Mantex

Tutorials, Study Guides & More

>> Home / Tutorials

Tutorials

literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

The Voyage a close reading

by

how to analyse prose fiction

Close reading is the most important skill you need for any form of literary studies. It means paying especially close attention to what is printed on the page. It is a much more subtle and complex process than the term might suggest. Close reading means not only reading and understanding the meanings of the individual printed words; it also involves being sensitive to all the subtle uses of language in the hands of skilled writers.

This can mean anything from a work’s particular vocabulary, sentence construction, and imagery, to the themes that are being explored. It also includes the way in which the story is being told, and the view of the world that it offers. It involves almost everything from the smallest linguistic items to the largest issues of literary understanding and judgement.

One of the first things you need to acquire for serious literary study is a knowledge of the vocabulary, the technical language, indeed the jargon in which literature is discussed. You need to acquaint yourself with the technical vocabulary of the discipline and then go on to study how its parts work.

What follows is a short list of features you might keep in mind whilst reading. They should give you ideas of what to look for. It is just a prompt to help you get under way.

Close reading – Checklist

Vocabulary
The author’s choice of individual words – which might vary from plain and simple to complex and ‘literary’.

Syntax
The arrangement of words in sentences. Often used for emphasis or dramatic effect.

Figures of speech
The rhetorical devices used to give decoration and imaginative expression to literature, such as simile, metaphor, puns, alliteration, and irony.

Literary devices
The devices commonly used in literature to give added depth to the work, such as imagery or symbolism.

Rhythm
The cadence or flow of words and phrases – including stress and repetition.

Narrator
Ask yourself, who is telling the story.

Narrative mode
First or third person narrator. (‘I am going to tell you …’ or ‘He left the room in a hurry’)

Point of view
The perspective from which the events of the story are related.

Characterisation
How a character is created or depicted.

Dramatisation
How any dramatic elements of a piece of work are created and arranged.

Plot
How the elements of the story are arranged.

Tone
The author’s attitude to the subject as revealed in the manner of the writing

Structure
The shape of the piece of work, or the connection between its parts.

Theme
The underlying topic or issue, as distinct from the overt story.

How to read closely

Close reading can be seen as a form of special attention which we bring to a piece of writing. It involves thinking more deeply than usual about the implications of the words on the page. Most normal people do this automatically, without being specially conscious of the fact. The academic study of literature brings the process more to the surface and makes it explicit. There are four levels or types of reading which become progressively more complex.

Language – You pay especially close attention to the surface elements of the text – that is, to aspects of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. You might also note such things as figures of speech or any other features which contribute to the writer’s individual style.

Meaning – You take account at a deeper level of what the words mean – that is, what information they contain, plus any further meanings they might suggest.

Structural – You note the possible relationships between words within the text – and this might include items from either the language or the meanings.

Cultural – You note the relationship of any elements of the text to things outside it. These might be other pieces of writing by the same author,
or other writings of the same type by different writers. They might be items of social or cultural history, or even other academic disciplines which might seem relevant, such as philosophy or psychology.

Close reading is not a skill which can be developed to a sophisticated extent overnight. It requires a lot of practice in the various linguistic and literary disciplines involved – and it requires that you do a lot of reading.

The good news is that most people already possess the basic skills required. They have acquired them automatically through being able to read – even though they haven’t been conscious of doing so. This is rather like many other things which we learn unconsciously. After all, you don’t need to know the names of your leg muscles in order to walk down the street.

The Voyage a close readingStudying Fiction is an introduction to the basic concepts and the language you will need for studying prose fiction. It explains the elements of literary analysis one at a time, then shows you how to apply them. The guidance starts off with simple issues of language, then progresses to more complex literary criticism.The volume contains stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Katherine Mansfield, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and Charles Dickens. All of them are excellent tales in their own right. The guidance on this site was written by the same author.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

Now here’s an example of close reading in action. The short passage which follows comes from Katherine Mansfield’s short story The Voyage. This concerns the journey made by a young girl at night on a ferry with her grandma. If you wish to read the complete story in conjunction with these tutorial notes, it is available free at Project Gutenberg.

redbtn The Voyage

If you would like to treat this as an interactive exercise, read the passage through a number of times. Make notes, and write down all you can say about what goes to make up its literary ‘quality’. That is, you should scrutinise the passage as closely as possible, name its parts, and say what devices the author is using. Don’t be afraid to list even the most obvious points.

Don’t worry if you are not sure what name to give to any feature you notice. You will see the technical vocabulary being used in the discussion notes which follow, and this should help you pick up this skill as we go along.

Fenella’s father pushed on with quick, nervous strides. Beside him her grandma bustled along in her crackling black ulster; they went so fast she had now and again to give an undignified little skip to keep up with them. As well as her luggage strapped into a neat sausage, Fenella carried clasped to her grandma’s umbrella, and the handle, which was a swan’s head, kept giving her shoulder a sharp little peck as if it too wanted her to hurry. … Men, their caps pulled down, their collars turned up, swung by; a few women all muffled scurried along; and one tiny boy, only his little black arms and legs showing out of a white wooly shawl, was jerked along angrily between his father and mother; he looked like a baby fly that had fallen into the cream.

Here are some comments, using the checklist as a guide. The objective is not to be totally exhaustive, mulling over every single word and punctuation mark in the paragraph. Rather, it’s to develop the skill of being sensitive to language, and to notice special effects when they are offered.

It’s also true that a really in depth close reading is much easier if you know the author’s work well – so that you can see regular patterns of language use and recurrent effects and themes.

Vocabulary
The language of the passage is fairly plain and simple. Apart from the term ulster (an overcoat) which might not be familiar to readers today, most of the terms used would be known even to a reasonably well-educated child. And this is entirely appropriate since Mansfield is relating the story to us largely from a child’s point of view. Her use of terms such as ‘>little skip’, ‘ neat sausage’, ‘tiny boy’, and baby fly reinforce this effect.

Syntax
The word order and grammar is that of normal written English. The only feature I can observe here under this heading is that in some clauses she separates the subject from its verb by interposing dependent clauses – ‘Men, their caps pulled down, their collars turned up, swung by’. But this is just giving variety to her construction of sentences.

Rhythm
She creates a briskness and liveliness in her prose to match the business of what is going on in the scene. This is done by the variation of sentence length. The first is quite short, the second is longer, but it is split into two which have a similar construction to the first.

It’s also done by her use of a form of repetition called parallelism. Notice how ‘quick, nervous strides’ is echoed by ‘crackling black ulster’: the construction is ‘adjective + adjective + noun’.

Figures of Speech
Under figures of speech you might have noticed the simile – ‘like a baby fly that had fallen into the cream’. That is, the small baby boy is directly compared to a fly. Then there is an example of onomatopoeia in the phrase ‘crackling black Ulster‘ – because the words themselves sound like the thing they are describing.

There is also an example of anthropomorphism in the swan’s-head-handled umbrella giving Fenella a ‘sharp little peck’ on the shoulder. That is, the inanimate object is spoken of as if it were alive – and once again this is entirely appropriate given that the story is being told from the child’s point of view.

Mansfield also uses alliteration more than once. In ‘crackling black Ulster’ there is repetition of the ‘a’, ‘ck’, and ‘l’ sounds; and in ‘white wooly shawl’ there is repetition of the ‘w’ and the ‘l’ sounds.

Tone
This can be quite a difficult feature to pin down accurately, but I think in this passage you could say that there was a light, brisk and somewhat playful attitude to what is going on. That’s the safest way of defining tone – describing the author’s attitude to the subject as briefly as possible. The tone here is entirely appropriate – because we are being invited to see the world from a child’s point of view.

Narrative mode
This is the traditional manner of story-telling using the third person and omniscient narrator. That is, Fenella is referred to as ‘she’ and Katherine Mansfield, as the person telling the story, does not intrude as an ‘I’ speaking directly to the reader. Moreover, as narrator, she knows what is going on in her characters’ heads and their feelings. She is ‘all-knowing’, which is what ‘omniscient’ means.

Narrator
This must be Katherine Mansfield, because she does not invent another person who stands between herself and the reader, telling the story. This might seem rather obvious, but some authors invent a fictional narrator who tells the story, and might even be a character in it.

Characterisation
It’s not easy to say a lot, based on such a short extract. But you might observe that ‘grandma bustled along’, which gives the impression of a lively older woman. (This is confirmed by events later in the story). And the observations about the umbrella and the little boy, as well as the ‘little skip’ Fenella is forced to make, help to establish her as a young girl.

Notice that Mansfield as narrator does not tell us that Fenella is a young girl: we work this out from the few details we have been given. Notice too that this information about the characters is being given piecemeal as the story progresses. We are being left to put together these pieces ourselves.

Point of view
Many of these small details – the peck from the swan’s head umbrella, the little boy looking like a fly – help to establish that the story is being told from Fenella’s point of view. That is, the events of the story are being shown as she would experience and see them. This is quite an important feature of prose fiction.

Drama
It’s not easy to say much about this based on such a short extract – or if we were reading the story for the first time. But most of the tension in the story is created by the fact that we are not quite sure what is going on. But returning with more knowledge of the story, we might note that the father is ‘nervous’ because he is due to be separated from his mother and his daughter. The grandmother ‘bustles’ along because she has the task of conveying Fenella to her new life.

Meanwhile Fenella is busy observing the world around her. Notice a small (and dramatic) detail of the world she sees. The little boy is being ‘jerked along angrily between his father and mother’ [my emphasis]: that is, the way some adults treat their children is not so pleasant.

 

We’ll stop at this point. It’s not really possible to say anything about plot, structure, or theme unless you’ve read the whole story. But almost everything listed was accessible even if you were reading the passage for the first time.

Literary studies are not conducted in such detail all the time, but it is very important that you try to develop the skill of reading as closely as possible. It really is the foundation on which everything else is based.

The next point to make about such close reading is that it becomes easier if you get used to the idea of reading and re-reading a piece of work. The Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov (famous for Lolita) once observed that “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only re-read it”.

What he meant by this apparently contradictory remark is that the first time we read a book we are busy absorbing information, and we cannot appreciate all the subtle connections there may be between its parts – because we don’t yet have the complete picture before us. Only when we read it for a second time (or even better, a third or fourth) are we in a position to assemble and compare the nuances of meaning and the significance of its details in relation to each other.

That’s why the activity is called ‘close reading’. You should try to get used to the notion of reading and re-reading very carefully, scrupulously, and in great detail.

Finally, let’s try to dispel a common misconception. Many people ask, when they first come into contact with close reading: “Doesn’t analysing a piece of work in such detail spoil your enjoyment of it?” The answer to this question is “No – on the contrary – it should enhance it.” The simple fact is that we get more out of a piece of writing if we can appreciate all the subtleties and the intricacies which exist within it. Nabokov also suggested that “In reading, one should notice and fondle the details”.

© Roy Johnson 2004

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

The Voyage Out

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Voyage Out was Virginia Woolf’s first full length novel. It was written and re-written many times between (probably) 1907 and its eventual publication by Duckworth in 1915 (the publishing house run by her step-brother Gerald Duckworth). It was originally called Melymbrosia, and an earlier version was completed in 1912. This alternative version was published with that title in 1962. But when her own publishing house the Hogarth Press produced a Uniform Edition of Woolf’s works in 1929, it was the later 1915 version that was used as the definitive text.

The Voyage out

first edition 1915

The Voyage Out – critical comment

The principal theme

Virginia Woolf was to devote a great deal of her career as a novelist and essayist to issues of women’s education and their position in society – from her earliest story Phyllis and Rosamond (1906) to her epoch-making attack on patriarchy Three Guineas (1938). Her first novel is no exception – as an exploration of a young woman who has received no formal education and who has been brought up at home in a manner which does not prepare her for any sort of independent adult life.

there was no subject in the world which she knew accurately. Her mind was in the state of an intelligent man’s in the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth; she would believe practically anything she was told. invent reasons for anything she said. The shape of the earth, the history of the world, how trains worked, or money was invested, what laws were in force, which people wanted what, and why they wanted it, the most elementary idea of a system in modern life—none of this had been imparted to her by any of her professors or mistresses

Rachel is intensely conscious of her lack of formal education, her powerlessness in society, and her exclusion from the male-dominated world of governance and decision-making. Her one consolation is that she has been left undisturbed to develop her artistic flair for piano-playing.

The experimental novel

Virginia Woolf is rightly celebrated as one of the most talented innovators of the modernist period for the work she produced between Jacob’s Room in 1922 and The Waves in 1932. For that reason her earlier first novel The Voyage Out (1915) is often classified as ‘traditional’ or ‘conventional’. That is partly because its main subject is a young woman’s ‘coming of age’, partly because the narrative follows a linear chronology, and partly because the book contains a substantial proportion of well-observed middle-class social life which could have come from any number of nineteenth century novels – from Jane Austen to George Meredith.

But the novel is far from conventional – for a number of reasons. First, it does not have a ‘plot’ as such. A group of people go on a cruise from London to Latin America. Whilst there, they organise an expedition into the interior, and when they get back one of them dies of fever. There is no mystery to be solved; there are no surprising coincidences or revelations; the one serious romance between the characters is abruptly terminated by Rachel’s death; and the narrative is even denied any structural closure. There is no return journey to the starting point:.

Instead we are presented with what Rachel Vinrace calls for during the events of the novel – “Why don’t people write about the things they do feel?” . Despite all the symbolism of a first journey away from home, a first love affair, and the dawning of mature consciousness which Rachel experiences, the bulk of the novel is taken up with what people say and think about each other. This was a bold alternative to the plot-driven novels of the late Victorian era.

[In fact Woolf’s next novel, Night and Day (1919) is far more conventional. Another young middle-class woman, Katharine Hilbery, is facing the limited social choices offered to her in life – but the novel is grounded in a family saga and a rather complex love quadrangle.]

Point of view

The other major innovation Woolf developed in this novel is what might be called the floating or roaming point of view. Novelists very often choose to relay their narratives from the point of view of a single character or a narrator who might be a character or a surrogate for the author. Woolf uses a combination of a reasonably objective third person narrative mode with passages in which the point of view switches from one character to another. She does this in order to explore three separate issues which she developed even further in her later novels.

The first of these issues is what might be called the relativity of human perception – how one person perceives another, and how this perception might change from one moment to the next. The second is to explore the distance which separates human beings, even when they feel that they closely understand each other. The third is to explore the differences between what a person does and what is said – or to point directly at internal contradictions in the human psyche. Very often people say things they do not mean, or they make statements about themselves which are contradicted by their behaviour.

Setting

The novel begins in London, then moves via a very convincing storm at sea to Portugal, where the Dalloways join the ship. This part of the narrative is quite credible, and is possibly based on a journey at sea Virginia Woolf made to Portugal with her younger brother Adrian in 1905. But after the Dalloways are dropped off (almost parenthetically) in North Africa the location switches with virtually no transition to the fictitious Santa Marina.

The implication is that this is located somewhere near the mouth of a ‘great river’ – presumably the Amazon. But despite adding historical background details of European colonialism in the region, and a sprinkling of exotic vegetation which Woolf adds to the narrative, the topography of the story never becomes really convincing.

It is significant that one feature of the indigenous vegetation that she mentions repeatedly is cypress trees – ‘at intervals cypresses striped the hill with black bars’ – which are characteristic of the Mediterranean but certainly not of tropical Latin-American vegetation. This might be ignored were it not for the fact that she was to do something very similar in later novels.

The background events of Jacob’s Room (1922) concerning Betty Flanders are supposed to be set in Scarborough, on the East coast of Yorkshire, but these scenes are never as convincing as the others set in Cambridge and London. And nobody in their right mind can read To the Lighthouse (1927) without visualising its setting as St Ives and the Godrevy Lighthouse where Woolf spent many summer holidays in her childhood. Yet the novel is supposed to be set in the Hebrides. This remains completely unconvincing throughout the whole of the novel.

Weaknesses

There are a number of minor characters who are written into the story line of The Voyage Out, but who then disappear from the text as if they have been forgotten. Mrs Chairley the Cockney housekeeper; Mr Grice the self-educated steward; the briefly identified Hughling Elliot; and even a major figure such as Willoughby Vinrace, captain of the Euphrosyne, owner of the shipping line, and Rachel’s own father who disappears half way through the narrative, never to reappear.

It is not clear from the structure or the logic of the novel why Rachel has to die. There are no practical or thematic links to what has gone on before in the events of the narrative; nobody else is affected by the ‘fever’; and the conclusion of the novel (‘woman dies suddenly’) is not related to any of the previous events.

It is true that Woolf was surrounded by many unexpected deaths amongst her own friends and relatives (her mother, her brother, her friend Lytton Strachey) but this biographical connection does not provide a justification for the lack of a satisfactory resolution to the narrative.

The Voyage Out – study resources

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Voyage Out The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – Collins Classics – Amazon UK

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – Collins Classics – Amazon US

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – Kindle edition

The Voyage Out Virginia Woolf – biographical notes

The Voyage Out The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Voyage Out The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Voyage Out Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Voyage Out Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

The Voyage Out Virginia Woolf at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

The Voyage Out

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition

The Voyage Out – plot summary

Chapter I. Ridley Ambrose and his wife Helen are leaving London to join their ship, the Euphrosyne which is due to take them on a cruise to South America. They join their niece, Rachel Vinrace, whose father owns the ship. A fellow traveller, Mr Pepper reminisces critically with Ambrose about their contemporaries at Cambridge. They are then joined by the captain Willoughby Vinrace.

Chapter II. The story switches between Helen’s reflections on Rachel, Mr Pepper’s bachelor interests and habits, and Mrs Chairley’s rage against the ship’s linens. It then covers Rachel’s lack of formal education, her talent for music, and her upbringing by aunts. She searches for coherence and meaning whilst she is critical of the adults who surround her.

Chapter III. In Portugal, Richard and Clarissa Dalloway are taken on board as extra passengers. At dinner there is conversation on the arts and politics, after which Clarissa writes a satirical letter criticising the other guests. Her husband joins her, and they both feel superior but sympathetic towards their fellow travellers.

Chapter IV. Clarissa meets Mr Grice, the self-educated steward, and then shares confidences with Rachel after breakfast. They read Jane Austen on deck, and Rachel discusses political philosophy with Richard Dalloway, who reveals his traditional and deep-seated male chauvinism.

Chapter V. The ship encounters a stormy passage at sea, which lays everybody low for two days. Helen comforts Mrs Dalloway with champagne. Meanwhile Richard Dalloway follows Rachel into her cabin and kisses her impulsively. That night Rachel has disturbing dreams.

Chapter VI. The Dalloways leave the ship. Rachel confides her mixed feelings about the incident to Helen, who advises her about Men and The Facts of Life. The two women agree to be friends, and Helen invites Rachel to stay at their villa whilst the captain sails up the Amazon, to which her father agrees for slightly selfish reasons.

Chapter VII. The ship reaches Santa Marina. Its colonial history is described. The Ambrose villa San Gervasio is dilapidated. After a week Mr Pepper decamps to a local hotel because he thinks the vegetables are not properly cooked at dinner.

Chapter VIII. Three months pass. Helen reflects on the inadequate education of young women. Helen and Rachel post letters then walk through the town to the hotel where they encounter guests playing cards. They are observed by Hirst and Hewet.

Chapter IX. In the hotel, people are preparing for the night. Hirst and Hewet discuss the possibility of organising a party excursion. Next day there is desultory chat over tea until Ridley Ambrose joins with Hirst and Hewet.

Chapter X. Rachel is reading modern literature and reflecting philosophically about the nature of life. She and Helen receive an invitation to Hewet’s expedition. The outing presents the radical young figure of Evelyn Murgatroyd, and Helen meets Terence Hewet,

Chapter XI. The party splits up at the top of the climb. Arthur declares his love to Susan. Their embraces are observed by Hewet and Rachel: she recoils ambivalently from the spectacle. They are joined by Hirst and Helen, whereupon they all agree to tell each other about themselves. The party then returns to town amidst a display of fireworks.

Chapter XII. A dance is held to celebrate Susan’s engagement to Arthur. Rachel is patronised then insulted by Hirst, whereupon Hewet makes excuses for him. Hirst then goes on to unburden himself to a sympathetic Helen. At dawn Hirst and Hewet walk back to the villa with Helen and Rachel.

Chapter XIII. Next day Rachel takes books by Balzac and Gibbon into the countryside to read, her mind full of impressions from the dance. She feels strangely moved by reading Gibbon, as if on the verge of some exciting discovery, and she thinks a lot about Hirst and Hewet.

Chapter XIV. Guests at the hotel read letters from friends and relatives back home. Susan is obsessed with the subject of marriage. Hewet can’t stop thinking about Rachel, and he goes up to the villa where he overhears her talking to Helen about her dead mother. He goes back to the hotel in a state of excitement, and is then quizzed by Evelyn about her flirtatious entanglements. Last thing at night he sees a woman coming out of someone’s bedroom.

Chapter XV. Some days later Helen and Ridley are visited by Mrs Flushing who is on a ‘collecting’ trip with her nouveau riche husband. They are joined by Hirst, Hewet, and Rachel who has tired of reading Gibbon. When Rachel and Hewet go for a walk, it leaves Hirst free to engage Helen in an intimate conversation, during which he reveals his fears and weaknesses, as well as expressing his admiration for her.

Chapter XVI. On their excursion Rachel and Hewet discuss the life of the typical unmarried middle-class girl (and its limitations) plus the issues raised by women’s suffrage. As he tells her about his literary ambitions she feels romantically attracted to him. He is excited yet dissatisfied by their intimacy and the tension between them.

Chapter XVII. Rachel is powerfully disturbed by her feelings for Hewet, and a distance grows between her and Helen. One Sunday there is a service in the hotel chapel. Rachel is distressed by the absence of any genuine religious belief, and she objects to the spirit in which the service is held. When Mrs Flushing invites her to lunch, she erupts into a criticism of the sermon. Mrs Flushing proposes a river trip to visit a traditional native village. Hirst and Hewet argue over religion, literature, and Rachel.

Chapter XVIII. Hewet realises that he is in love with Rachel, but he is in doubt about the idea of marriage. He wonders what her feelings are and cannot make up his mind about what to do.

Chapter XIX. Evelyn complains to Rachel about two men with whom she is romantically involved. Then she becomes enthusiastic about social reform – including the rescue of prostitutes. Rachel feels oppressed by her appeal to intimacy. She then meets Mrs Allan who invites her to her room and asks her to help her get dressed for tea. Rachel feels oppressed by this appeal too, and escapes into the garden, but she is irritated by the chatter and the discussion of plans for the excursion, and she then quarrells with Helen.

Chapter XX. The Flushings, along with Hewet and Hirst plus Rachel and Helen go on the expedition. They sail upstream in a small ship. Hewet is very conscious of Rachel’s presence. They go on a walk together in to the forest – to declare their love for each other. When they return to the ship they feel detached from their companions.

Chapter XXI. The expedition continues. Hewet and Rachel try to discuss the consequences of their love – which seem to lead inevitably towards marriage, about which neither of them is sure. The expedition reaches the native village. Hewet and Rachel are completely absorbed in each other. At night, back on the ship, they ask Helen for advice. She reassures them that they will be happy.

Chapter XXII. Hewet and Rachel become engaged. Whilst she plays the piano, he writes notes for his novel – on women, which reveal his traditional chauvinism. They plan their future and get to know about each other’s past lives. They become very nostalgic for England – both the countryside and London.

Chapter XXIII. Rachel is annoyed by people’s inquisitiveness now that she is engaged. A message from home brings news of the suicide of a housemaid. A ‘prostitute’ is expelled from the hotel. Hirst admits to himself that he is unhappy, but he brings himself to congratulate Hewet and Rachel.

Chapter XXIV. Sitting in the hotel, Rachel comes to an appreciation of her independent identity, even though she is joining herself to Hewet for the rest of her life. Miss Allan finishes her book on the English poets. Evelyn envies Susan and Rachel for being engaged, but she herself dreams of becoming a revolutionary.

Chapter XXV. Rachel develops a headache and is confined to her room. The headache gets worse and she becomes delirious. ‘Dr’ Rodriguez reassures them it is nothing serious, but Rachel gets steadily worse. Hirst is despatched in search of another doctor and returns with Dr Lesage. He confirms that Rachel is seriously ill – probably with fever. Hewet, Helen, and Hirst wait anxiously for days. Rachel starts to hallucinate, then eventually she dies.

Chapter XXVI. News of Rachel’s death quickly reaches the hotel. It is thought she was unwise to go on the expedition where she has caught the fever. Mr Perrot makes a final appeal to Evelyn, but she turns him down,, as she is leaving for Moscow.

Chapter XXVII. Life returns to normal at the hotel. There is a tropical thunderstorm, and people prepare to return home.

The Voyage Out

OUP World Classics edition

The Voyage Out – characters
Mr Ridley Ambrose a classics scholar, translating Pindar
Helen Ambrose his wife (40)
Rachel Vinrace their niece (24)
Willoughby Vinrace a shipping line owner – Rachel’s father
Mr William Pepper a dogmatic Cambridge friend of Ambrose
Mrs Emma Chairley the Vinrace housekeeper (50)
Richard Dalloway a former member of parliament (42)
Clarissa Dalloway the daughter of a peer – his wife
Mr Grice the self-educated steward
St John Hirst a clever but boorish Cambridge don (24)
Terence Hewet former student at Winchester and Cambridge
Evelyn Murgatroyd a strong-willed feminist
Arthur Venning a romantic young man
Susan Warrington a romantic young woman
Wilfred Flushing a nouveau riche art collector
Alice Flushing his wife, an artist
Miss Allan an elderly teacher of English
Mrs Thornbury a wise old woman (72)
Dr Rodriguez the (dubious) town doctor
Dr Lesage the replacement doctor
Virginia Woolf’s writing

Virginia Woolf's handwriting

“I feel certain that I am going mad again.”

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Woolf - OrlandoOrlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon US

Kew GardensKew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon US

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

Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of the novels The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, and the collection of stories Monday or Tuesday in a variety of digital formats.

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

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

Red button Virginia Woolf – a timeline in phtographs
A collection of well and lesser-known photographs documenting Woolf’s life from early childhood, through youth, marriage, and fame – plus some first edition book jackets – to a soundtrack by Philip Glass. They capture her elegant appearance, the big hats, and her obsessive smoking. No captions or dates, but well worth watching.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2015

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

The War of the Worlds

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The War of the Worlds (1897) was the fourth of the novels which catapulted H.G. Wells to fame as a writer of science fiction during the last decade of the nineteenth century. The idea for the story was given to him by his brother Frank, and it was one of the first stories to feature conflict between mankind on earth and extraterrestrial beings. Like his other science fiction novels The Time Machine (1888), The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), and The Invisible Man (1897) it explores a single, original idea in a simple narrative that is backed up with a pseudo-scientific rationale. The book has remained in print ever since its first publication over one hundred years ago.

The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds – a note on the text

The novel first appeared as an illustrated monthly serial in Pearson’s Magazine and simultaneously in New York Cosmopolitan magazine between April and December 1897. Early in the following year two pirated versions began to appear in New York and Boston newspapers with the locations of the action changed so that the Martian invasion was directed at the American city concerned. The story first appeared in single volume novel format published by William Heinemann in London and Harpers in New York in 1898. For a full account of its publishing history and revisions to subsequent editions, see the note by Patrick Parrinder in the Penguin Classics edition (2005)

The War of the Worlds – critical commentary

H.G. Wells was certainly not short of memorable ideas at the start of his writing career – The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The First Men in the Moon (1901) have retained their popularity ever since they first appeared. These works have passed into general cultural consciousness, aided by their adaptations for other forms of media such as film, television, and comic books.

The War of the Worlds is no exception to this cross-media adaptation. Most famously, it was produced as a documentary-style radio play by Orson Welles in 1938, and such was the authenticity of the production (and the credulity of the American listening public) that it caused wholesale panic. People actually believed Martians had invaded the eastern seaboard of the USA, to which area the locations had been changed.

After these early successes with novels he himself called ‘scientific romances’, Wells became quite famous, and his opinions on science, technology, and politics were taken quite seriously. Following the influence of modernist writers such as James Joyce, D.H. Larence, and Virginia Woolf, his reputation declined and since the end of the twentieth century it has never risen again above that of a popular minor writer.

The prophetic element

Despite all the Boys Own Adventure elements of the novel and the creepy monsters from outer space that have become the stock-in-trade of science fiction, there is one element of the novel in which Wells excels himself. That is the amazingly prophetic way in which he writes about mechanised warfare and and creates scenes which were to become commonplace less than two decades after the publication of the novel.

The descriptions of devastation following the Martians’ initial attacks are amazingly prescient. of the images of carnage and obliteration which resulted from trench warfare in Flanders from 1914 to 1918.

In one night the valley had become a valley of ashes. The fires had dwindled now. Where flames had been there were now streamers of smoke; but the countless ruins of shattered and gutted houses and blasted and blackened trees that the night had hidden stood out now gaunt and terrible in the pitiless light of dawn. .. Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and universal.

Moreover the Martians fight with the very weapon that seems to sumarize the barbarity and unthinking inhumanity of the first world war – poison gas. Their use of the Heat-Ray also features very prophetically as what we now call laser beams. And just to give Wells a further accolade for predicting the future, the evacuation of refugees on the eastern coast could be a description of the spirit and the physical conditions of the Dunkirk evacuations of 1940:

For after the sailors could no longer come up the Thames, they came up onto the Essex coast, to Harwich and Walton and Clacton, and afterwards to Foulness and and Shoebury, to bring off the people. They lay in a great sickle-shaped curve that vanished into mist somewhere towards the Naze. Close inshore was a multitude of fishing smacks – English, Scotch, French, Dutch and Swedish; steam launches from the Thames, yachts, electric boats, , and beyond were ships of large burden, a multitude of filthy colliers, trim merchantmen, cattle-ships passenger boats, petroleum tanks, ocean tramps an old white transport even, neat white and grey liners from Southampton … A dense swarm of boats chaffering with the people on the beach, a swarm which extended up the Blackwater almost to Maldon.

The novel also touches on issues of evolutionary biology raised in Wells’ notion that the Martians are overcome not by mechanical force but by their vulnerability to disease from which the human beings have become immune as part of their history in the evolutionary process. This is a positive and realistic piece of social philosophy which Wells summarises in an almost Biblically succinct expression.

By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.

The War of the Worlds – study resources

The War of the Worlds The War of the Worlds – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The War of the Worlds The War of the Worlds – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The War of the Worlds H.G. Wells Classic Collection – five novels – Amazon UK

The War of the Worlds H.G. Wells Biography – Amazon UK

The War of the Worlds The War of the Worlds – DVD movie adaptation- Amazon UK

The War of the Worlds – chapter summaries

Book I – The Coming of the Martians

1.   An un-named narrator speculates that the cosmological development of the planet Mars makes it probable that its inhabitants would have justifiable grounds for invading a nearby planet. With his colleague the astronomer Ogilvy he observes astronomical activity and watches gaseous projections heading towards earth.

2.   Some time later what seems to be a large meteorite lands near Woking. Ogilvy inspects it and finds a huge metal cylinder with sounds of activity inside. He alerts journalist Henderson, but on returning to the pit the object has made they find nothing new.

3.   The narrator then visits the site. He believes that there are men on Mars but thinks the cylinder (the Thing) will contain objects. Following newspaper reports of ‘A Message from Mars’ Ogilvy and the Astronomer Royal inspect the site.

4.   An inquisitive crowd gathers. The cylinder opens and the first Martian emerges – a leathery bear-like creature with tentacles. The narrator recoils in horror and disgust.

5.   The narrator feels a fascinated horror for the pit in which the cylinder lies. A deputation arrives waving a white flag. A ‘heat-ray’ emerges from the cylinder and exterminates everything before it.

6.   The heat-ray attack causes panic amongst the spectators. Some people are trampled to death in the confusion.

7.   The narrator escapes and goes home, convincing himself that everything is normal again. He thinks that increased gravity and the presence of more oxygen on Earth will slow down the Martians.

8.   Life beyond a small radius round these events goes on as normal, but back at the cylinder the Martians are busy preparing for the next phase of their attack, and they kill anyone who comes near. A second cylinder arrives in the region.

9.   Next day the cylinder has been surrounded by troops from a nearby barracks.. Heavy shelling breaks out in the evening.. The narrator evacuates his home and leaves with his wife and servant to stay with relatives.

10.   The narrator returns home alone at night. A third cylinder lands during a storm, and he sees a giant tripod emerge from it. He arrives back home during a thunderstorm.

11.   From his study window he observes the whole countryside on fire. A soldier arrives and relates details of the fight against the mechanised tripods and heat rays, which have defeated the soldiers completely.

12.   The-narrator and the artilleryman decide to move towards London. They encounter people being evacuated by the military. The army attacks, and one mechanised tripod is hit, collapsing into the river. Other Martian machines arrive to rescue it.

13.   The. Martians retrench, and the narrator drifts in a boat downstream. He meets a clergyman whose whose religious convictions have been shattered by the sudden attacks and devastation.

14.   In central London there are incomplete and misleadingly tepid reports of events in the newspapers. Over-optimistic proclamations are issued. South-Western train services are disrupted. Heavy deployments of troops are organised. By the following morning there is mass panic.

15.   The Martians attack again. One is damaged, but repairs itself. The narrator sees the Martian firing poisoned gas out of black tubes. A further cylinder lands.

16.   In central London there is a mass exodus heading north and east. The narrator’s brother steals a bicycle and heads towards Chelmsford. He rescues two women in a pony and trap, and they decide to head for Harwich . People all round them are desperate and are trampled under foot.

17.   The following day the Martians reach central London. Further cylinders arrive from space. The narrator’s brother reaches the coast and secures passage on a boat going to Ostend. There is a sea battle in which three Martian tripods are beaten off by an ironclad torpedo ram

Book Two – The Earth Under the Martians

1.   The narrator is hiding from the black gas in a house with the clergyman They are making their way towardds London amidst destruction, dead horses, and human corpses. They encounter a Martian which is ‘collecting’ live human beings. They hide in a house in Mortlake which is struck and destroyed by the arrival of another cylinder

2.   From his place of hiding the narrator observes the Martians. They compose largely a huge head, with tentacles acting as hands. They do not eat, but ingest blood directly from other creatures. They do not sleep, and reproduce sexlessly. They do not wear clothes, and have no knowledge of the wheel.

3.   The clergyman is selfish, greedy, and morally spineless. The Martian machines begin making aluminium tubes.. They then bring human beings into the pit and kill them for their blood.

4.   The curate loses control and is in conflict with the narrator, who knocks him unconscious. When a Martian invades the house he takes away the curate. The narrator lives in fear, hiding in the house .

5.   He stays in the house for several days without food, then realises that the Martians are no longer outside. The pit is littered with the bodies of their victims. All around are scenes of devastation.

6.   The whole of south-west London is covered by the Red Weed, but this gradually succumbs to a disease. and leaves behind nothing but rotting debris. The narrator moves on amongst total desolation.

7.   On Putney Heath he meets the artillery man again, who reports that the Martians have been making flying machines. The soldier takes the view that humanity is currently beaten, and proposes to establish a desperate band of resisters to keep the human race and its knowledge alive – living in underground sewers and railway tunnels. They retire to his hide-out, where he is digging a secret escape route. But the grandiose plans for disciplined resistance suddenly evaporate, and he organises a grand dinner with Champagne and cigars. The narrator is disillusioned, and decides to push on into London.

8.   The narrator finds the streets of London empty except for the occasional dead body. But he comes across Martian tripods and handling machines that are out of action. He realises that the Martians are dead and have been killed by the diseases and bacteria they have ingested from the blood of their victims to which humans have become immune during their evolution.

9.   Realising that London has been saved, the narrator has a mental breakdown for a few days, then returns to his own house in Woking – where he is reunited with his wife.

The Epilogue.   The narrator speculates on the lessons that have been learned from the invasion. It is possible that another attack could take place, and lessons in terrestrial humility should be learned. It is also possible that at some future date people from the Earth will need to travel to other planets in order to survive.

The War of the Worlds – further reading

Bernard Bergonzi, The Early H.G. Wells, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961.

Michael Draper, H.G. Wells, London: Macmillan, 1987.

John Hammond, An H.G. Wells Companion, London: Macmillan, 1979.

Roslynn D. Haynes, H.G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future, London: Macmillan, 1980.

John Huntington, The Logic of Fantasy: H.G. Wells and Science Fiction, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Brian Murray, H. G. Wells, New York: Continuum, 1990.

Patrick Parrinder, H.G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1972.

Patrick Parrinder, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995.

More science fiction by H.G. Wells

The War of the Worlds The Time Machine (1895) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The War of the Worlds The Invisible Man (1897) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The War of the Worlds The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The War of the Worlds The Wheels of Chance (1896) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The War of the Worlds The First Men in the Moon (1901) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The War of the Worlds The Shape of Things to Come (1933) – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

© Roy Johnson 2016

More on H.G. Wells
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Warden

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Warden was first published in 1855 by Longman. It was Trollope’s fourth novel, but the first in the series which became known as The Barsetshire Chronicles, and it established his reputation as a popular novelist. The others in the sequence are Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, and The Last Chronicle of Barset.

The opening of the novel makes it clear that Barchester was supposed to be a cathedral town in the south west of England, and it is probably constructed imaginatively from elements of Salisbury and Wells cathedrals, which Trollope knew well from his travels around the south west in his professional capacity as inspector of the postal system. (He is credited with having invented the post box.)

The Warden

Anthony Trollope

The Warden – critical commentary

The strengths

Undoubtedly the main strength of this novel is the characterisation of the Reverend Harding – the gentle, considerate widower who looks after his charges in the hospital with loving care; who has a passion for music and has published a book on the subject at his own expense; and who plays the cello imaginatively when in an emotionally charged state. He also has a finely developed conscience, which does not let him continue in a sinecure that provides him with a generous living for little effort and few responsibilities.

Both friends and enemies alike urge him to stay where he is, but he cannot live with the thought that the money which provides his generous income might rightly belong to the twelve paupers whose care is his raison d’etre as warden.

Contemporary and modern readers alike can be forgiven for thinking that some last-minute reprieve will solve his dilemma – and it is to Trollope’s credit that no such melodramatic solution comes about. Harding moves out of his comfortable home with his unmarried daughter; he sells furniture; he goes to live in rented accommodation; and he ends up in a much smaller parish on a reduced income.

The reader therefore is left with no uplifting conclusion to the novel – except that Reverend Harding has acted according to his conscience and paid the material price of doing so. This plot construction is admirably restrained, and the best feature of the novel.

The weaknesses

But there are a number of weaknesses. The most important is thematic; the lesser weaknesses are technical – to do with the art and craft of novel-writing. The main problem arises from the fact that the trigger for the entire drama is political and financial malpractice in the established church. This corruption ranges from simony (the selling of church preferments and benefices) to nepotism (favouritism to relatives in making appointments).

As a major landowner the church had (and still has) vast reservoirs of wealth which it used to pay its clergy, all of which the novel makes fairly clear. And some of the positions they held are largely sinecures. Indeed, part of the warden’s moral dilemma is not just that he is receiving a large annual salary to which he might not be legally entitled, but that he receives this salary for doing next to nothing.

But the study of this moral problem remains at a purely personal level. The warden’s distressed state of mind is traced minutely by Trollope, but no attempt is made to explore the larger issues of ecclesiastical politics, finances, and corruption – even though famous legal cases are mentioned in the narrative.

We do not even know if Reverend Harding’s salary is a legitimate outcome of Hiram’s will or not – because even the Queen’s Council does not come to any conclusion on the matter. The most important legal and financial issue underpinning the story is simply left unexamined.

It is as if Trollope can only see as far as ‘characters’ – the tender hearted warden and the arrogant archdeacon – and is not interested in probing the causes of the social problems that make up his story. Neither is the chain of responsibility for the administration of the will examined, and the roles of the bishop, archdeacon, warden, and steward are all left at the level of friendships and family connections.

Technical weaknesses

There are two problems to which many critics have found objection on the grounds of disrupting the tone and the manner of the novel. The first of these is the introduction of huge digressions when Trollope suddenly launches a chapter-long satirical attack on the Jupiter newspaper – which everybody above the age of fifteen would have known full well to be his fictionalised version of The Times.

The characters and their interaction with each other are suddenly put on hold whilst Trollope criticises the newspaper for its dominance, its undue influence in society, and its lack of accountability (a criticism which he does not think to apply to the church).

These are fairly reasonable views to hold against the press – but Trollope almost abandons his responsibility to construct a coherent novel in his eagerness to berate (at great length) the organ which is bringing questionable practices within the church to the public’s attention.

This is followed by two further digressions with similar purposes – the parodies of Carlyle and Dickens. His accounts of Dr Pessimist Anticant [Thomas Carlyle] and Mr Popular Sentiment [Charles Dickens] become like two obtrusive satirical essays inserted into the delicate fabric of the novel.

It is not Trollope’s opinion of Carlyle and Dickens one objects to, but the fact that no attempt has been made to integrate these episodes with the remainder of the novel. They are materials of a different kind to the lives of the Reverend Harding, his daughters, and his domestic life. As Henry James observes in his essay on Trollope (in Partial Portraits) ‘both these little jeux d’esprit are as infelicitous as they are misplaced’.

This technical flaw is both signalled and reinforced by Trollope’s weakness with names. It is simply not possible to construct a credible fictional world in the realist tradition, containing railways, cathedrals, and named London streets, then populate it with characters called Sir Abraham Haphazard, Dr Pessimist Anticant, Mr Popular Sentiment, and Reverend Quiverful. These belong possibly in an eighteenth century work, but they cannot sit persuasively alongside characters called Eleanor Harding and Mr Chadwick.

The Warden – study resources

The Warden – OUP paperback – Amazon UK

The Warden – OUP paperback – Amazon US

The Warden – All six of the Barsetshire novels – £0.50

The Warden – All the Barsetshire novels – Amazon UK

The Warden – Project Gutenberg eBooks [FREE]

The Warden – Audiobook – FREE at LibriVox

Anthony Trollope – A website with plots summaries, TV and Radio links, quotes, quizzes, seminar groups, competitions – official site of the Trollope Society.

The Warden – plot summary

Chapter 1.   The Reverend Septimus Harding is a modest clergyman in the cathedral town of Barchester in the south west of England. He is in charge of an almshouse for twelve old workmen, and he supplements their meagre weekly allowance from his own stipend. Rumours begin to circulate that his own generous income should be divided amongst his charges, according to the terms of Hiram the founder’s will.

Chapter 2.   John Bold has inherited property, and although technically a surgeon, he practises medicine amongst the poor without charging for his services. He is a radical reformer and is in love with Harding’s daughter Eleanor. Harding’s son-in-law Archdeacon Grantly disapproves of Bold, who starts legal enquiries into the financial basis of the almshouses (the hospital).

Chapter 3.   Bold asks Harding to discuss the terms of Hiram’s will. Harding pleads ignorance, but is upset by the fear that he might be in the wrong in accepting a salary which ought to be distributed amongst more needy recipients. Harding consults the bishop, who refers him to his son the strict archdeacon. Harding also reveals the discomfiture he feels in his position because Bold is linked romantically to his daughter Eleanor.

Chapter 4.   The twelve occupants of the hospital are divided over the issue of what they are led to believe is their rightful inheritance of one hundred pounds a year for each man. But eventually nine of them put their names to a petition, defying their ‘leader’ Bunce, who is against the action.

Chapter 5.   The archdeacon visits the hospital and lectures the men, criticising them for their petition. He seeks legal advice from a Queen’s Counsel, Sir Abraham Haphazard. The warden is deeply embarrassed by the public dispute and the threat to his good reputation.

Chapter 6.   Bold’s sister Mary tries to persuade him to give up the case for the sake of their friendship with the Harding family – but he is resistant. Mary attends a party at the warden’s home, following which Eleanor exchanges views with both her father and with Bold.

Chapter 7.   The scandal becomes more widely known and is taken up by the national daily newspaper the Jupiter [The Times] which elevates it to a conflict between Church and State, and between Protestant and Catholic politics.

Chapter 8.   The archdeacon lives very comfortably but his practical wife disagrees with his position regarding the scandal – largely because it impedes Eleanor’s chances of securing Bold as a husband. She also thinks it causes unnecessary worry to her father. Chadwick arrives with an opinion from Sir Abraham Haphazard – that there are weaknesses in the legal documents which the archdeacon assumes to be favourable to his case.

Chapter 9.   In private conference the archdeacon reveals Sir Haphazard’s opinion to the bishop and the warden, claiming that they have nothing to fear, but insisting that the opinion is kept secret. The warden is deeply troubled by the lack of clarity on the matter, even though the legal opinion clears him of any blame. He thinks of resigning from his position as a solution to the dilemma, but the archdeacon bullies him in the name of the larger good of the Church.

Chapter 10.   The warden is completely crestfallen and sees his reputation and his way of life in ruins. He eventually confides in his daughter Eleanor, who comforts him and encourages him to give everything up and live in an untroubled state of simplicity.

Chapter 11.   Eleanor decides to rescue her father’s feelings by appealing to John Bold to call off his inquiries. When she does so, Bold pours out his heart and his love for her. There is an implication that these avowals constitute an engagement. He agrees to leave the case alone, even though others might continue to pursue it.

Chapter 12.   Bold visits the archdeacon to inform him of his intention to abandon the case. Dr Grantly receives the news with lofty disdain and insults Bold, refusing to believe that he is acting in good faith.

Chapter 13.   When Eleanor goes to tell her father that Bold is calling off the action, it is too late. Another editorial in the Jupiter names the warden specifically in the scandal. Harding decides to go to London to confront Haphazard. He also has plans to retire to another parish.

Chapter 14.   Bold arrives in London to see Tom Towers, journalist for the Jupiter. A whole chapter is devoted to a satirical critique of the newspaper and the unaccountable power it holds in forming and manipulating public opinion.

Chapter 15.   When Bold confronts Towers he finds that the case has been taken up by Dr Pessimist Anticant [Thomas Carlyle] and Mr Popular Sentiment [Charles Dickens]. Towers flatly refuses to use any influence on the paper on the spurious grounds of impartiality and public interest. Bold buys a copy of the serial novel The Almshouse [which is a benign parody of Dickens].

Chapter 16.   Rev Harding also goes to London – to see Haphazard and escape from the archdeacon. When he is kept waiting for an appointment he hides in Westminster Abbey, wrestling with his conscience. He then passes time in a supper-house and a coffee shop.

Chapter 17.   Sir Abraham Haphazard, the attorney general, tells Harding that Bold has withdrawn his legal action and advises him to forget the issue and continue in his present position. He is unable to explain the exact terms of Hiram’s will. But Harding insists that it is a matter of conscience, and feels that he has no option but to resign from his position as warden.

Chapter 18.   When the warden arrives back at his hotel, the archdeacon argues that it would be madness to resign his position – using largely financial arguments. But Rev Harding sticks to his position to resign, even though he will lose his income.

Chapter 19.   The next morning, despite entreaties from his daughter to delay the decision, the warden writes two letters of resignation to the bishop then returns home. The archdeacon visits his lawyers, who propose the solution of an exchange arrangement with another parish.

Chapter 20.   The bishop accepts Harding’s resignation but offers him money and accommodation in order to help him survive. But Harding refuses both offers – as he does the idea of an ecclesiastic exchange. He bids a sad farewell to the bedesmen in the hospital.

Conclusion.   Harding moves into lodgings and eventually becomes preceptor in a small Barchester parish. living in reduced circumstances. Eleanor marries Bold, who gradually becomes friendly with the archdeacon.

The Warden – principal characters
Reverend Septimus Harding the warden of the hospital for elderly paupers at Barchester
Susan Harding his elder daughter, married to the archdeacon
Eleanor Harding his younger daughter, in love with John Bold
Dr Theophilius Grantly the conservative archdeacon, son of the bishop, and the warden’s son-in-law
John Bold a non-practising surgeon and radical reformer
Mary Bold his sister and friend to Eleanor Harding
Chadwick the steward of Hiram’s will
Finney Bold’s lawyer
Mr Bunce the aged ‘sub-warden’ at the hospital
Sir Abraham Haphazard a London barrister QC
Tom Towers a journalist and editor of The Jupiter
The Warden – further reading

The Warden Ruth apRoberts, Trollope, Artist and Moralist, London: Chatto and Windus, 1971.

The Warden Victoria Glendenning, Trollope, London: Pimlico, 2002.

The Warden Henry James, Partial Portraits, 1888.

The Warden James R. Kincaid, The Novels of Anthony Trollope, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

The Warden Ellen Moody, Trollope on the Net, London: Hambledon Continuum, 1999.

The Warden Richard Mullen, Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in his World, London: Duckworth, 1990.

The Warden Bill Overton, The Unofficial Trollope, Lanham Rowman & Littlefield (MD), 1982.

The Warden Donald Smalley, Trollope: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 2013.

The Warden John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, and Readers, London: Palgrave, 2006.

The Warden Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

The Warden Stephen Wall, Trollope and Character, London: Faber and Faber, 1988.

© Roy Johnson 2014

The Warrior’s Soul

by

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

The Warrior’s Soul was written in late 1915–early 1916. It was first published in Land and Water, March 1917. It was posthumously collected in Tales of Hearsay, published by T. Fisher Unwin in 1925. The other tales in the volume were The Tale, Prince Roman, and The Black Mate.

The Warrior's Soul

The Retreat from Moscow

Illarion Pryanishnikov 1840-1894

The Warrior’s Soul – critical commentary

Internationalism

The issues here are very typical Conrad subjects. There is a strong sense of internationalist friendship between the Russian Tomassov and his French colleague De Castell. They are also united in their admiration for the French lady in whose salon they have met. De Castell gives Tomassov classified information which is advantageous to the Russians.

But then Tomassov is confronted by his patriotic duty in circumstances of a tragic coincidence. As a Russian he ought to be remorseless towards the Frenchman who has invaded his own country. Even worse: De Castell is so devastated by the grim conditions and the slim chances of surviving the French retreat from Moscow (in which 380,000 men died and 100,000 were captured) that he begs Tomassov to shoot him. At first he refuses, but then does so – with what seem like devastating consequences to his own conscience.

Conrad is being unusually even-handed here. Russians do not usually fare well in his work – with the good biographical reason that Conrad’s family suffered under the political control of Poland by Russia in the nineteenth century. His father and family were exiled to the Ukraine because of his father’s political agitation as a democrat and a patriot.

Of course at the time of this tale’s composition, England , Russia, and France were allies during the first part of the first world war in the conflict with Germany. So it might be argued that Conrad was contributing a little propaganda to the war effort with this tale. Conrad had an unusual and complex relationship with nationality. He was born a Russian citizen – since Russia ruled Poland at that time. He imbibed a strong sense of Polish patriotism from his father. And after serving in the British merchant navy, he took out English citizenship in 1886. Following that, it took him a further three years to renounce his Russian citizenship in 1889.

Evaluation

This is another of Conrad’s historical narratives which is not so successful as his more mature and contemporary-based works. It smacks of the anecdote and lacks the aesthetic and moral complexities of his more successful writing. The elements of the drama are related in very general terms, with very little concrete detail and almost no personal focalization.

It is interesting that he reaches back into the Napoleonic wars to come up with a topic which might throw some light on the conflict which was tearing Europe apart in 1914-1918. The connection is logical – a major international conflict – but somehow the time gap is too wide, and the work pales beside Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent

The Warrior’s Soul – study resources

The Warrior's Soul The Warrior’s Soul – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

The Warrior's Soul The Warrior’s Soul – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Warrior's Soul The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

The Warrior's Soul Tales of Hearsay – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Warrior's Soul Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

A Warrior's Soul Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

A Warrior's Soul Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Warrior's Soul

The Warrior’s Soul – plot summary

An un-named narrator, an old Russian military campaigner, recounts scenes from the Napoleonic wars, finally focusing on his special relationship with a young soldier called Tomassov who had previously been posted in Paris. In an attack on the demoralised Napoleonic Grand Army in its retreat from Moscow, Tomassov takes pity on the enemy and puts up his sword.

Tomassov had previously fallen in love with a beautiful woman who ran a salon in Paris. One afternoon in early 1812 he visits the salon to find her in conversation with French officer De Castel. The two men sense that they are in competition for her favours. When the y both leave, De Castel reveals to Tomassov that the Russian envoy and his staff are about to be arrested. This disclosure permits the envoy to escape arrest.

Back at the Napoleonic battle, the narrator expresses sympathy for the French troops who have fared so badly in the ill-fated Moscow campaign. Tomassov arrives from his patrol with an utterly bedraggled and despairing French prisoner. The prisoner has begged Tomassov to kill him as an act of mercy – but he has refused. The prisoner turns out to be De Castel. Tomassov is mocked in his regiment for being ‘humane’ – and in the end he is so touched by De Castel’s pleas that he does shoot him.

Afterwards, Tomassov resigns from the army and retreats into provincial obscurity.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

The Warrior’s Soul – principal characters
I an un-named Russian officer, the narrator
Tomassov an idealistic young Russian soldier
De Castel a French army officer
The Warrior’s Soul

The Warrior's Soul

first edition, Fisher Unwin 1925

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph ConradThe 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.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book at Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book at Amazon US

Joseph Conrad - writing table

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Further reading

Red button Amar Acheraiou Joseph Conrad and the Reader, London: Macmillan, 2009.

Red button Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Red button Muriel Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010

Red button Hillel M. Daleski , Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession, London: Faber, 1977

Red button Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Red button Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985

Red button John Dozier Gordon, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940

Red button Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958

Red button Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, London: Continuum, 2007.

Red button Owen Knowles, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990

Red button Jakob Lothe, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008

Red button Gustav Morf, The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad, New York: Astra, 1976

Red button Ross Murfin, Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1985

Red button Jeffery Myers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Cooper Square Publishers, 2001.

Red button Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007.

Red button George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Mercer University Press, 2005.

Red button John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Red button James Phelan, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Red button Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966

Red button Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues), London: Macmillan, 2006.

Red button J.H. Stape, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

Red button John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Arrow Books, 2008.

Red button Peter Villiers, Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner, Seafarer Books, 2006.

Red button Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980

Red button Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work), London: Northcote House, 1994.

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad Lord JimLord 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.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

Joseph Conrad Heart of DarknessHeart 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’.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013

Joseph Conrad web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
Joseph Conrad complete tales

The Watering Place

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Watering Place was not published during Virginia Woolf’s lifetime, and it is possibly the last thing she ever wrote. She records in a diary entry for 16 February 1941 overhearing a conversation in a Brighton restaurant very much like the one in the story. It is one of her short, non-dramatic stories which records a mood through a collection of related images – and for Woolf it has a rather unusual setting.

The Watering PLace

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition

The Watering Place – critical commentary

Running through all three sections of the story are images of fish – the smell of fish in the town; the ‘enormous’ consumption of fish in the restaurant; the ‘queer fishy smell’ that permeates the ladies room; and the ‘skeleton’ of the town left at night.

Along with the fish imagery, there is recurrent mention of the sea – the ‘depths of the sea’ in the opening, then the ‘surge of an indrawing tide’ with which the flushing toilet is compared, and then the town itself, at night, ‘has sunk down into the water’.

It is amazing enough to think of Virginia Woolf writing a story based on a conversation in a women’s toilet, but what is really remarkable about the story is the similarity of the crucial ‘overheard conversation’ with T.S.Eliot’s bar room chat in ‘A Game of Chess’, the second part of The Waste Land:

Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart,
He’ll want to know what you’ve done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.

The common factors are a serviceman and a lower class woman. Eliot’s Albert is ‘coming back’ from the first world war; Woolf’s Bert is in danger of being ‘courtmartialled’ for something he is doing. Eliot’s Lil needs to get a new set of teeth, whilst Woolf’s Gert (a ‘simpering little thing’) is more fortunate, with a set to match Bert’s:

Bert never did care about big women … Ave you seen him since he’s been back? … They’ve both got the same teeth … Are He’s [sic] got such beautiful white teeth … Gert has em too … But his are a bit crooked

It should be noted that Virginia Woolf herself set Eliot’s entire poem in type when it was published by the Hogarth Press in 1923. This was in the early years of the Press, when all production was hand-crafted by Woolf and her husband Leonard.

Study resources

The Watering Place The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Watering Place The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Watering Place The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Watering Place The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

The Watering Place The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Watering Place

The Watering Place – synopsis

The first paragraph of the story is an evocation of seaside life presented as a satirical account of its inhabitants described in terms of the seashells used to decorate holiday gifts and memorabilia.

The second paragraph starts in the fishy interior of a restaurant, and then proceeds to the ladies room, where three young women are applying make-up and exchanging gossip. Fragments of their conversation are punctuated by the sound of a flushing toilet.

The story ends with a description of the town at night, illuminated only by fairy lights.

Virginia Woolf podcast

A eulogy to words

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red button Susan Sellers, The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

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

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

Virginia Woolf's handwriting

“I feel certain that I am going mad again.”

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Woolf - OrlandoOrlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon US

Kew GardensKew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon US

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

Virginia Woolf – web links

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 – 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.

© Roy Johnson 2014

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

The Well-Beloved

by

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

The Well-Beloved was first serialized in the London Illustrated News in 1892. It was then published as a complete novel in 1897 by Osgood, McIlvaine & Co. The full title was originally The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament, which emphasises the protagonist’s fixation on the ‘ideal woman’.

The Well-Beloved

The Well-Beloved – critical commentary

Sex in the novel

Despite all Jocelyn’s romantic idealism and his incontinent fixations on younger and younger women, he actually spends the whole novel with no sexually consummated adult relations at all.

This is strange, because the events of the narrative begin with a typically Hardyesque appeal to old folk traditions of pre-marital sex. Jocelyn arranges to meet the first Avice at night in the castle, presumably with a view to taking advantage of this tradition. But she sends him a note canceling the rendezvous specifically on the grounds that she does not agree to the idea – which certainly confirms that she was conscious of this being the reason for their nocturnal meeting.

Jocelyn goes off instead with Marcia, a woman who just happens to be walking past at the time, and he proposes marriage to her as soon as they reach London. It’s true that he spends a few days in a hotel with Marcia when he is supposed to be arranging their marriage. This would have been unthinkable in his native environment, but could pass in the more socially advanced mores of the capital. Yet there is nothing in the text to suggest that they enjoy a sexual relationship.

Just as he thinks he is going to secure the second Avice, she reveals that she is already married to someone else, and there is a suggestion that as a couple they have taken advantage of the island custom, which rubs salt into Jocelyn’s emotional wound at the time.

The same happens with the third Avice, who when confronted by his offer of marriage, runs off with someone else of her own age. Jocelyn thus spends the whole novel (forty years plus) pursuing phantoms. It is to presumably part of Hardy’s purpose to reveal this emotional absurdity. Then in the end Jocelyn settles for a marriage of convenience with his old friend Marcia Bencomb in a union which he rather tastelessly points out to her is based on friendship and certainly not love.

Hardy explored the consequences of sexual desire and activity in many of his novels (as frankly as was permitted at the time) most notably in Jude the Obscure which he wrote only a few years later in 1895. But The Well-Beloved appears to explore nothing more than the futility of pursuing idealised concepts of the opposite sex, which Jocelyn does – three times over.

The result of Jocelyn’s experiences might be thought as Hardy’s warning against romantic idealization – yet there is very little evidence in the text to support this idea. Jocelyn’s life trajectory is not held up as a failure or an example of emotional under-development. He is simply driven by this impulse until his last attempt fails and he is prepared to settle for a sexless relationship based on an old friendship.

Readers embarking on psychological interpretations of novels and their authors might like to keep in mind that not long after the publication of The Well-Beloved Thomas Hardy married a woman (Florence Dugdale) who was forty years younger than him – possibly an instance of what Oscar Wilde claimed was ‘life imitating art’?

Social background

The practical working background of the novel is sensitively observed. Just as every aspect of woodcutting and the timber business informs The Woodlanders, and agriculture permeates Tess of the d’Urbervilles, here in The Well–Beloved the stone industries of Portland are carefully incorporated. The business of mining and cutting stone is the enterprise on which the Bencomb and Pierston businesses were founded, and Hardy pointedly reminds us in one part of the story that the local stone was used to build St Paul’s cathedral.

This is Hardy the son of a stonemason and himself an architectural designer underscoring the commercial life of Wessex out of which these lives have emerged. It is unfortunate that the fictional integration of the commerce and the business dynasties are not so well incorporated as they are in the other novels. They do not form essential parts of the narrative in the same way as the destinies of Giles Winterbourne and Tess are determined by their occupations in the rural industries in which they participate.

Moreover, Jocelyn rises to fame as a sculptor, a shaper of this local stone – but without any credible evidence of his artistic talents or activity. None of his work is discussed, and the twenty year periods between each version of Avice are skipped over without comment. This reinforces the idea that all Hardy’s attention was focused onto Jocelyn’s obsession with his ideal woman, and it contributes to the overwhelming sense of weakness in The Well-Beloved compared with his other great novels.

The Isle of Slingers

Hardy chose to re-name the location of the novel, as he did in so many of his other works. But ‘The Isle of Slingers’ is actually an old name for Portland Island – given to it because of the habit of the local population to hurl stones at unwanted visitors – or ‘kimberlins’ or ‘foreigners from the mainland of Wessex’ as they are called in the text.

The total population of the island around that time was only about eighty households, which coupled with the xenophobia enshrined in its popular name, resulted in a great deal of inter-marriage and the fact that everybody knew everybody else’s business. These social factors are well reflected in the novel .

Avice Caro marries a cousin (which was legally controversial at the time); all three generations of women have the same first name (Avice); and the grand-daughter eventually marries someone with the surname Pierston – which is that of the protagonist, Jocelyn.

The three Avices, the second something like the first, the third a glorification of the first, at all events externally, were the outcome of the immemorial island customs of intermarriage and prenuptial union, under which conditions the type of feature was almost uniform from parent to child through generations.

The Well-Beloved – Study resources

The Well-Beloved The Well-Beloved – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Well-Beloved The Well-Beloved – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Well-Beloved The Well-Beloved – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Well-Beloved The Well-Beloved – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Well-Beloved The Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle eBook

The Well-Beloved The Well-Beloved – eBooks at Project Gutenberg

The Well-Beloved The Well-Beloved – audiobook at LibriVox.org

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Red button The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Red button Authors in Context – Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Red button Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy – Amazon UK

The

The Well-Beloved – plot summary

Part First

Chapter I.   Would-be sculptor Jocelyn Pierston returns to his native Isle of Slingers [Isle of Portland] in Dorset to visit his father after three years living in London. He is greeted enthusiastically with a kiss by his childhood friend Avice Caro.

Chapter II.   Jocelyn reassures the embarrassed Avice, and proposes marriage to her, then immediately regrets it. He has a romantically idealised image of Woman which is constantly shifting from one object to another. Avice has become a cultivated woman, and after a month’s sojourn they are understood to be engaged.

Chapter III.   At the end of his holiday Jocelyn goes to meet Avice at night to say farewell, but she does not show up at the appointed place.

Chapter IV.   She sends him a note excusing herself because she does not approve of the local tradition of pre-marital sex. He leaves nevertheless and meets Marcia Bencomb, who is running away from home and her father, who is a rival to Jocelyn’s father in the stone quarrying trade.

Chapter V.   Jocelyn and Marcia shelter from a sudden storm under a boat, then they are forced to stay overnight at a hotel in Budmouth.

Chapter VI.   They travel together to London where, having decided that Marcia is the latest incarnation of his ideal woman, Jocelyn asks her to marry him. They book into a hotel, and he goes to make the necessary marriage arrangements, then visits his friend Somers who is a painter.

Chapter VII.   Jocelyn explains to Somers his personal theory of the idealised woman, up to his recent experiences with Avice and Marcia. He rationalises his fickleness, them temporises with Marcia regarding the marriage arrangements.

Chapter VIII.   Jocelyn and Marcia squabble over their uncertain social status. She writes to her father, who refuses to endorse her proposed marriage on grounds of rivalry between the two families. Marcia leaves the hotel, and is subsequently taken back home by her father. Jocelyn later hears that Avice has married a cousin and that Marcia is to go on a world tour with her father.

Chapter IX.   The years pass. Jocelyn becomes a successful sculptor, but he continues to flit from one example of his idealised woman to another.

The Well-Beloved

‘The Isle of Slingers’

Part Second

Chapter I.   When Jocelyn is middle-aged his father dies, leaving him quite wealthy. He attends a fashionable party, still in search of his ideal woman, and thinks he might have found her in the form of Mrs Nicola Pine-Avon, an intellectual widow.

Chapter II.   But when he visits Mrs Pine-Avon he finds her rather remote, so he insults her and leaves. At another social event he reads a letter telling him that Avice has died.

Chapter III.   This news inflames his old feelings for Avice, who he now realises he has undervalued, and he bitterly regrets the loss. He goes back to the island in time to see her buried in the local churchyard.

Chapter IV.   He meets Avice’s daughter Ann, whose family fell on hard times, leaving her to work as a laundress. Jocelyn thinks of her as the reincarnation of her mother; he calls her by her mother’s name; and wishes he could live locally and pay court to her.

Chapter V.   Back in London he meets Avice (Ann) at the docks and feels powerfully attracted to her, even though she is only a laundress. He decides to rent a manor-house on the island so as to be near her.

Chapter VI.   He arranges for Avice to visit his house daily to do his laundry. He thinks of her as the original Avice – and realises that he is hopelessly in thrall to a woman who he ‘despises’ intellectually.

Chapter VII.   Jocelyn pursues Avice in her daily life on the island. She reveals her knowledge of her mother’s sad history (deserted by her intended) and even though she seems indifferent to him, Jocelyn decides he wants to marry her.

Chapter VIII.   When he next confronts her she reveals that she rapidly tires of men after first finding them attractive. But he still intends to pursue his plans.

Chapter IX.   Jocelyn is jealously watching Avice take washing to a soldier-lover when his friend Somers suddenly arrives. Jocelyn admits he is completely in thrall to Avice. He is then visited by Mrs Pine-Avon, who pays court to him, but he is completely consumed by his current obsession.

Chapter X.   Somers sees Mrs Pine-Avon and wants to marry her. Avice is upset about something, and Jocelyn offers to take her on as a temporary help in London.

Chapter XI.   When they get there his housekeepers have drunk his wine and absconded. Avice keeps herself separate from him, even though he feels completely responsible for her welfare.

Chapter XII.   Eventually he asks her to marry him. She refuses, revealing that she has already married Isaac Pierston, with whom she has quarrelled and separated. Jocelyn reveals his former relationship with her mother, and he takes Avice back to the island.

Chapter XIII.   Isaac is brought back and reconciled with his wife, who then has a baby she christens Avice. Jocelyn goes back to London, where Somers is due to marry Mrs Pine-Avon.

The Well-Beloved

‘The Isle of Slingers’

Part Third

Chapter I.   Twenty years later Jocelyn is in Rome, having sent Avice money from time to time. He receives a letter from her telling of her husband’s death, and he decides to visit the island. She is living in his old house, and he immediately entertains the idea of marrying her – until he sees her daughter, who he regards as the reincarnation of her grandmother.

Chapter II.   Jocelyn has misgivings that the old curse is still upon him. He rescues the young Avice when she is stuck on some rocks and feels that he detects a direct connection running from grandmother to grand-daughter.

Chapter III.   He revisits young Avice’s mother and proposes to marry the girl. She agrees to help him in such a plan. They all visit the castle where Jocelyn was supposed to meet young Avice’s grandmother. Avice’s mother encourages her daughter to favour Jocelyn, but the girl is not really interested – and so far she has only ever seen him at night.

Chapter IV.   An aged Somers suddenly appears along with his matronly wife (Mrs Pine-Avon) and several children. Jocelyn stays away from young Avice during their visit. Mother Avice falls ill, but she persuades her daughter to accept Jocelyn because he is kind, rich, and upper class. Jocelyn reveals to her his connections with her mother and grandmother – and at the same time he begins to think that the marriage might not be a good idea.

Chapter V.   Jocelyn takes Avice and her mother to his new house and studio In London, but Avice is still not enthusiastic about him. He goes back to the island on what is supposed to be the eve of his wedding day.

Chapter VI.   Mother Avice is ill, but glad to have her plans for her daughter’s wedding almost fulfilled. However, young Avice elopes with young Henri Leverre the same night, and her mother dies with the shock of events.

Chapter VII.   Marcia Bencomb (Leverre’s stepmother) arrives [after forty years] to seek out Jocelyn via the odd connection between them. Jocelyn accepts what has happened, and promises to settle a handsome dowry on young Avice.

Chapter VIII.   Mother Avice is buried, then Jocelyn falls ill, after which he loses his interest in aesthetics. Marcia nurses him, and reveals herself as the older woman she now is. They move back to the island and eventually get married (as old friends, not lovers). Jocelyn devotes himself to improving local living conditions.

Map of Wessex

Hardy’s WESSEX

The Well-Beloved – principal characters
Jocelyn Pierston a young would-be sculptor
Avice Caro his childhood friend
Mrs Caro a widow, her mother
Marcia Bencomb daughter of rival family to Pierstons
Alfred Somers Jocelyn’s friend, a painter
Mrs Nicola Pine-Avon a young intellectual widow
Ann Avice Caro Avice’s daughter, a laundress
Avice Pierston Avice Caro’s daughter, a governess
Hardy’s study

Thomas Hardy's study

reconstructed in Dorchester museum

Further reading

Red button John Bayley, An Essay on Hardy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Red button Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form, Brighton: Harvester, 1982.

Red button Kristin Brady, The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1982.

Red button L. St.J. Butler, Alternative Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1989.

Red button Raymond Chapman, The Language of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1990.

Red button R.G.Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1970.

Red button Ralph W.V. Elliot, Thomas Hardy’s English, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984.

Red button James Gibson (ed), The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, London, 1976.

Red button Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1962. (This is more or less Hardy’ s autobiography, since he told his wife what to write.)

Red button P. Ingham, Thomas Hardy: A Feminist Reading, Brighton: Harvester, 1989.

Red button P.Ingham, The Language of Class and Gender: Transformation in the English Novel, London: Routledge, 1995,

Red button Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist, London: Bodley Head, 1971.

Red button Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. (This is the definitive biography.)

Red button Michael Millgate and Richard L. Purdy (eds), The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978-

Red button R. Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, London: Routledge, 1988.

Red button Harold Orel (ed), Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, London, 1967.

Red button F.B. Pinion, A Thomas Hardy Companion, London: Macmillan, 1968.

Red button Norman Page, Thomas Hardy, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1977.

Red button Rosemary Sumner, Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist, London: Macmillan, 1981.

Red button Richard H. Taylor, The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, London, 1978.

Red button Merryn Williams, A Preface to Hardy, London: Longman, 1976.

Other works by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Tess of the d'UrbervillesTess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) is probably the most popular of Hardy’s late, great novels. The sub-title is ‘A Pure Woman’, and it is a story which explores the tragic consequences of a young milkmaid who becomes the victim of the men she encounters. First she falls for the spiritual but flawed Angel Clare, and then the physical but limited Alec Durberville takes advantage of her. This novel has some of the most beautiful and the most harrowing depictions of rural working conditions which reveal Hardy as a passionate advocate for those who work the land. It also has a wonderfully symbolic climax at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. There is poetry in almost every page.
Thomas Hardy Tess of the d'Urbervilles Buy the book at Amazon UK
Thomas Hardy Tess of the d'Urbervilles Buy the book at Amazon US

 

The WoodlandersThe Woodlanders (1887) Giles Winterbourne, an honest woodsman, suffers with the many tribulations of his selfless love for Grace Melbury, a woman above his station in this classic tale of the West Country. She marries the new doctor, Edred Fitzpiers, but leaves him when she learns he has been unfaithful. She turns instead to Giles, who nobly allows her to sleep in his house during stormy weather, whilst he sleeps outside and brings on his own death. It’s often said that the hero of this novel is the woods themselves – so deeply moving is Hardy’s account of the timbered countryside which provides the backdrop for another human tragedy and a study of rural life in transition.
Thomas Hardy The Woodlanders Buy the book at Amazon UK
Thomas Hardy The Woodlanders Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Wessex TalesWessex Tales Don’t miss the skills of Hardy as a writer of shorter fictions. None of his short stories are really short, but they are beautifully crafted. This is the first volume of his tales in which he was seeking to record the customs, superstitions, and beliefs of old Wessex before they were lost to living memory. Yet whilst dealing with traditional beliefs, they also explore very modern concerns of difficult and often thwarted human passions which he developed more extensively in his longer works.
Thomas Hardy Wessex Tales Buy the book at Amazon UK
Thomas Hardy Wessex Tales Buy the book at Amazon US

Thomas Hardy – web links

Thomas Hardy at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, book reviews. bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Thomas Hardy Collection
The complete novels, stories, and poetry – Kindle eBook single file download for £1.29 at Amazon.

Thomas Hardy at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

Thomas Hardy at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, the novels and literary themes, poetry, religious beliefs and influence, biographies and criticism.

The Thomas Hardy Society
Dorset-based site featuring educational activities, a biennial conference, a journal (three times a year) with links to the texts of all the major works.

The Thomas Hardy Association
American-based site with photos and academic resources. Be prepared to search and drill down to reach the more useful materials.

Thomas Hardy on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production features, box office, film reviews, and even quizzes.

Thomas Hardy – online literary criticism
Small collection of academic papers and articles ‘favoring signed articles by recognized scholars and articles published in peer-reviewed sources’.

Thomas Hardy’s Wessex
Evolution of Wessex, contemporary reviews, maps, bibliography, links to other web sites, and history.

© Roy Johnson 2014

More on Thomas Hardy
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Wheel of Time

by

tutorial, commentary, synopsis, and study resources

The Wheel of Time (1892) first appeared in Cosmopolitan Magazine in December 1892 and January 1893. It later appeared in the collection of Henry James stories published by Osgood, McIlvaine later the same year. The other stories in the volume were The Private Life, Lord Beaupre, The Visits, Collaboration, and Owen Wingrave.

The Wheel of Time

The Wheel of Time – critical commentary

The main point of interest in this story is the twinning, inversions, and parallels which are drawn between the two generations – together with the ironic reversal of Fanny’s appearance and Maurice’s reaction to her.

The young Maurice cannot bring himself to propose marriage, despite his mother’s encouragement, to the rich but plain Fanny Knocker – so he escapes the social expectations being made of him by fleeing abroad. Fanny falls seriously ill in a manner which suggests lovesickness.

Later, the older Maurice has a plain daughter of his own. The roles are reversed. He would like to marry off the plain Vera to Fanny’s handsome son Arthur – thus ‘correcting’ the mistake he now feels he has made regarding Fanny. But Arthur behaves in the same way – fleeing abroad rather than marrying a plain woman. Vera too falls ill, but she actually dies.

Fanny’s miraculous transformation from a plain young woman to spectacular mature beauty causes Maurice serious pangs of regret – so much so that he ends up reproaching her for not giving him sufficient warning when they first met. It is not quite clear from the text if this is to be taken as a faintly comic reaction or a more serious example of his essential egoism.

Eugene Onegin

This story is Henry James’s variation of Pushkin’s famous novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, but with an added twist. The centre of Pushkin’s narrative is that an unsophisticated country girl, Tatyana, falls in love with the romantic but bored hero, Onegin. She writes a letter declaring her feelings to him – to which he doesn’t even reply. Later he coldly rejects her, and makes matters worse by flirting with her sister.

Several years later Onegin meets Tatyana again at a ball in St Petersburg. She is now transformed into a mature and confident society beauty – completely unlike her younger self. Onegin becomes obsessed with her, even though she is now married to an ageing prince. He writes her several letters – to which she doe not reply. Eventually he confronts her and pleads to resume their former relationship. She admits that she still loves him, but refuses to be unfaithful to her husband. He is left bitterly regretting his lost opportunity.

The Wheel of Time – study resources

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

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

The Wheel of Time Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Wheel of Time Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Wheel of Time The Complete Tales of Henry James – Volume 8 – Digireads reprint – UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

The Wheel of Time The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle eBook edition

The Wheel of Time The Wheel of Time – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Wheel of Time

The Wheel of Time- principal characters
Lady Greywood a society lady
Maurice Glanvil her handsome third son, who is a failure
Vera Glanvil Maurice’s daughter, who is plain and short
Mrs Jane Knocker Lady Greywood’s friend
Fanny Knocker her plain daughter, later Mrs Trejant
Arthur Trejant Fanny’s handsome son
The Wheel of Time – plot summary

Part I.   General Knocker and his wife Jane have recently inherited money, and are on their way back from India to England. In Paris, Jane Knocker meets her old friend Lady Greyswood and seeks her help to find a husband for Fanny, her plain daughter.

A year later Lady Greyswood suggests the rich Fanny as a suitable match to her untalented but handsome son Maurice. He rejects the idea because Fanny is so plain: he wants an attractive wife. Lady Greyswood thinks it will be prudent to let the idea mature. However, when she invites the Knockers to dinner, Jane feigns a headache and sends Fanny in her place, so that she will meet Maurice. Following this, further social meetings take place.

Part II.   The two mothers plot and negotiate. Maurice has no money and no prospects, but is very handsome: Fanny is rich but plain. Lady Greyswood tries again to persuade Maurice to take an interest in Fanny, even revealing that Fanny is in love with him. He still rejects the idea because he thinks that Fanny is ‘awful’.

Lady Greyswood lies about Maurice’s feelings to Jane Knocker and tries to promote further meetings between the two younger people. Maurice then makes an effort to socialise with Fanny for the sake of his mother. He admits that she has talents, but eventually bolts for France when he cannot pretend any more. Fanny is taken ill – with the implication that she is sick with love for Maurice.

Part III.   Twenty years later Maurice is now a widower and is almost fifty years old. He has brought his daughter Vera to England to help launch her in society. But she is short and plain, and something of a disappointment to him. At a lunch party Vera meets a charming young man, and they all witness the unveiling of a portrait painting of a very beautiful woman, his mother, who turns out to be Fanny Knocker, now Mrs Trejant. The boy Arthur offers to introduce Maurice and Vera to his mother. Maurice reveals to Vera that the woman is an old friend.

Part IV.   Maurice waits impatiently for a dinner engagement with Mrs Trejant. He goes to see the portrait again and learns that she is popular, handsome, and is now a widow. He pays her a visit and is astonished to find that she is almost a different person than the one he knew. They compare notes about their respective lives, and are very amicable with each other. He asks her about the old agreement between their mothers – but she feigns ignorance.

Part V.   Maurice goes to see Mrs Trejant every day and feels he has never met such an interesting woman. She accommodates him warmly, but they do not discuss the nature of their previous relationship. Mrs Trejant takes an enthusiastic and protective interest in Vera. Her son Arthur suddenly goes to Ireland, and Maurice reflects on the similarities in their behaviour – bolting before the prospect of marrying a plain girl. Arthur however has good prospects, both financial and social.

Maurice patronisingly reproaches Mrs Trejant for not having warned him (a quarter of a century before) that she would not always be plain. Eventually, he convinces himself that she has always been in love with him, and that she now has a chance to show it.

Part VI.   Maurice realises that he is in love with Mrs Trejant. He arranges a formal dinner, and after everyone else has gone he asks her to marry him. But she refuses, and instead takes Vera to her estate in Derbyshire for six months. Maurice goes abroad alone, hoping that their two children will find the happiness that he and Fanny once missed.

But in Paris he bumps into Arthur, who is bolting from Derbyshire to Spain. Maurice goes to Derbyshire to find Mrs Trejant distraught with the failure of her plans, and Vera is critically ill. Like Fanny, she does recover, but a year later she dies in Rome.

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

The Wind Blows

by

tutorial, comment, study resources, and plot summary

The Wind Blows was first published on 27 August 1920 in the Athenaeum (edited by Katherine Mansfield’s husband John Middleton Murry) and later reprinted in Bliss and Other Stories (1920).

The Wind Blows

The Wind Blows – critical commentary

The story is a wonderfully subtle, restrained, and even understated evocation of the emotional turmoil in the maturation process of a young teenage girl. The portrait is composed of her reactions to the people in her life and the atmosphere of her surroundings. To these are added a number of suggestive symbols and metaphors that Mansfield selects to suggest her sexualisation and emotional growth.

These suggestions begin with the phenomenon that gives the story its title – the wind. As every teacher knows, young people are enlivened and even excited by windy weather – and Matilda is no exception. She is woken up by the wind and thinks ‘something dreadful has happened’. But it hasn’t – the disruption is merely a relection of her febrile transitory feelings. She is part way between being a girl and a woman.

Next she thinks that life is ‘hideous and simply revolting’ and she ‘hates’ her mother for trying to control her appearance – particularly her hair. This is clearly a portrait of adolescent unrest, or ‘growing pains’ as they are sometimes known.

She also feels a sense of competition with the girl next door – Marie Swainson – seeing her as reckless and possibly a sexual rival: ‘Her skirt flies up about her waist … she doesn’t mind what she does’. Matilda is also irritated that Marie turns up for her piano lesson ‘hours before her time’, thus breaking the spell of Matilda’s contact with the teacher Robert Bullen.

For when she arrives at the home of her teacher the story takes a distinctly erotic turn. Matilda feels comforted by Mr Bullen’s enviornment and engaged by his manner – his ‘very nice hand’ and the fact that he speaks ‘so kindly’. Her own fingers ‘tremble’ and ‘her heart beats so hard she feels it might lift her blouse up and down’. She is so affected by his presence and the romance of playing Beethoven that she starts to cry.

Mr Bullen uses the language and gestures of seduction. He takes hold of her hands, allows her to rest her head against him, and resorts to a flattering cliché – ‘that rare thing, a woman’. Fortunately for Matilda, the spell of this moment is broken by the arrival of her rival Marie Swainson.

When she goes to the harbour with her brother Bogey she takes her hat off and allows her hair to fall free – defying her mother’s injunction. The height and force of the stormy sea is a clear reflection of the disturbed feelings and potential for liberation that she feels inside herself.

This liberation is confirmed and underscored in the visionary moment of imagining her older self on board the ship, looking back as it leaves the island and sailing out to sea. Matilda then sees her younger self as the girl who cried that day at her music lesson ‘many years ago’. Two separate periods of time are telescoped into one before the story ends on the same note as it began – with the wind.

The Wind Blows – study resources

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Wind Blows – plot summary

Matilda is a young teenage girl living in south New Zealand with her mother and her brother Bogey. On a particularly windy autumn day she feels somewhat irritated by life and is at odds with the world, partucularly her mother’s fuss over her appearance and clothing.

She goes to a piano lesson with her teacher Mr Bullen, where she feels soothed by his avuncular manner and the atmosphere of his drawing room. He seems to her a protective and slightly romantic presence, to which she is in the process of yielding when they are interrupted by the arrival of his next pupil, Matilda’s neighbour Marie Swainson.

Back home she continues to feel an existential resentment regarding her home life. When her bother suggests a walk on the esplanade she feels it as a liberation. They go down to the harbour where they see a steamer putting out to sea. She has a vision of herself and Bogey on board the ship as older people, leaving the island and looking back on their youthful past.

The Wind Blows

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations

Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

© Roy Johnson 2015

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

The Wings of the Dove

by

tutorial, characters, resources, video, further reading

The Wings of the Dove (1902) is one of James’s late, great masterpieces. Quite apart from the famous baroque prose style, it features many of his recurrent themes. American innocence pitched against European cunning. The plot is a complex love triangle which strains at the limits of what is morally acceptable. Even for modern readers, the scheming and motivations will seem quite shocking.

The heroine Kate Croy is in love with a man who hasn’t enough money to offer her a fashionable marriage. She thinks she can enhance her lover’s financial prospects by pushing him into the arms of a rich American heiress who is dying – but she doesn’t count on the unexpected results.

The setting is a Venice that includes the usual correlatives of disease and death. And a social depth which is more-than-usually concerned with issues of money, social status, and class mobility. Be prepared for long and complex sentences which strain many readers’ patience.

The Wings of the Dove

Venice

The Wings of the Dove – plot summary

Kate Croy and Merton Densher are two engaged Londoners who desperately want to marry but have very little money. Kate is constantly put upon by family troubles, and is now living with her domineering aunt, Maud Lowder. Into their world comes Milly Theale, an enormously rich young American woman who had previously met and fallen in love with Densher, though she didn’t reveal her feelings. Her travelling companion and confidante, Mrs. Stringham, is an old friend of Maud’s. Kate and Aunt Maud welcome Milly to London, and the American heiress enjoys great social success.

The Wings of the DoveWith Kate as a companion, Milly goes to see an eminent physician, Sir Luke Strett, because she’s afraid that she is suffering from an incurable disease. The doctor is noncommittal but Milly fears the worst. Kate suspects that Milly is deathly ill. After the trip to America where he had met Milly, Densher returns to find the heiress in London. Kate wants Densher to pay as much attention as possible to Milly, though at first he doesn’t quite know why. Kate has been careful to conceal from Milly (and everybody else) that she and Densher are engaged.

With the threat of serious illness hanging over her, Milly decides to travel to Venice with Mrs. Stringham. Aunt Maud, Kate and Densher follow her. At a party Milly gives in her Venice palazzo (the older Palazzo Barbaro, called “Palazzo Leporelli” in the novel), Kate finally reveals her complete plan to Densher: he is to marry Milly so that, after her presumably soon-to-occur death, Densher will inherit the money they can marry on. Densher had suspected this was Kate’s idea, and he demands that she consummate their affair before he’ll go along with her plan.

Aunt Maud and Kate return to London while Densher remains with Milly. Unfortunately, the dying girl learns from a former suitor of Kate’s about the plot to get her money. She “turns her face to the wall” and grows very ill. Densher sees her one last time before he leaves for London, where he eventually receives news of Milly’s death.

Milly does leave him a large amount of money despite everything. But Densher won’t touch the money, and he won’t marry Kate unless she also refuses the bequest. Conversely, if Kate chooses the money instead of him, Densher offers to make the bequest over to her in full. The lovers part on the novel’s final page with a cryptic exclamation from Kate: “We shall never be again as we were!”

Study resources

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – 1997 film adaptation on DVD

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – eBook version at Project Gutenberg

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – authoritative text

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – audioBook at LibriVox

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James – biographical notes

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

The Wings of the Dove

Principal characters
Kate Croy a talented but scheming young woman
Merton Densher a Fleet Street journalist with aspirations
Milly Theale an American orphan and heiress
Aunt Maude Lowder Kate’s aunt, who maintains her – at a price
Susan Stringham a Vermont widow and companion to Milly
Lord Mark a fortune-hunting aristocrat who Maude ‘intends’ for Kate
The Wings of the Dove – film version

1997 film adaptation

This is a lush and beautiful film version of the novel from director Iain Softley. His London scenes are successful, but the film really comes alive visually in Venice, though it has to be said that the explicit sexual content is somwhat at odds with Jame’s original text, where everything is implied and suggested rather than made overt. Helena Bonham Carter gives a typically pouting and sexy performance as the emotionally scheming Kate Croy, and Alison Elliot is convincingly consumptive as the heiress Milly Theale. Even the costumes were nominated for an Academy award in this outstanding production which captures faithfully the spirit of the original novel.

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

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2010

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

Get in touch

info@mantex.co.uk

Content © Mantex 2016