Ossipon, and begs him to help her. Ossipon assists her, but also confesses his romantic feelings for her. Planning on running away with her, he aids her in taking a boat to the continent. However, her instability and the revelation of her murder increasingly worries him, and he abandons her. He later discovers she disappeared, leaving behind her wedding ring, presumably drowned.

The Secret Agent – film version

Sylvia Sydney and Oscar Homulka star in Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation, which he re-named Sabotage. This was possibly to distinguish it from his other film Secret Agent which was released in the same year – 1936.

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1936 adaptation Sabotage

See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database

Principal characters

Adolf Verloc	Anglo-French shopkeeper, anarchist, and double agent (40+)
Winnie Verloc	his young wife
–	Winnie’s mother – an old woman who wears a black wig
Stevie	Winnie’s mentally-retarded young brother
Chief Inspector Heat	detective working on the Greenwich bombing attack
The Assistant Comissioner	in charge of the Special Crime Department
Annie	the assistant Commissioner’s wife, who is a friend of Michaelis’s patroness
A distinguished lady	upper-class patroness of Michaelis
Sir Ethelred	Secretary for State (Home Secretary) to whom the Commissioner reports
‘Toodles’	Sir Ethelred’s (unpaid) private secretary
Privy Councillor Wurmt	attache at a foreign embassy (Russia)
Mr Vladimir	First Secretary at a foreign embassy (Russia)
Baron Scott-Wartheim	Verloc’s former employer at the embassy
Alexander Ossipon aka ‘Tom’ and ‘The Doctor’	anarchist, former medical student (no degree) who writes propoaganda leaflets
Karl Yundt	old anarchist
The Professor	former teach of chemistry who carries a live bomb at all times
Michaelis	fat, ex-prisoner, vulgar-Marxist
Mrs Neale	Winnie’s cleaner

Joseph Conrad – biography

The Complete Critical Guide to Joseph Conrad is a good introduction to Conrad criticism. It includes a potted biography, an outline of the stories and novels, and pointers towards the main critical writings – from the early comments by his contemporaries to critics of the present day. Also includes a thorough bibliography which covers biography, criticism in books and articles, plus pointers towards specialist Conrad journals. These guides are very popular. Recommended.

Other novels by Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
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Oxford World Classics offers the best editions of Conrad’s work. They are largely based on the most accurate versions of the texts; and they feature introductory essays, a biography, explanatory notes, textual variants, a bibliography of further reading, and in some cases missing or deleted chapters. They are also terrifically good value.

Nostromo (1904) is Conrad’s ‘big’ political novel – into which he packs all of his major subjects and themes. It is set in the imaginary Latin-American country of Costaguana – and features a stolen hoard of silver, desperate acts of courage, characters trembling on the brink of moral panic. The political background encompasses nationalist revolution and the Imperialism of foreign intervention. Silver is the pivot of the whole story – revealing the courage of some and the corruption and destruction of others. Conrad’s narration is as usual complex and oblique. He begins half way through the events of the revolution, and proceeds by way of flashbacks and glimpses into the future.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

Joseph Conrad web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
More on Joseph Conrad tales

The Secret Sharer

October 26, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Secret Sharer (1910) is a popular and much-anthologized work by Conrad. It’s quite short, yet it presents an enigmatic narrative and the story has been interpreted in a number of different ways. Like many of Conrad’s other stories, it combines elements of his own experience as a seaman with events recorded as part of naval history. The story is set in the Malayan Archipelago (The Gulf of Siam or Thailand to be exact) which features in a similar work, The Shadow-Line, written a few years later.

Joseph Conrad

The Secret Sharer – critical commentary

The double

There is a literary tradition of stories which deal with a theme known as ‘the double’. These are narratives featuring a character who feels the presence of, thinks he percieves, or sometimes even sees another character who has the same appearance or name as himself. The second character might succeed in society where the first character fails, or the second might perform some anti-social act for which the first character is blamed. Examples include Edgar Alan Poe’s Wiliam Wilson, Fyodor Dostoyevski’s The Double, and Vladimir Nabokov’s The Eye. For a further explanation this, see our tutorial on The Double.

Very often these stories are first person narratives in which it becomes clear to the reader that the second character does not actually exist, but is a projection of the narrator’s imagination – an ‘alternative’ personality, or ‘another self’ representing a fear or a wish-fulfilment.

The Secret Sharer is explicitly packed with the features of this theme. The unnamed narrator and Leggatt are of similar age. Both of them went to the elite sailor’s training school on the Conway. They are both bare footed when they meet. The captain gives Leggatt his own sleeping suit to wear, so that they look the same, and he puts him into his own bed. The captain immediately (and throughout the tale) refers to Leggatt as his ‘double’ and ‘secret self’. Leggatt was chief mate on the Sephora – and presumably the captain had previously been a mate before promotion to captain.

The two men echo each other’s gestures. The captain feels that they are both ‘strangers on board’. Leggatt is a stranger because he comes from another ship, the captain because he has so recently taken up his command. The captain refers to Leggatt as if he is looking in a mirror.

The story therefore seems to be variation on the double theme – and it is often discussed in such terms, particularly because none of the rest of the crew actually see Leggatt, and all information about him comes from the narrator, the captain.

This is a seductive interpretation, but it contains one major flaw. The fact is that other people in the story know that Leggatt exists. The captain of the Sephora, Archbold, comes looking for his chief mate who has escaped from the ship. So Leggatt is not a projection of the captain’s imagination, or an id to his ego. He actually exists.

There must therefore be some other means of interpreting the story, or providing an explanation for the events of the narrative.

There but for the grace of God …

Conrad often creates stories in which someone is presented with a moral dilemma or an existential crisis. This experience might also involve confronting ethically complex situations or other characters who have dared to cross the line between good and evil.

In Heart of Darkness for instance the narrator Marlowe is given the task of tracking down Kurtz, a man who has gone beyond acceptable limits in establishing his imperialist empire. Yet Marlowe, before he even meets Kurtz, is pre-disposed to admire his audacity. He asks his readers to empathise and imagine what courage it takes to break the rules of civilized society. Similar situations occur in Lord Jim and The Shadow-Line.

In The Secret Sharer we therefore have a situation where the young captain is confronted by another man of a similar age and provenance who has become embroiled in an ethically complex situation. Leggatt acts with the very best motive of saving the Sephora during a storm, and he is confronted by a weak captain and a malicious crew mate. He saves the ship, but kills his crew mate in doing so. In terms of maritime law he is guilty of a capital crime. This is an example of a good motive with a bad outcome.

But the young sea captain is entirely tolerant of Leggatt and his situation. He makes no criticism and acts instinctively to protect him from detection and capture. It’s as if he realises that he himself might have acted in a similar manner if he had been confronted by the same situation.

One can argue that the young captain acts out of class loyalty. Both he and Leggatt have come from the same training college, and the captain feels an instinct to protect his own kind. This is an interpretation which will not be popular with Conrad devotees, because it is an elitist position. And it is made even worse by the fact that at the end of the story the young captain does not appear to have learned anything.

The captain puts his own ship and the entire crew in great peril just for the sake of saving one individual from justice – something his maritime code of ethics would never condone. And yet the spirit of the narrative and Conrad’s attitude to the captain suggests a positive outcome to the story. The captain succeeds in steering clear of Koh-ring, and he feels that he has a closer relationship with the vessel he commands. This is a bad motive with a good outcome.

Interestingly, Leggatt saves the crew of the Sephora by his act of ‘setting’ a reefed foresail, but kills an individual in doing so. The young captain on the other hand does the opposite. He saves an individual (Leggatt) but puts his own crew in great danger by sailing so close to the Koh-ring island.

The Secret Sharer – study resources

The Secret Sharer – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Secret Sharer – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Secret Sharer – Kindle eBook

The Secret Sharer – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Secret Sharer – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Secret Sharer – Dover Thrift – Amazon UK

The Secret Sharer – Dover Thrift – Amazon US

The Secret Sharer – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg [FREE]

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Secret Sharer – plot summary

Part I. A young seaman has his first command to take a sailing ship from the Gulf of Siam (Thailand) back to England. Whilst becalmed during the night at the start of the voyage he takes on board Leggatt, another senior seaman who has escaped from a nearby ship. the Sephora, after killing a malicious fellow seaman during a storm. The young captain sympathises with Leggatt’s plight and conceals him in his cabin. Leggatt gives a reasonable explanation for his actions (which saved his ship) and the young captain continues to give him refuge.

Part II. When the captain of the Sephora comes searching for his escaped prisoner, he gives his own account of events. The crew of the young captain’s ship find his behaviour increasingly strange, but he continues to protect Leggatt. Both of them are graduates of the same training school, and the captain regards Leggatt as his ‘double’ or ‘alternative self’. After a number of number of near scrapes in being detected, Leggatt asks to be put off the ship when it nears some islands. He is willing to take his chance to make an escape. The captain takes a grave risk by sailing perilously close to an island, but in the end Leggatt slips away undetected and the captain sails on, feeling that he now has complete control of his ship.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

Principal characters

I	the narrator, an unnamed young mariner
–	the chief mate with ‘terrible whiskers’
–	the young second mate
Leggatt	the chief mate of the Sephora
Archbold	the captain of the Sephora

The Secret Sharer – first book edition

First edition – J.M.Dent & Sons 1912

Critical studies

Ted Billy, A Wilderness of Words: Closure and Disclosure in Conrad’s Short Fiction, Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1997.

Gary Geddes, Conrad’s Later Novels, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1980.

Stephen K. Land, Conrad and the Paradox of Plot, London: Macmillan Press, 1984.

F.R.Leavis, ‘The Shadow-Line’, in Anna Karenina and Other Essays, London: Chatto and Windus, 1967.

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Other novels by Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
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Buy the book from Amazon US

Joseph Conrad web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
More on Joseph Conrad tales

The Shadow Line

October 18, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Shadow Line: A Confession (1917) is one of a number of Conrad’s works which draw upon his own experiences as a seaman during his third visit to the far East in 1887-1888. He signed up as mate on the Vidar, which traded in the islands of Malaysia, but just like the young man in this story he signed off and was then given his first (and only) command of his own ship. He travelled from Singapore to Bangkok to take over as captain of the Otago, then took the ship to Sydney, calling in en route at Singapore to pick up medical supplies.

Joseph Conrad

The fact that these elements are reflected in the story should not lead readers to suppose that the finished work is merely a biographical record. The relationship between biography and fiction is a complex issue, and it should be remembered that not only do writers transform personal experience to give it artistic shape and force, but there is no direct and simple relationship between a personal experience and its depiction in fictional form.

The Shadow Line – critical commentary

Narrative structure

The main elements of the narrative are arranged in a very simple pattern. The story begins in Singapore as the young captain secures his first command. He travels to Bangkok to join his ship, and sails back to where he came from, in Singapore. This structure echoes the main thematic development of the novella – his change from a state of youth and immaturity to that of an older and wiser man who has been hardened by the grim experiences of his journey.

Conrad is renowned for the complexity of his novels and stories – particularly the radically fractured time schemes of his narratives. But the structure and the sequence of events in The Shadow-Line are relatively straightforward. Events are related by a single first-person narrator, the young sea captain, and he delivers them in the same sequence that they occur, with no flashes forward or backward.

The only element of ‘back story’ is provided by the chief mate’s account of his conflict with the previous captain, and the only part of the text which is not either dialogue or first person narrative is two brief extracts from the young captain’s diary. In fact it’s difficult to understand why Conrad bothered including these two short passages, because they continue to recount events in the same sequence and in a similar manner.

Steam and Sail

At the start of the tale, the young sailor’s position as mate on the steam ship is comfortable and he is successful in it – carrying the approval of his captain (Kent). Yet he leaves the ship, for reasons he cannot explain. The experienced seamen with whom he discusses the issue put it down to his youthful impetuosity.

Yet when he takes up his command of the sailing ship he is in raptures with the ship itself which he thinks of as ‘she’ and himself as a lover. He also conceives of himself as the latest in a long honourable tradition of previous captains. (This is powerfully ironic in the light of the previous captain and his actions.)

But there are immediate problems connected with the type of vessel. The sailing ship requires a great number of men on deck, co-operating with each other to manage the sails and navigation. These are exactly what the captain does not have, because the crew are down with malaria. He is therefore forced to manage the ship himself, assisted by two crew who are both ill.

In the end he succeeds – so in one sense it is the older traditions of the sea and the earlier form of maritime technology which provide him with the gruelling experience that forms his character. He learns the value of co-operative working methods.

Youth and experience

At the start of the narrative, the young seaman is competent, but he displays the impetuosity and naivety of youth. He gives up his job without any good reason, and has no alternative career prospects. He fails to recognise that Captain Giles has recommended him to the Harbour Master, and his mood switches rapidly from despair to elation on learning of his new appointment. He also disregards the medical advice he is given, and sets sail without the services of a chief mate.

In his favour is the fact that his essential soundness is recognised by Captain Kent, his previous commander, the experienced Captain Giles, and the Harbour Master who gives him his position. He survives under the pressure of the ship’s misfortunes, and he has the good luck not to contract malaria like the rest of his crew.

Once back in Singapore, he realises that he has learned a severe lesson, he feels older (though only two or three weeks have passed) and at the end of the story he is intending to start out to complete his journey the very next day.

Novel, novella, story?

The narrative is one hundred pages – approximately 30,000 words – which means it could be considered a short novel or a long short story. But it has the classic characteristics of the novella. It is concerned essentially with a single experience in the life of one character, but the event it deals with is of a magnitude that makes it more than a passing episode. That is, it deals with a universal issue, not a particular event (no matter how revealing).

The captain’s experiences test his courage to the limit; he learns a very severe lesson; and he ultimately triumphs against adversity in a way which takes him from youth to manhood. These are large-scale issues, much bigger than the smaller (though revealing) incidents which would characterize the short story.

All the drama is concentrated into one topic and one location – the captain’s command and his problems on board the ship. Even his interactions with others are reduced essentially to just the saintly cook and the deranged chief mate. This sharpness of dramatic focus reinforces the especially compacted nature of the novella as a literary genre.

The title

Readers might be forgiven for thinking that the title refers to a shipping company – but Conrad uses the term ‘shadow-line’ two or three times throught the novella in a mataphoric sense.

time, too, goes on – till one perceives ahead a shadow-line warning one that the region of early youth, too, must be left behind

The line is therefore a zone of transition between two states of being – youthfulness and maturity – which is the pricipal issue of the novella as a whole. When the young captain’s morale is at its lowest point he communes with himself in a diary, reflecting on the difference between his current despair and the youthful enthusiasm with which he began his voyage fifteen days earlier:

It seems to me that all my life before that momentous day is infinitely remote, a fading memory of light-hearted youth, something on the other side of a shadow

The Shadow Line – study resources

The Shadow-Line – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Shadow-Line – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Shadow-Line – Kindle eBook (annotated)

The Shadow-Line – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Shadow-Line – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Shadow-Line – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Shadow-Line – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Shadow Line – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Shadow-Line – plot summary

A young, inexperienced, but competent seaman suddenly gives up his successful position as mate on a steamship. Whilst he is on shore in Singapore an older and experienced sea captain recommends him to the harbour master, as a result of which he is given command of a sailing ship whose captain has died at sea. He travels to Bangkok to take charge of the ship and feels that he is joining an illustrious brotherhood of distinguished former commanders. However, he learns from the chief mate that the previous captain was dissolute and neglected his duties, The chief mate was forced to take charge of the ship, and the captain cursed the ship and all its crew before dying.

The new young captain is delayed in Bangkok by a combination of official procedures and the chief mate’s illness. He seeks medical advice, but impatient to be underway with his new commission, he disregards the warnings and sets sail in unfavourable conditions. The journey progresses very slowly because of a lack of wind, and the ship becomes becalmed in the Gulf of Siam. Meanwhile all the crew are infected with malaria, and the chief mate appears to be dying. The mate believes that an evil influence from the previous captain is casting a jinx on the ship.

The young captain then suddenly discovers that the supplies of quinine he has been using to treat his crew have been stolen and sold by the previous captain, who has re-filled the bottles with useless stuff. The captain is supported in all his attempts to keep going by the ship’s cook, who has a bad heart.

The chief mate recovers slightly, but the ship makes no progress. The captain in despair decides to abandon the voyage and return to Singapore. En route the ship encounters a tropical thunderstorm, and the captain has to maintain the safety of the ship with the help of only two or three sick crew members. The chief mate goes through a phase of near madness in which he believes that they are battling against evil forces of the former captain, who he personally buried at sea in the same part of the Gulf.

Finally, the ship reaches Singapore, the crew are taken off to hospital, and the cook requests to be discharged from his duties. The captain recruits a replacement crew and is planning to resume his voyage the very next day, feeling older and wiser.

Biography

Principal characters

I	the narrator, an unnamed young mariner
Hamilton	a non-paying loafer and snob
Captain Giles	an experienced retired navigator
Chief Steward	custodian of the Officers’ Sailors’ Home
Captain Kent	commander of the narrator’s previous ship
Captain Ellis	harbour master in Singapore
R	gay shipping master in harbour office
Burns	chief mate
Doctor	medical chief in Bangkok
Ransome	the cook with a bad heart
Gambril	a grizzled sailor
Frenchy	sailor with a Mr Punch face

The Shadow Line – publication

first edition, J.M.Dent 1917

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

Critical studies

Ted Billy, A Wilderness of Words: Closure and Disclosure in Conrad’s Short Fiction, Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1997.

Gary Geddes, Conrad’s Later Novels, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1980.

Stephen K. Land, Conrad and the Paradox of Plot, London: Macmillan Press, 1984.

F.R.Leavis, ‘The Shadow-Line’, in Anna Karenina and Other Essays, London: Chatto and Windus, 1967.

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Other novels by Joseph Conrad

Under Western Eyes (1911) is the story of Razumov, a reluctant ‘revolutionary’. He is in fact a coward who is mistaken for a radical hero and cannot escape from the existential trap into which this puts him. This is Conrad’s searing critique of Russian ‘revolutionaries’ who put his own Polish family into exile and jeopardy. The ‘Western Eyes’ are those of an Englishman who reads and comments on Razumov’s journal – thereby creating another chance for Conrad to recount the events from a very complex perspective. Razumov achieves partial redemption as a result of his relationship with a good woman, but the ending, with faint echoes of Dostoyevski, is tragic for all concerned.
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Chance is the first of Conrad’s novels to achieve a wide commercial success, and one of the few to have a happy ending. It tells the story of Flora de Barral, the abandoned daughter of a bankrupt tycoon, and her long struggle to find happiness and dignity. He takes his techniques of weaving complex narratives to a challenging level here. His narrator Marlow is piecing together the story from a mixture of personal experience and conversations with other characters in the novel. At times it is difficult to remember who is saying what to whom. This is a work for advanced Conrad fans only. Make sure you have read some of the earlier works first, before tackling this one.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

Joseph Conrad web links

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

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas

Joseph Conrad – a collection of web links

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

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

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of his work for the cinema and television – in various languages.

Works by Joseph Conrad
HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions.

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

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

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
More on Joseph Conrad tales

The Sherlock Holmes Formula

July 20, 2018 by Roy Johnson

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a total of fifty-nine Sherlock Holmes stories – most of which appeared in The Strand Magazine between 1887 and 1927. The stories made Doyle rich and brought thousands of readers to the magazine. Sherlock Holmes became so popular as a character that Doyle thought the stories were interfering with what he regarded as his more serious literary ambitions. In 1893 he killed off his hero in a famous story The Final Problem where Holmes is pulled to his death by arch rival Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland.

This created such an outcry and a public demand for more stories (particularly in the United States) that Doyle was forced to ‘resurrect’ Holmes. He did this rather cleverly by creating new stories that dealt with cases from a time before his demise.

Origins

It is quite clear that the character of Sherlock Holmes is based largely on Edgar Allan Poe’s famous detective Auguste Dupin. Holmes leads a largely solitary and slightly bohemian life; he operates as a private detective; and he solves his cases not by action but by a process which combines acute observation of details with a rigorous system of logical induction. All of these characteristics are identical to those of Auguste Dupin.

Structure

A typical story is related by his friend Doctor Watson as a first person narrator. A retired medical orderly from the war in Afghanistan, Watson takes up bachelor residence with Holmes at the famous apartments 221B Baker Street. Later in the series, he marries and lives separately. Sometimes Watson merely acts as an ‘outer narrator’. He introduces the story, then relates Holmes’ account of the mystery and its solution. In just one or two stories Sherlock Holmes himself is the first person narrator (The Lion’s Man and The Blanched Soldier).

Watson often presents a brief character sketch of Holmes – his moodiness, his habits of playing the violin or taking cocaine, and his obsessive recording of previous cases. Then there might follow an example of his inductive method. Holmes for instance more than once presents a perceptive interpretation of Watson’s recent behaviour from a close examination of his shoes.

Then comes the announcement of the mystery to be solved – often accompanied by the arrival of the person who has commissioned the case. The client suddenly appears at 221B Baker Street with a problem which is either a personal and sensitive issue, or one which cannot be solved by the police.

Sherlock Holmes is in fact an amateur consultant detective. He solves problems which might be crimes that have baffled the police, but he also acts in cases which are puzzling to individuals – and sometimes in which no crime has been committed.

His first step in almost all cases is to assemble the details of the case. The reader is thereby presented with the ‘background’ to the problem. This includes baffling circumstances, the skullduggery, or the crime itself – all outlined within the confines of Holmes’ Baker Street consulting rooms.

Holmes then constructs a solution to the problem – but does not say what it is. Proof of his theory is usually required, and this usually involves a trip to either Paddington, Euston, or Victoria railway station. On the journey to their destination he unravels some of the further details to Watson, who is amazed at Holmes’ insights.

Arriving at their destination, (the crime scene or the locus of the problem) Holmes often arranges a fiendish plot or dons some convincing disguise which causes the culprit to reveal him or herself.

It has to be said that in this latter phase of the story, there is often a great deal more background detail provided to explain the origins of the problem or to solve the crime. This is often detail the reader can have no way of knowing from what has been previously dramatised in the story.

It is in this sense that despite their enduring popularity, the Sherlock Holmes stories are pitched at what might be called the tabloid level of literary distinction. They are lightweight, often dryly amusing, and quite entertaining tales. They have even attracted a considerable amount of critical attention – though this is often taken up with naive issues of correspondence between the fictional events of the stories and the ‘real’ London and South-East in which they are situated. (For example – Where exactly is 221B Baker Street?)

But Conan Doyle does not really play fair with his readers. Sherlock Holmes might be a memorable fictional creation; he might have impressive powers of induction; and he might get caught up in thrilling escapades in his work as a consultant detective. But if the solution to the problems he faces comes from a character who suddenly appears in the last pages of a story, the revelation of a hidden trapdoor, or the unannounced arrival of an illegitimate child – then the patient reader has every reason to feel somewhat cheated rather than rewarded.

The best current editions of the Sherlock Holmes stories are those published in the Oxford World’s Classics paperback series. Each volume contains a critical introduction, a note on the text, a bibliography of further reading, a chronology of Arthur Conan Doyle, and most importantly a series of explanatory notes giving historical, geographical, and scientific information about details mentioned in the text.

The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes – Amazon UK

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Amazon US

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes – Amazon UK

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes – Amazon US

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes – Amazon UK

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes – Amazon US

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The Shooting Party

December 20, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Shooting Party was first published in Harper’s Bazaar in New York and London in 1938, and was reprinted in A Haunted House published by the Hogarth Press in 1944.

Claude Monet 1840–1926

The Shooting Party – Critical comment

This is a devastating and at times almost exaggerated critique of upper class society. The house and its occupants are ageing and falling apart. The slaughter of the pheasants is an apt metaphor for the privilege and waste of a landowning class which has outlived its purpose in society. And the mindless brutality of the Squire is a comic parody of the military tradition of which he is part.

The complicity of this class with its servants is neatly illustrated by the fact that Milly Masters is knitting a jersey for her son, who may well be the illegitimate offspring of the Squire.

The parts of the story are also tied together by a number of recurring motives – the curled claws and the eyes of the pheasants and those of the women in the story:

Old Miss Rashleigh filled her glass. As they sipped their eyes became lustrous like half-precious stones held to the light. Slate blue were Miss Rashleigh’s; Miss Antonia’s red, like port. And their laces and their flounces seemed to quiver, as if their bodies were warm and languid underneath their feathers as they drank.

It is interesting to note that the story was originally composed without the opening and closing paragraphs concerning Milly Masters which ‘frame’ the central sequence. This speculation over the identity of a woman on a train is an idea Virginia Woolf used more than once. Milly Masters cannot be pinned down sociologically at the outset of the story, but by the end of the narrative her unfashionable clothes, her monogrammed suitcase, and the brace of pheasants she is carrying have all had their significance revealed.

The Shooting Party – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

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

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

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Shooting Party – story synopsis

The story begins as Milly Masters, a housekeeper, gets into the third class carriage of a train with her suitcase and two pheasants. The narrative immediately switches to the old country house where she works. Miss Antonia is waiting for lunch, whilst her brother, the Squire, is out in the grounds, shooting pheasants.

The luncheon table is set by servants, and she is joined by her elderly sister, Miss Rashleigh. Meanwhile, birds continue to be shot and piled up into a cart. Milly Masters finishes knitting a jersey for her son, then helps unload the birds from the cart.

The two sisters have lunch (of pheasant) whilst the shooting continues outside. The carcass of the bird they have eaten is thrown to their spaniel dog in the dining room.

They then fall into reminiscence and gossip as they drink their wine. They criticise their male relatives, from which it transpires that Milly Masters is probably their brother’s mistress. Whilst they are talking, the harsh autumn weather is causing damage to what is obviously a dilapidated house.

The Squire arrives with three hounds and begins to curse everyone. He then begins to lash out with a leather whip and causes Miss Rashleigh to fall into the fireplace, where the shield of the Rashleighs and a picture of King Edward fall onto her.

The story returns to the railway carriage where Milly Masters is described as an ordinary woman, but one whose eyes reveal ‘the ghost of a family, of an age, of a civilization dancing over the grave’.

Principal characters

Miss Antonia	an old woman
Miss Rashleigh	her even older sister
Squire Hugh Rashleigh	their brother
Milly Masters	the handsome housekeeper
Wing	the gamekeeper

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Between the Acts (1941) is her last novel, in which she returns to a less demanding literary style. Despite being written immediately before her suicide, she combines a playful wittiness with her satirical critique of English upper middle-class life. The story is set in the summer of 1939 on the day of the annual village fete at Pointz Hall. It describes a country pageant on English history written by Miss La Trobe, and its effects on the people who watch it. Most of the audience misunderstand it in various ways, but the implication is that it is a work of art which temporarily creates order amidst the chaos of human life. There’s lots of social comedy, some amusing reflections on English weather, and meteorological metaphors and imagery run cleverly throughout the book.
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The Complete Shorter Fiction contains all the classic short stories such as The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, and The String Quartet – but also the shorter fragments and experimental pieces such as Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. These ‘sketches’ (as she called them) were used to practice the techniques she used in her longer fictions. Nearly fifty pieces written over the course of Woolf’s writing career are arranged chronologically to offer insights into her development as a writer. This is one for connoisseurs – well presented and edited in a scholarly manner.
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Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
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Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Short Story – essential works

September 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

tutorial and guide to important texts

The short story is as old as the earliest tale-telling. Many longer narratives such as epics and myths (such as the Bible) contain short episodes which can be extracted as stories. But as a distinct literary genre, the short story came into its own during the early nineteenth century. Many writers have created successful short stories – but those which follow are the prose artists who have had most influence on its development in terms of form. We will be adding more guidance notes and examples as time goes on.

Edgar Allen Poe is famous for his Tales of Mystery and Imagination. These are tight, beautifully crafted exercises in plot, suspense, psychological drama, and sheer horror. He also invented the detective story. This is the birth of the modern short story. Poe was writing for magazines and journals. He has a spectacularly florid style, and his settings of dungeons and crumbling houses come straight out of the Gothic tradition. He’s most famous for stories such as ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘The Black Cat’, and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ which vividly dramatise extreme states of psychological terror, anxiety, and what we would now call existential threat. He also theorised about the story, claiming that every part should be contributing to the whole, and the story should be short enough to read at one sitting. This edition is good because it includes the best of the stories, plus some essays and reviews. An ideal starting point.
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How short is short?

There is no fixed length for a short story. Readers generally expect a character, an event of some kind, and a sense of resolution. But Virginia Woolf got most of this in to one page in her experimental short story Monday or Tuesday. There are also ‘abrupt fictions’ of a paragraph or two – but these tend to be not much more than anecdotes.

There’s an often recounted anecdote regarding a competition for the shortest possible short story. It was won by Ernest Hemingway with an entry of one sentence in six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

There are also quite long stories – such as those written by Henry James. If the narrative sticks to one character and one issue or episode, they remain stories. If they stray into greater degrees of complexity and develop expanded themes and dense structure – then they often become novellas. Examples of these include Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.

Nathaniel Hawthorne produced stories that are beautifully crafted studies in symbolism, moral ambiguity, and metaphors of the American psyche. His tales are full of characters oppressed by consciousness of sin, guilt, and retribution. They explore the traditions and the consequences of the Puritanism Europe exported to America. Young Goodman Brown and Other Stories in the Oxford University Press edition presents twenty of Hawthorne’s best tales. It’s the first in paperback to offer his most important short works with full annotation in one volume.
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Guy de Maupassant brought the subject matter of the story down to an everyday level which shocked readers at the time – and can still do so now. He also began to downgrade the element of plot and suspense in favour of character revelation. He was a relative of Flaubert, a novelist manqué, and bon viveur who died at forty-three of syphilis in a madhouse. Nevertheless he left behind him an oeuvre of more than 300 stories. His tone is objective, detached, and often deeply ironic; and he is celebrated for the exactness and accuracy of his observations, and the balance and precision of his style. Although most of his stories appear at first to be nothing more than brief and rather transparent anecdotes, the best succeed in giving impressionistic but truthful insights into the hidden lives of people caught amidst the trials of everyday existence.
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Charles E. May, The Short Story: the reality of artifice, London: Routledge, 2002, pp.160, ISBN 041593883X. This is a study of the development of the short story as a literary genre – from its origins to the present day. It takes in most of the major figures – Poe, Hawthorn, James, Conrad, Hemingway, Borges, and Cheever. There’s also a very useful chronology, giving dates of significant publications, full notes and references. and annotated suggestions for further reading. Despite the obvious US weighting here, for anyone who needs an overview of the short story and an insight into how stories are analysed as part of undergraduate studies, this is an excellent place to start.
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Katherine Mansfield is one of the few major writers who worked entirely within the short story form. Her finest work is available in just one volume. She followed Chekhov in paring down the dramatic element of the short story to a minimum, whilst raising its level of subtlety and psychological insight to new heights. Every smallest detail within her stories is carefully chosen to complete a pattern which the whole tale symbolises. She was also an early feminist in presenting many of her stories from a convincingly radical point of view. In this she was rather like her friend and contemporary, Virginia Woolf with whom she discussed the new literary techniques they were both developing at the same time. Unfortunately, Katherine Mansfield died at only thirty-five when she was at the height of her powers.
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James Joyce published Dubliners in 1916 and established himself immediately as a great writer. This has been an enormously influential collection which helped to establish the form of the modern short story. These are studies of Dublin life and characters written in a stark, pared-down style. Most of the characters and scenes are mean and petty – sometimes even tragic. Joyce had difficulty finding a publisher for this his first book, and it did not appear until many years after it had been written. It was severely attacked because the names of actual persons and places in Dublin are mentioned in it. Several of the characters introduced in Dubliners eventually reappear in his great novel Ulysses. In terms of literary technique, Joyce is best known for his use of the ‘epiphany’ – the revealing moment or experience used as a focal point for the purpose of the story.
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The Whiplash Ending

It used to be thought that the ‘point’ of a short story was best held back until the last paragraph. The idea was that the reader was being entertained – and then suddenly surprised by a revelation or an unexpected reversal or twist. O. Henry popularised this device in the US. However, most serious modern writers after Chekhov came to think that this was rather a cheap strategy. They proposed instead the relatively eventless story which presents a situation that unfolds itself to the reader for contemplation.

Virginia Woolf took the short story as it had come to be developed post-Chekhov, and with it she blended the prose poem, poetic meditations, and the plotless event. Her finest achievements in this form – Kew Gardens, Sunday or Monday, and The Lady in the Looking-glass‘ – create new linguistic worlds without the prop of a story line. These offer a poetic evocation of life and meditations on time, memory, and death. This edition contains all the classic short stories such as The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, and The String Quartet – but also the shorter fragments and experimental pieces such as Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. These ‘sketches’ (as she called them) were used to practice the techniques she used in her longer fictions. Nearly fifty pieces written over the course of Woolf’s writing career are arranged chronologically to offer insights into her development as a writer. This is well presented and edited in a scholarly manner by Susan Dick.
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Franz Kafka created stories and ‘fragments’ (as he called them) which are a strange, often nightmarish mixture of tale and philosophic meditation. Start with Metamorphosis – the account of a young salesman who wakes up to find he has been transformed into a giant insect. This particular collection also includes Kafka’s first publication – a slim volume of what he called ‘Meditations’ – as well as the forty-page ‘Letter to his Father’. It also contains the story in which he predicted the horrors of the concentration camps – ‘In the Penal Colony’. Kafka is famous for having anticipated in his work many of the modern states of psychological angst, alienation, and existential terror which became commonplace later in the century.
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Epiphanies and Moments

James Joyce’s contribution to the short story was a device he called the ‘epiphany’. Following Guy de Maupassant and Chekhov, he wrote the series of stories Dubliners which were pared down in terms of literary style and focussed their effect on a revelation. A sudden remark, a symbol, or moment epitomises and clarifies the meaning of a complex experience. This usually comes at the end of the story – either for the character in the story or for the reader. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf followed a similar route of playing down action and events in favour of dramatising insights into character and states of mind. Woolf called these ‘moments of being’.

Jorge Luis Borges like Katherine Mansfield, only wrote short stories. He was an Argentinian, much influenced by English Literature. His tales manage to combine literary playfulness and a rich style with strange explorations of mind-bending ideas. He is credited as one of the fathers of magical realism, which is one feature of Latin-American literature which has spread worldwide since the 1960s. His stories often start in a concrete, realistic world then gradually slide into strange dreamlike states and end up leaving you to wonder where on earth you are, and how you got there. Funes, the Memorious explores the idea of a man who cannot forget anything; The Garden of Forking Paths is a marvellous double-take on the detective story; and Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a pseudo-essay concerning encyclopedia entries of an imaginary world – which begin to invade and multiply within our own. He also wrote some rather amusing literary spoofs, which are collected in this edition.
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Ernest Hemingway trained as a newspaper reporter and began writing short stories in the post-Chekhov period, consciously influenced by his admiration for the Russian novelist Turgenev. He is celebrated for his terseness and understatement – a sort of literary tough-guy style which was much imitated at one time His persistent themes are physical and moral courage, stoicism, and what he called ‘grace under pressure’. Because his stories are so pared to the bone, free of all superfluous decoration, and so reliant on the closely observed detail, they fit well within the modernist style. He once won a bet that he could write a short story in six words. The result was – ‘For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.’ His reputation as a novelist has plummeted recently, but his stories are still worth reading.
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John Cheever is a story writer in the smooth and sophisticated New Yorker school. His writing is urbane, thoughtful, and his social details well observed. What he writes about are the small moments of enlightenment which lie waiting in everyday life, as well as the smouldering vices which lurk beneath the polite surface of suburban America. This is no doubt a reflection of Cheever’s own experience. For many years as a successful writer and family man he was also an alcoholic and led a secret double life as a homosexual. His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character’s decorous social persona and inner corruption. His is a literary approach which has given rise to many imitators, perhaps the best known of whom is Anne Tyler. He’s sometimes called ‘the Checkhov of the suburbs’.

Nadine Gordimer is one of the few modern writers who have developed the short story as a literary genre beyond what Virginia Woolf pushed it to in the early modernist phase. She starts off in modern post-Chekhovian mode presenting situations which have little drama but which invite the reader to contemplate states of being or moods which illustrate the ideologies of South Africa. Technically, she experiments heavily with point of view, narrative perspective, unexplained incidents, switches between internal monologue and third person narrative and a heavy use of ‘as if’ prose where narrator-author boundaries become very blurred. Some of her stories became more lyrical, more compacted and symbolic, abandoning any semblance of conventional story or plot in favour of a poetic meditation on a theme. All of this can make enormous demands upon the reader. Sometimes, on first reading, it’s even hard to know what is going on. But gradually a densely concentrated image or an idea will emerge – the equivalent of a Joycean ‘epiphany’ – and everything falls into place. Her own collection of Selected Stories are UK National Curriculum recommended reading.
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The Siege of London

March 16, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Siege of London first appeared in The Cornhill Magazine in January—February 1883. The magazine had been edited until the year before by Leslie Stephen, who was the father of Virginia Woolf. James was in fact a friend of the family, and it is highly likely that Leslie Stephen had personally accepted the story for the magazine.

The Siege of London – critical commentary

Theme

The main theme of this story is fairly easy to understand and is directly related to its slightly ironic title. Mrs Headway lays siege to London in the sense of establishing her right to a place in its upper social echelons. She is an ambitious and very determined woman with a rather murky past, which technically should prohibit her from making such inroads.

But she has preserved her good looks, and is referred to as the ‘Texan Belle’. It is these lures with which she has entrapped the somewhat naive Sir Arthur Demesne, who Littlemore describes as ‘a nonentity of the first water’.

Demesne’s mother searches desperately for information about Mrs Headway’s ‘past’ – to confirm her suspicions that she is not a respectable woman. But since nobody else except Littlemore knows anything about her past life, such efforts to reveal blemishes are thwarted.

Mrs Headway has her goals firmly in mind, and she is completely realistic about her life chances. She realises that she has a murky past, and that Sir Arthur is her last chance of gaining a place in upper class European society.

The crux

Given this theme, and the fact that Mrs Headway’s plan has already succeeded, it is rather curious that Littlemore, after protecting the reputation of his old friend from enquiry throughout the story, suddenly reveals the truth to Lady Demesne.

He knows that the couple are engaged but not yet married, but the only possible profit he can gain from revealing the truth to Lady Demesne is a patriotic blow against English class snobbery, which he neither expresses nor entertains. He merely tells her that the information will not help her in any way. That turns out to be true – but it is another reason why Littlemore need not have made the revelation.

The Siege of London – study resources

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

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

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

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

The Siege of London – CreateSpace edition

The Siege of London – Kindle edition

The Siege of London – HTML edition

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Siege of London – plot summary

PART ONE

I. Rupert Waterville and his friend George Littlemore meet Mrs Headway at the Comédie Francaise in Paris. She has known Littlemore in the past, has been much married and divorced, and has previously been Mrs Grenville and Nancy Beck. She is bold, outspoken, and from the ‘wild west’ of America. Littlemore has a slightly dissolute past, but has made his money in a silver mine and now professes to have no ambition. Waterville looks up to him as a model of sophistication.

II. When Littlemore visits Mrs Headway she reveals to him her burning ambition to ‘get on in European society’ and appeals to him for help. She wishes to be introduced to his sister, who lives in London. He is cautiously reserved about such prospects, because he perceives her to be brash and opportunistic.

III. Sir Arthur Demesne is completely infatuated with Mrs Headway, but he is naive and cannot understand why she does not have more friends. Being a raffish and lose woman from a completely different country and culture to his own, she is a mystery to him.

IV. Waterville worries that Mrs Headway might ask to be ‘introduced’ to polite society in London, which would compromise his reputation as a diplomat. Whilst Demense’s mother visits Paris to keep an eye on him, Waterville takes Mrs Headway to the Luxembourg Galleries to see modern French painters.

V. She reveals that Lady Demesne would be prepared to receive her, but that she ambitiously wants Lady Demesne to visit her. She wishes to accumulate social status, and is sorely piqued by the way she was ignored in New York society.

When they return to her hotel, Sir Arthur Demesne has brought his mother to meet her. Demesne also calls on Littlemore hoping to gain information on Mrs Headway’s ‘background’, but doesn’t get any.

But Lady Demese only visits Mrs Headway once, and concludes that she is a worthless trollop. Littlemore is recalled to America on business, Waterville goes to London, and Mrs HGeadway goes to Rome where (she claims) she entertains nobility.

PART TWO

VI. The following year Waterville is invited to Longlands by Lady Demesne where Mrs Headway is also a guest. Waterville feels some sympathy for her, surrounded as she is by centuries of English tradition. But when he speaks to her she accuses him of spying on her. She later reveals that she thinks Lady Demesne is trying to halt her social progress and prevent her marriage to Sir Arthur. Lady Demesne asks Waterville for information on Mrs Headway, but he refuses to criticise her.

VII. When Littlemore returns from America, Waterville warns him that Mrs Headway is now an accepted social success. Mrs Headway warns Littlemore that Lady Demesne will wish to quiz Littlemore about her ‘past’ and prevent any marriage to Sir Arthur, which is precisely what she now wants.

VIII. Littlemore’s sister Agnes Dolphin receives a letter from Lady Demesne asking about Mrs Headway. Agnes asks her brother to confirm everybody’s worst fears about Mrs Headway, but he defends her right to ‘succeed’ socially. They disagree about the issue. She wishes to preserve the traditions of English exclusiveness which she has embraced with all the fervour of a proselyte: he wishes to defend an American democratic right to get on in the world.

IX. Mrs Headway once again summons Littlemore to support her as her oldest friend. However, it’s a trick to force him to meet Sir Arthur. But when Littlemore asks Sir Arthur if he wants to ‘know’ anything about his bride-to-be, Sir Arthur rejects the offer and becomes engaged to Mrs Headway.

X. Lady Demesne finally confronts Littlemore at his sister’s house and asks him directly about Mrs Headway. He confirms that she is not ‘respectable’, which is what she feared. The marriage goes ahead anyway.

Principal characters

Rupert Waterville	a naive young American diplomat posted to London embassy (34)
George Littlemore	a rich and sophisticated American widower with a dissolute past (44)
Sir Arthur Demesne	a naive young English aristocrat and Tory MP
Lady Demesne	his scrupulous mother
Mrs Nancy Headway	a much married and divorced ‘Texan Belle’, previously Nancy Beck
Mrs Agnes Dolphin	Littlemore’s snobbish sister who has embraced ‘Englishness’

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
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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.

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The Solution

April 20, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Solution first appeared in the monthly magazine The New Review in three issues between December 1889 and February 1990. It was specially commissioned for the new publication, which was founded and edited by Archibald Grove. The story itself was based on an anecdote related to James by his friend the actress Fanny Kemble.

Frascati – Paul Flandrin

The Solution – critical commentary

Social conventions

Contemporary readers might find it difficult to appreciate the social nicety which is at the crux of this tale. During a group excursion to a picnic, Wilmerding quite innocently goes for a walk with Veronica, the eldest daughter of Mrs Goldie. They are missing from the main group for some time.

In the nineteenth century (and earlier) the social conventions for contact between men and women were so tightly controlled that for a single woman to be alone with a single man – out of any supervision by a chaperone, a family friend, or any other third party – was considered to be a potential blot upon her reputation.

The inference is clearly a prurient fear of some sexual connection being made, but alongside or even beneath that in the case of the class James was writing about is a financial fear that social capital would be lost. The woman’s reputation could not be converted into real capital via marriage arranged on

Mrs Goldie’s social ambition is to find husbands for her daughters. This is not an easy task, because she herself has no money (compared with people in the circles where she is mixing) and two of her daughters are not attractive.

Veronica alone has the social capital of good looks; but if her reputation were to be sullied by what was considered an episode of improper behaviour, that capital would be lost. This is a situation he had already explored in his famous novella Daisy Miller more than ten years previously.

This is the crux of the trick played on Wilmerding by Montaut and the narrator: they know that he has such an elevated sense of honour that he will be prepared to marry Veronica if he thinks he has placed her in an untenable position.

The international dimension

Wilmerding is an upright and naive American who has found himself out of his depth amidst European social mores. From his republican background, he doesn’t realise the significance of taking an innocent stroll with a young unmarried woman.

The two Europeans, the narrator and Montaut, realise that Wilmerding has unwittingly placed himself in a socially embarrassing position, and they play on his credulity and his sense of honour – the Frenchman Montaut more unscrupulously than the English narrator. .

Fear of marriage

It is difficult not to see this as yet another variation on the theme of ‘fear of marriage’ which James explored in so many of his stories. We know that James debated with himself the tension between marriage and remaining a bachelor – always coming down on the side of the latter. And this is not even taking into account the homo-erotic impulses to which he eventually gave way later in life.

The story illustrates the danger posed by a pretty face and an unmarried woman. One innocent stroll in the Italian countryside is enough for a man of honour to be entrapped – obliged to proffer marriage when no such gesture was contemplated or intended.

Of course this instance is slightly amusing, because Wilmerding is rescued from his trapped condition by the whiles of a clever woman, Mrs Rushbrook, who simultaneously ‘bags her man’. Nevertheless, he has to pay a price, which Mrs Goldie is happy to seize on.

If you wished to push the ‘fear of women and marriage’ argument even further, you could argue that Mrs Rushbrook not only ‘snares’ Wilmerding, but also relieves him of his money in doing so. So – two women strip him of his independence and his money. Bachelors beware!

The framed narrative

James was very fond of the framed narrative – where there is an account of how the story comes about enclosing another more detailed narrative of the story itself. But the ‘frame’ here is not complete. The inner narrator (the un-named diplomat) is already dead when the story begins, and the main narrative is the outer-narrator’s reconstruction of events with ‘amplification’.

It is rather curious that James should take the trouble to create this double sourcing of the narrative when he makes no further use of it after the introductory paragraph. But it is entirely in keeping with his manner of creating stories, as the even more complex example of The Turn of the Screw proves.

The Problem – study resources

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

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

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

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

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

The Solution – HTML version at The Ladder

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Solution – plot summary

Part I. An un-named narrator, a former officer from the English diplomatic service, looks back to his posting in Rome in the early part of the nineteenth century when he was twenty-three. He mixes with attachés Wilmerding and Montaut from the United States and French embassies respectively in a social life which centres on an English widow Mrs Blanche Goldie and her three daughters.

They visit Mrs Goldie at an afternoon tea-party near Frascati, Wilmerding is missing for some time with Veronica, the most attractive of Mrs Goldie’s daughters. Montant argues to the narrator that this indiscretion obliges Wilmerding to make an offer of marriage to Veronica, otherwise her reputation will be compromised. They disagree, and make a bet on the outcome.

Part II. After the holiday the diplomats reassemble in Rome. The narrator teases Wilmerding for having returned without having made any formal commitment to Veronica. They discuss the subtle differences between American and European conventions regarding single men and women. As something of a joke, the narrator claims that Wilmerding has ‘gone too far’ with Veronica, at which Wilmerding professes complete innocence regarding his intentions.

Wilmerding consults Montant for advice – then suddenly leaves to go back to Frascati. Montant then claims he has won the bet – because Wilmerding will feel obliged to marry Veronica out of a sense of honour. But the narrator rides after Wilmerding, arriving back at Frascati to find that Wilmerding is already engaged to Veronica – so he rides on to seek advice from Mrs Rushbrook, the widow of an English naval officer who he wishes to marry.

Part III. The narrator feels very remorseful that his ‘joke’ has backfired and implores Mrs Rushbrook to help him quash the engagement. She argues that his best recourse would be to offer to marry Veronica himself. The next day the narrator goes to see Mrs Goldie to explain the misunderstanding. She refutes his arguments on the grounds that nobody knows what Wilmerding’s motives are.

She also challenges the narrator to propose marriage himself to Veronica – since although he has no money, he is very well connected and is expected to rise in the diplomatic service. Immediately afterwards, the narrator meets Wilmerding, Veronica, and Mrs Rushbrook, who are all very friendly. Mrs Rushbrook asks for details of Wilmerding’s social background.

Part IV. Back on duty in Rome, the narrator feels embarrassed and avoids Wilmerding. He visits Mrs Rushbrook, who has done nothing to help his secret plan, and thinks Veronica will blossom once she is married. But Wilmerding suddenly leaves Rome, having been rejected by Veronica. Next day the narrator confronts Mrs Rushbrook, who says she has offered her own money to the Goldies to buy off Wilmerding. Mrs Goldie, having come into money, goes off on a world tour. The narrator then reveals that Mrs Rushbrook in fact persuaded Veronica not to marry Wilmerding in exchange for his money – and that she had married him herself.

Principal characters

I	the un-named outer narrator who relays the tale
—	an un-named inner narrator – a former member of the English diplomatic service
Mrs Blanche Goldie	a flamboyant English widow with three unmarried daughters
Veronica Goldie	the most attractive daughter
Rosina Goldie	unattractive
Augusta Goldie	unattractive
The General	American foreign officer in Rome – a Carolinian dandy
Henry Wilmerding	his secretary, a rich Quaker gentleman
Guy de Montaut	French attaché in Rome
Mrs Rushbrook	an accomplished English widow of a naval officer

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Other works by Henry James

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

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What Masie Knew (1897) A young girl is caught between parents who are in the middle of personal conflict, adultery, and divorce. Can she survive without becoming corrupted? It’s touch and go – and not made easier for the reader by the attentions of an older man who decides to ‘look after’ her. This comes from the beginning of James’s ‘Late Phase’, so be prepared for longer and longer sentences. In fact it’s said that whilst composing this novel, James switched from writing longhand to using dictation – and it shows if you look carefully enough – part way through the book.
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The Ambassadors (1903) Lambert Strether is sent from America to Paris to recall Chadwick Newsome, a young man who is reported to be compromising himself by an entanglement with a wicked woman. However, Strether’s mission fails when he is seduced by the social pleasures of the European capital, and he takes Newsome’s side. So a second ambassador is dispatched in the form of the more determined Sarah Pocock. She delivers an ultimatum which is resisted by the two young men, but then an accident reveals unpleasant truths to Strether, who is faced by a test of loyalty between old Europe and the new USA. This edition presents the latest scholarship on James and includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times.
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Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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