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Joseph Conrad criticism

April 22, 2015 by Roy Johnson

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

Joseph Conrad criticism is a bibliography of critical comment on Conrad and his works, with details of each publication and a brief description of its contents. The details include active web links to Amazon where you can buy the books, often in a variety of formats – new, used, and as Kindle eBooks. The listings are arranged in alphabetical order of author.

The list includes new books and older publications which may now be considered rare. It also includes print-on-demand or Kindle versions of older texts which are much cheaper than the original. Others (including some new books) are often sold off at rock bottom prices. Whilst compiling these listings I bought a copy of Jeremy Hawthorn’s early study Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness for one penny.

Joseph Conrad and the Reader – Amar Acheraiou, London: Macmillan, 2009. This challenging study proposes new approaches to modern literary criticism and is fully devoted to Conrad’s relation to the reader, visual theory and authorship.

Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase – Jacques Berthoud, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. A demonstration of the clarity, consistency, and depth of thought evident in Conrad’s novels written during the first decade of the twentieth century.

Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius – Muriel Bradbrook, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941. A brief study of the life and work with stories considered in three main themes: the wonders of the deep, the hollow men, and recollections in tranquillity.

Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views) – Harold Bloom (ed), New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010. A new selection of contemporary critical commentary, plus a bibliography and a chronology of Conrad’s life.

An Autobiography of Joseph Conrad – Stephen Brennan, Skyhorse Publishing, 2014. Scenes from Conrad’s memoirs and non-fictional writing stitched together to showcase some of the more exciting and trying times in the novelist’s life.

Joseph Conrad and Psychological Medicine – Martin Bock and Robert Hampson, Texas Tech Press, 2002. Revises our understanding of Conrad’s life, and rethinks the dominant themes of his work in light of pre-Freudian medical psychology.

Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession – Hillel M. Daleski, Holmes & Meier, 1977.

Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture – Stephen Donovan, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. An analysis of Conrad’s relation to Victorian and early twentieth century popular culture. Illustrated summaries of the development of specific popular cultural forms—songs, early cinema, magazines, advertising, and tourism—underpin fresh readings of Conrad’s central works.

Joseph Conrad: The Imagined Style – Wilfred S. Dowden, Vanderbilt University Press, 1970. Analyzes the evolution of Conrad’s style and vision of imagery through a study of his novels and short stories.

Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper – Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. A study that relates Conrad’s work to the crisis of modernity in the late nineteenth century, and discusses ‘faultlines’ – ambiguities and apparent aesthetic ruptures – in nine of the major novels and novellas.

Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue – Aaron Fogel, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985. Fogel shows how Conrad shaped ideas and events and interpreted character and institutions by means of dialogues representing not free exchange but various forms of forcing another to respond.

Joseph Conrad: Comparative Essays – Adam Gillon and Raymond Brebach, Texas Tech Press, 1993. Gillon examines the affinities between Conrad’s descriptive art and both painting and film.

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

Conrad, Language, and Narrative – Michael Greaney, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Challenges old assumptions and engages current controversies in revelatory and rich close readings.

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

Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity – Robert Hampson, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992. Traces the development of Conrad’s conception of identity through the three phases of his career: the self in isolation, the self in society, and the sexualised self.

The Theatre of Joseph Conrad: Reconstructed Fictions – Richard J. Hand, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

One of Us: Mastery of Joseph Conrad – Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Chicago University Press, 1997. Conrad has traditionally been viewed as an admirable master: master mariner, storyteller, and writer. But his reputation has been linked in recent years to the negative masteries of racism, imperialism, and patriarchy.

Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness – Jeremy Hawthorn, London: Edward Arnold, 1979. This book explores the interplay between technical accomplishment and artistic conception in Conrad’s work, addressing the question why some of Conrad’s novels are acknowledged masterpieces and others ‘incomplete successes’.

Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment – Jeremy Hawthorn, London: Hodder Arnold, 1992. This study argues that technical skills can be refined but these have to be complemented by a larger vision and commitment – “a conception of the whole” – otherwise it does not result in great art.

Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad – Jeremy Hawthorn, London: Continuum, 2007. This book will open Conrad’s fiction to readings enriched by the insights of critics and theorists associated with Gender Studies and Post-colonialism.

Essays on Conrad – Frank Kermode (ed), Cambridge University Press, 2000. A series of critical studies written by Ian Watt, and edited by Frank Kermode.

The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Owen Knowles, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Background study materials to all the major works – chronologies, critical essays, maps, bibliographies, and the development of Conrad’s critical reputation.

Conrad’s Narrative Method – Jakob Lothe, Ohio State University Press, 2008. This structuralist study of narrative is the first book-length attempt to apply recent developments in critical theory and practice to the whole canon of Conrad’s works.

Joseph Conrad – Tim Middleton, London: Routledge, 2006. A student’s introductory guide to Conrad, his life and work, with a chronology and suggestions for further reading

The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad – Gustav Morf, New York: Astra Books, 1976.

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

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Jeffery Myers, Cooper Square Press, 2001. This claims to be the definitive biography – but some readers disagree.

Joseph Conrad: A Life – Zdzislaw Najder, Camden House, 2007. This too is tipped as the definitive biography, because Najder’s command of English, French, Polish, and Russian allowed him access to a greater variety of sources than any other biographer, and his Polish background and his own experience as an exile have afforded him a unique affinity for Conrad and his milieu.

The French Face of Joseph Conrad – Lindsay Newman and Yves Hervouet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. This study presents the French face of Conrad’s work, and demonstrates that his knowledge of the French language and its literature (which preceded his acquisition of the English language) has profound implications for the study of the novels.

Joseph Conrad Today – Kieron O’Hara, Imprint Academic, 2007. Argues that Conrad’s scepticism, pessimism, emphasis on the importance and fragility of community, and the difficulties of escaping our history are important tools for understanding the political world in which we live.

Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision – George A. Panichas, Mercer University Press, 2005. The book shows that morality in Conrad’s work is not reducible to an absolute category but must be apprehended in the forms of both moral crises and the possibility of moral recovery enacted in their complexity and tensions.

The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad – John G. Peters, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. This introduction is aimed at students coming to Conrad’s work for the first time. It covers Conrad’s themes of travel, exploration, and racial and ethnic conflict.

A Historical Guide to Joseph Conrad – John G. Peters, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Original essays showcase the abundance of historical material Conrad drew upon, and how he mined his early life as a sailor to create scathing indictments of colonialism and capitalist cupidity.

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

Homosexuality in the Life and Work of Joseph Conrad: Love Between the Lines – Richard J. Ruppel, London: Routledge, 2009. Conrad’s recurrent bouts of neurasthenia, his difficult courtships, late marriage, and frequent expressions of misogyny can all be attributed to the fact that Conrad was emotionally, temperamentally, and, perhaps, even erotically more comfortable with men than women.

Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography – Edward Said, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966. Said argues that Conrad, who set his fiction in exotic locations like East Asia and Africa, projects political dimensions in his work that mirror a colonialist preoccupation with ‘civilizing’ native peoples.

Joseph Conrad: The Critical Heritage – Norman Sherry, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1973. A collection of reviews and essays tracing the development of Conrad’s critical reputation as a novelist.

Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues) – Allan H. Simmons, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. First-time readers of Conrad are provided with in-depth contexts for appreciating a writer whose work is often challenging, while readers already familiar with Conrad’s fiction will find new perspectives with which to view it.

Joseph Conrad In Context – Allan H. Simmons, Cambridge University Press, 2014. This book examines the biographical, historical, cultural and political contexts that fashioned Conrad’s works. Each short chapter covers a specific theme in relation to Conrad’s life and his fiction.

The New Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – J.H. Stape, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Thirteen chapters offer diverse perspectives on emergent areas of interest, including canon formation, postcolonialism, gender, critical reception and adaptation.

The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad – John Stape, Arrow Books, 2008. A biography that puts its emphasis on Conrad’s life, rather than his work.

Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner – Peter Villiers, Seafarer Books, 2006. A biographical study which traces Conrad’s career as a sailor, and looks at the places he visited in relation to their depiction in his stories and novels.

Conrad in the Nineteenth Century – Ian Watt, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980. Close readings of the novels, full of quotes, detailed analysis and an acute explanation of the major themes of Conrad’s narratives.

Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work) – Cedric Watts, London: Northcote House, 1994. Explores Conrad’s importance and influence as a moral, social, and political commentator

Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition – Andrea White, Cambridge University Press, 2008. A study showing how Conrad demythologized and disrupted the imperial subject constructed in earlier writing, and arguing that the very complexity of Conrad’s work provided an alternative, and more critical, means of evaluating the experience of empire.

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Joseph Conrad prose style

March 18, 2014 by Roy Johnson

how to start analysing prose style

Joseph Conrad was famous for his prose style – yet English was his third language, the first two being Polish and French. He was not unlike the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who began writing in his native Russian, then switched to French, and finally started writing in English when he emigrated to America in 1940. Both of these authors are widely regarded as great prose stylists and masters of the English language.

Nevertheless, it is not unusual for some readers to complain about the difficulties they feel in grappling with Conrad’s style when encountering his writing for the first time. It’s true that his writing is not the clearest and easiest to understand: in fact a liking for his style is something of an acquired taste. But it is possible to come to terms with the difficulties he presents (the long, complex sentences and abstract language) with concentration, thoughtful reflection, and practice.

The tutorial notes that follow are one way of diffusing these problems by analysing some technical aspects of Conrad’s prose style. They are in no way rigorous or systematic: there are other types of close reading and analysis which can throw light on aspects of a writer’s prose style (see the examples listed below).

The extract which follows is from the opening pages of Conrad’s early story An Outpost of Progress, first published in 1897. It deals with two European characters who have recently arrived at a trading station somewhere in central Africa. If you wish to read the complete story in conjunction with these tutorial notes, it is available free at Project Gutenberg.

An Outpost of Progress

First edition – J.M.Dent & Sons 1912

Sample text

The two men watched the steamer round the bend, then, ascending arm in arm the slope of the bank, returned to the station. They had been in this vast and dark country only a very short time, and as yet always in the midst of other white men, under the eye and guidance of their superiors. And now, dull as they were to the subtle influences of surroundings, they felt themselves very much alone, when suddenly left unassisted to face the wilderness; a wilderness rendered more strange, more incomprehensible by the mysterious glimpses of the vigorous life it contained. They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one’s kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one’s thoughts, of one’s sensations—to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike.

Joseph Conrad prose style – analysis

Sentence length
Some of the sentences here are quite long – particularly the last. This is because he is expressing quite complex ideas or generating a very charged atmosphere. But they are not all long: the first, which deals with an action by characters, is much shorter.

Narrative mode
Conrad adopts the common third person omniscient narrative mode. That is, he tells us what his characters do, how they feel, and what they think. But you might notice that statements such as the one begriming ‘Few men realise’ is of a different kind than, say, ‘The two men watched’. Conrad stops telling the story for a moment and is offering us his opinion. In fact everything else up to the end of the paragraph is Conrad’s own general view of the world. He suddenly becomes what is called an ‘intrusive narrator’ at this point. He intervenes in his own narrative to comment on the story and offer his philosophic reflections on life in general.

It’s easy to overlook this distinction when engaged with the drama of the narrative, but it has an important bearing on our interpretation of the story. That’s because these intrusions into the story help him to project a particular view of the world – which add up to an ideology.

Language
You will probably notice that he uses a number of terms which will cause most people to think ‘Now what exactly does he mean by that?’ These are expressions such as ‘irresistible force’, ‘unmitigated savagery’, ‘negation of the habitual’, and ‘discomposing intrusion’. What make these difficult to grasp at first is that he is switching from the very concrete and specific descriptions of the two men and the trading station to an abstract and very general consideration of their moral condition.

This is almost the language of philosophy. The terms ‘force’, ‘savagery’, ‘habitual’, and ‘intrusion’ are all abstract nouns. We are not necessarily conscious of this whilst reading the text, but they take us away from the ‘story’ and force us to consider rather large scale social reflections.

In fact the combination of rather unusual and powerful adjective qualifying an abstract noun – ‘unmitigated savagery, ‘profound trouble’ – is a ‘trade mark’ of Conrad’s prose style. You will see many other examples in almost all his stories and novels.

Prose rhythm
In prose writing, rhythm is easier to feel than to define. You do not need to go into all the technical detail of stress analysis as you might with poetry, but it should be possible to sense that Conrad puts a lot of rhythmic emphasis into what he writes, using a number of literary devices more commonly found in poetry:

alliteration
repetition
balanced clauses

Alliteration
‘The courage, the composure, the confidence’ is a fairly obvious example of alliteration, with an insistent stress falling on the initial letter c in each of these words. Notice too that they are all abstract nouns.

Repetition
The expression ‘with primitive nature and primitive man’ combines both alliteration (in the initial letter p) with repetition of the word ‘primitive’ itself. You might also note that his use of the second ‘primitive’ here throws the emphasis onto the word that follows it – ‘man’. There are plenty of other examples of the same thing in this paragraph: ‘more strange, more incomprehensible’ and ‘every great and every insignificant’ are just two.

Repetition is just one of the rhetorical devices at work here: and rhetoric is ‘the art of speakers or writers to persuade, inform, or motivate their audience’.

Balanced clauses
The rather long sentences in this passage also contain a different kind of repetition – that is, clauses which are similar to each other in grammatical construction. These are sometimes called ‘balanced clauses’. The final sentence begins with the phrase ‘To the sentiment of being alone’, and in order to ‘tug’ us through the fairly lengthy reflection that follows Conrad repeats the initial ‘to’ and the construction of the clause of which it is a part. So we have, ‘To the sentiment of being … to the clear perception … to the negation of the habitual’.

Finally, look at the construction of the sentence that begins ‘Few men realise that their life’. Conrad wants to explain what he has in mind by using the term ‘life’, so he inserts two clauses which expand the notion. But in doing so, and whilst we are so to speak ‘waiting’ for the end of the sentence, his terms of expansion are nicely balanced: ‘the very essence of their character’ (with its emphasis falling on ‘essence’ and ‘character’, is paralleled by the following clause ‘their capabilities and their audacities’ with the emphasis falling again on two abstract nouns.

The abstraction forces readers into a quasi-philosophical mode of thinking about ‘life’. What exactly does he mean by people’s ‘capabilities’ and ‘audacities’? His answers will come from the events of the narrative itself – which show his two characters to be lazy, stupid, and moral cowards. This appears to ‘prove’ or at least justify his judgements about human beings and society in general – which is part of any writer’s conscious or unconscious objective.

Studying 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 is carefully graded, starting from simple issues of language then progressing to more complex issues. The single 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 notes on this page were written by the same author.
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Close reading exercises

Sample close reading of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House

Sample close reading of Katherine Mansfield’s The Voyage

Sample close reading of Virginia Woolf’s Monday or Tuesday

Other novels by Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
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Heart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
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Joseph Conrad 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.

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Joseph Conrad web links

December 10, 2010 by Roy Johnson

a selection of web-based archives and resources

This short selection of Joseph Conrad web links offers quick connections to resources for further study. It’s not comprehensive, and if you have any ideas for additional resources, please use the ‘Comments’ box below to make suggestions. The university-based web sites tend to be rather old in terms of graphic design, but have the advantage of depth in terms of content.

Joseph Conrad links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

critical survey and literary essays

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness book looks at the famous novella in detail from the perspective of the early twenty-first century and offers a series of critical essays which plot its reception and the establishment of its reputation. It begins with a long essay by the editor exploring its political, social, and literary background, offering a defence of Conrad. This is a counter to the criticisms made by Edward Said and Chinua Achebe which claim that Conrad, for all his liberalism, cannot conceal a submerged racism and imperialism from his critical gaze.

Heart of Darkness was written in 1899, and was based loosely on Conrad’s own experience as a seaman with a commission to sail up the Congo river in 1890. During the twentieth century it has become a central text in the discussion of European imperialism , and possibly the best known of Conrad’s works – even though his first commercial success did not come until much later with the publication of Chance in 1913.

D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke even puts in a spirited defence of Conrad as an even-handed writer in gender terms. I’m afraid he’s on something of a hopeless quest here, as anyone who has read widely in Conrad will know – particularly some of his deservedly less well-known short stories.

There’s a chapter which traces the critical debate on Heart of Darkness from its publication to the present day. This allows readers the opportunity to witness how succeeding generations have interpreted the text, and it’s a refreshing reminder that literary criticism has fads and fashions which change and even disappear.

The latter half of the book is given over to five extended critical readings of the text. These represent what are currently perceived as major schools of literary criticism – neo-Marxist, historicist, feminist, deconstructionist, and narratological. These will allow the serious students of literature at whom the book is aimed to sense the academic climate and see what to aim at in their own work.

The feminist critique takes up the conventional objection that Conrad’s works don’t include many female characters, and even includes a bizarre recipe for those who cannot accept that a writer might not share contemporary values.

Nina Pelikan Straus concluded that while women readers may find some way to appreciate the text (she offers a number of reading strategies), in the end the best that women readers can do is remain detached from Heart of Darkness and refuse to grant the status of high art to the work.

There’s also an interesting bonus – an appendix in which two film adaptations of the text are analysed. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now! (1979) and Nicholas Roeg’s Heart of Darkness (1994) are compared with the original text in a way which casts interesting light on both, though no mention is made of the ‘deleted’ scenes on the old French rubber plantation in Coppola’s film which would reinforce the fact that his work was about imperialism and not just war.

It’s a pity even more divergent views are not represented, but maybe there’s just not enough room in one volume. As Douglas Hewitt, one of the many critics cited in this very scholarly survey observes: “Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has had more critical attention per word than any other modern prose work”.

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D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Abingdon: Routledge, 2007, pp.160, ISBN 0415357764

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Jude the Obscure

October 11, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, resources, and web links

Jude the Obscure (1895) was the last of Thomas Hardy’s novels, and it is generally regarded as expressing his most tragic vision of the world. The novel was subject to extensive censorship on grounds of blasphemy and indecency when it was first published. It was this interference with the creative process that led Hardy to give up writing novels. After this point he concentrated instead on writing poetry, and went on to produce some of the greatest and most influential poems of the twentieth century.

In the novel Hardy explores themes that had interested him throughout his career as a novelist – education, class, sexuality, craftsmanship and tradition, the condition of marriage, and the forces of society and conventions that thwart individual ambition.

Jude the Obscure – a note on the text

The novel had a long and complex genesis. Hardy began its composition in 1890, writing from notes he had made in 1887. He worked on the narrative between 1892 and 1894, and it first saw light of day as a serial story in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine published simultaneously in London and New York.

During this time it had three separate titles – The Simpletons, Hearts Insurgent, and The Recalcitrants before Hardy settled on the final title. However, the text of this early version was heavily bowdlerised, and some of the incidents in the story were significantly different from the story in its final edited version.

The novel first appeared in volume form in 1895, published by Osgood McIlvaine. For this edition Hardy restored some of the missing scenes and put slightly different emphasis on the behaviour and motivation of his characters. It was not until Hardy revised the text for the 1912 edition of the ‘Wessex Edition’ of his novels published by Macmillan that the text became ‘stable’.

For a full account of the history of the text, see Patricia Ingham’s study The Evolution of Jude the Obscure.

Jude the Onscure – critical commentary

Structural parallels

Most readers will have little difficulty spotting the structural elements of the novel that twin and echo each other. Jude Fawley marries Arabella Donn, and lives to regret it. Then Sue Bridehead marries Richard Phillotson, and the result is the same. These parallels constitute the first part of the novel.

Sue and Jude then begin to live together, even though they are not married, but society puts obstacles in their way, because of the prejudice against ‘living in sin’. At this stage both Sue and Jude are both technically still married to other people. Jude is married to Arabella who has gone to Australia, and Sue is married to Phillotson, but has separated from him.

In an attempt to break the prejudice that society has against them, Jude and Sue both secure divorces, but they then live in a state of ambiguity. Many of the other characters they live amongst continue to imagine that they are either adulterous or bigamous. The couple make matters worse for themselves by pretending to get married, but they do not actually go through a formal ceremony. These events constitute the two main central sections of the novel.

Finally, Sue decides she must re-marry Phillotson even though she does not love him and finds him physically repulsive. Then Jude too re-marries Arabella (in a drunken stupor). The outcomes are equally disastrous for both characters. For Sue it is a living death, and for Jude it is death itself. These are the closing chapters of the novel. It is not surprising that many readers find these outcomes unbearably tragic – especially so since Jude’s son murders his brother and sister, then hangs himself.

The sensation novel

In the latter part of the nineteenth century there was a vogue for what was called the ‘sensation novel’. These were novels which featured plot elements of murder, disguise, bigamy, madness, blackmail, fraud, theft, kidnapping, incarceration, or disputed wills. They were a sort of half-way house between the conventional novel of social life and the Gothic horror story which also might include ghosts, vampires, ruined castles, and dead bodies.

Hardy steers clear of the Gothic, but he comes close to the sensation novel in his exploration of personal relationships, sexuality, and the conventions of marriage in Jude the Obscure. All the problems of censorship he endured at the first publication of the novel hinged on infractions of what were considered acceptable topics for polite literature.

At a very minor level, Arabella traps Jude into marriage by pretending to be pregnant after they first start their relationship. In other words, they have had sex before marriage – a phenomenon Hardy had featured in many of his other novels and stories – often citing ‘rural customs’ as justification.

Arabella leaves Jude, goes to Australia, and marries another man. She is therefore committing bigamy – but she argues on return that nobody worries about such matters “in the Colony”. When she returns to work at the modernised bar in Christminster, she and Jude spend the night together. The situation is morally problematic: she is technically bigamous – married to two men at the same time. But Jude has a sexual encounter with her that night (about which he later feels ambivalent). Actually, they are married to each other, but since she is also married to someone else (illegally) Jude is guilty by association. Jude however has the slim moral consolation that he does not know she is married to someone else until the next morning.

Jude and Sue spend a number of years living together even though they are not married – during which time they have two children. Hardy’s ‘argument’ against the conventions surrounding conventional marriage are that this period of their lives represents a ‘marriage of true minds’ [Shakespeare: Sonnet 113] as well as bodies (though these are not mentioned). Jude abd Sue are harassed for defying conventions, but they truly love and understand each other.

However, to live in defiance of society has its costs. They find it difficult to find accommodation, and eventually Sue undergoes a religious conversion that leads her into a state of mind in which she feels compelled to obey the letter of the law which she swore in marrying Phillotson. Since she does not love him and feels physically repelled by him, this a form of masochistic self-punishment.

In reaction to this turn of events, Jude does the same thing in re-marrying Arabella – a woman who he does not love, and the results are similarly negative. Hardy is using elements of the sensation novel to highlight his criticisms of the conventions and taboos surrounding marriage. The sensation elements are – bigamy, people ‘living in sin’, children born out of wedlock, and even the murder of children and suicide at the hands of Little Father Time.

Education

The most important secondary theme of the novel is education – and its relation to social class. Jude is the brightest student of the schoolmaster Phillotson, who at the start of the novel is leaving Marygreen to go to Christminster (Oxford) with the ambition of graduating and becoming a clergyman. Hardy accurately captures the relationship between the church and higher education that existed at that time. The sons of middle and upper class families would be privately educated, then expected to go to university as a natural step towards joining the professions – the church, law, medicine, or the army.

Phillotson does not make the grade. He remains a school teacher, and is even demoted to a teaching assistant because of his unorthodox personal life when he condones Sue’s leaving him to live with Jude. This is frowned upon socially, and it is significant that one of his reasons for re-marrying Sue is that it will enhance his chances of professional promotion.

Jude is a similar case – trapped as he is in an upper working class existence, He has the natural talents to teach himself Latin and Greek, which at that time were thought to be the natural subjects of study in what we now call higher education. As a stonemason he knows he has little chance of escaping his social status, yet he is aware that some provision was being made for working students in the universities

Once again Hardy was entirely accurate historically. Ruskin College Oxford was established in 1899 for the education of working men, and the Cambridge ‘extension classes’ were instituted around the same time – though these were to ‘offer’ academic lectures to working people, rather than enrolling them as students who might graduate.

Jude is enterprising enough to write to one of the college masters for advice on gaining entry – only to be rebuffed by a reply telling him he would do better to remain in his present station. Jude is mortified by this response, and it contributes to his growing sense of disillusionment.

Ultimately he is employed in repairing the stonework of the very buildings that have housed the rejection of him intellectual aspirations. The tragic decline of his hopes reaches its nadir when he denounces the former university luminaries who were formerly his cultural heroes.

This thwarting of intellectual ambitions, combined with the problems of his personal life, contribute powerfully to the tragic sense of resolution in the novel. This double sense of disappointment for the characters may be one of the reasons many readers find the novel a difficult literary experience to endure.

Jude the Onscure – study resources

Jude the Obscure – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Jude the Obscure – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Jude the Obscure – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Jude the Obscure – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Jude the Obscure – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Jude the Obscure – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Jude the Obscure – York Notes – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle eBook

Jude the Onscure – chapter summaries

Part First- at Marygreen

I – i Richard Phillotson takes leave of his favourite pupil Jude Fawley as he goes to Christminster to pursue his ambition of obtaining a degree and becoming a clergyman.

I – ii Farmert Troutham beats and sacks Jude from his job of scaring birds off the corn. Jude’s great-aunt reproaches him, and he feels he does not want to be grown up. He walks out of the village to look towards Christminster.

I – iii Jude looks on Christchurch from afar, investing it with romantic powers. A group of wagoners he meets reinforce the notion that life there is lived on a higher plane.

I – iv The quack physician Vilbert promises to bring Jude his old Latin and Greek primers – but fails to do so. Jude writes to Phillotson for grammar guides, but is disappointed when they do not offer simple formulas for translation.

I – v Jude expands his aunt’s bakery business and reads classics whilst making his deliveries. He then becomes an apprentice stonemason in a nearby town.

I – vi Whilst dreaming of Christminster Jude meets Arabella when she throws a pig’s penis at him. He is powerfully attracted to her.

I – vii Next day despite his wish to study, he goes out with Arabella and they very rapidly become close. Arabella discusses her success with friends, who advise her to secure such a good prospect of marriage by entrapment.

I – viii Arabella flirts with Jude and leads him on. Arranging for her parents to be absent, she and Jude end up in her house alone at night – upstairs.

I – ix Two months later Arabella announces that she is pregnant. Jude is only nineteen when he marries her. However, she later reveals that she was ‘mistaken’. Jude immediately feels trapped.

I – x Jude and Arabella inefficiently kill the pig they have been fattening. They argue about the origin and the state of their marriage.

I – xi Next day they quarrel again. Jude feels that his marriage is a disaster. He learns from his aunt that bad marriages are a feature of the Fawley family. He thinks of suicide, then gets drunk. When he arrives home Arabella has left – and she emigrates to Australia with her parents.

Part Second – Christminster

II – i Three years later Jude arrives in Christminster (prompted by a photo of Sue Bridehead, his cousin). He wanders through the city at night, invoking the spirit of its former luminaries.

II – ii Jude looks for work as a stonemason and also locates Sue Bridehead. He has promised his aunt he will not pursue any sort of romantic liaison with her

II – iii Jude traces Sue to a Sunday service in church, but still does not approach her, mindful of his still being married. Sue buys two figures of pagan gods Venus and Apollo and keeps them in her room.

II – iv Jude is consumed by his sexual desire for Sue, but he still regards his marriage vows as a hindrance – until he gets a note form Sue introducing herself as his cousin. They visit Phillotson, who goes on to hire Sue as an assistant teacher.

II – v Sue is successful as a teacher, and Phillotson begins to develop a romantic interest in her. Jude is disappointed, but feels he is hamstrung because of his marriage to Arabella.

II – vi Jude is warned again by his aunt to stay away from Sue. He despairs of his plans to become a student, and receives a crushing reply to a letter requesting advice from a college Master.

II – vii Jude is completely despondent. He resorts to drink, recites Latin in the pub, and goes back to. Marygreen, where he talks about joining the church.

Part Third – at Melchester

III – i Jude and Sue both move to Melchester to study. She tells him she is engaged to Phillotson, who she will marry after her two years of study.

III – ii< Jude and Sue spend a day in the countryside and miss the last train home. They stay overnight in a shepherd’s cottage.

III – iii The next day Sue is reprimanded by her college for staying out. She escapes from confinement, crosses a river, and goes to Jude, who dresses her in his spare clothes.

III – iv Sue tells Jude about her sexless relationship with a young undergraduate. They exchange criticisms of Christminster, and she promises not to vex him with her religious scepticism.

III – v Sue moves to Shaston a nearby town and she is dismissed from the college for disgraceful behaviour with Jude. He visits her, even though she is very capricious towards him. He has still not told her he is married.

III – vi Richard Phillotson has also moved to Shaston. He visits Melchester and learns that Sue has been expelled. At the cathedral he meets Jude, who explains the truth about what happened. Jude meets Sue and tells her about Arabella. They part as friends, not lovers.

III – vii Sue decides to marry Phillotson, and asks Jude to give her away at the wedding. She rehearses the ceremony with Jude in an empty church.

III – viii On a visit back to Christminster Jude meets Arabella working in a modernised pub. She persuades him to stay overnight in a nearby village.

III – ix Next day Arabella reveals that she contracted a bigamous marriage whilst in Australia. They part inconclusively. He meets Sue and they travel to Marygreen where their aunt is ill. Sue reveals that whilst Phillotson is honourable, she regrets marrying him. Jude gets a letter from Arabella, telling him she is re-joining her Australian husband in London

III – x Jude visits the composer of an affecting hymn, hoping to share spiritual confidences – only to find him setting up a wine franchise.

Part Fourth – at Shaston

IV – i Jude visits Sue at her school in Shaston. They are very close, but then she capriciously makes him leave.

IV – ii Jude’s aunt dies. He meets Sue for the funeral. She reveals her ‘repugnance’ for Phillotson, and she feels trapped in the conventions of marriage.

IV – iii Jude cannot reconcile his sexual desire for Sue with his religious aspirations – so he burns his books. Sue asks Phillotson if she can go to live with Jude. They exchange notes between their classrooms discussing the matter.

IV -iV Phillotson consults his friend Gillingham, who advises him to avoid scandal. But Phillotson has come round to a full understanding and acceptance of Sue’s position, and he agrees to let her leave.

IV – v Jude and Sue elope together. She insists that they are to be ‘just ‘good friends’ and she behaves in a tantalising, contradictory manner towards him. They stay in separate rooms. Arabella has meanwhile asked for a divorce.

IV – vi Phillotson is asked to resign because of the scandal, but he refuses and defends himself at a public enquiry, then becomes ill. Sue visits him compassionately He asks her to stay, but she refuses – so he thinks to divorce her.

Part Fifth – at Aldbrickham

V – i The following year both Arabella’s and Phillotson’s divorces become absolute, but Sue does not want to marry Jude. They live together chastely, in separate rooms in the same house.

V – ii Arabella calls at the house asking for help. When Jude offers to see her, Sue puts up a jealous protest, and in the end offers herself sexually to Jude if he agrees not to help Arabella. Next day Sue exchanges views on Jude and marriage with Arabella, who is going back to her Australian husband.

V – iii Sue and Jude agree to delay getting married. A letter from Arabella reveals the existence of Jude’s son, who turns up the very next day – an old man in a boy’s body. Sue agrees to be like a mother to him.

V – iv Sue and Jude go off to the registry office to get married, but they are frightened off by the bad state of other couples there. They go into a church to watch a religious ceremony and come to the same conclusion – that for them marriage would be a dangerous and bad risk.

V – v Arabella and her husband see Sue and Jude at an agricultural fair. Despite their closeness, Arabella thinks she intuits Sue’s lack of passion. She buys a quack love philtre from Vilbert.

V – vi Sue and Jude go secretly to London and let it be known they are married. They secure a church restoration commission together, but are dismissed because the locals think they are not married. Jude. Is forced to auction the family furniture.

V – vii Three years later Sue has two children, Jude is ill, and they have the widow Endlin living with them. Arabella, now a widow, meets Sue whilst she is selling ginger cakes at an agricultural fair at Kennetbridge.

V – viii Driving back from the fair, Arabella decides she wants Jude back again. She meets Phillotson, who is living in reduced circumstances. Jude decides he wants to go back to Christminster.

Book Sixth – at Christminster again

VI- i Jude and family arrive in Christminster on Founders’ Day and he is humiliated again over his academic ‘failure’ They cannot find accommodation, and Sue is asked to leave one house because she admits to not being married.

VI – ii Father Time reproaches Sue for having so many children, then he hangs her son and daughter and himself ‘because we are so many’. When the children are buried Sue wants to open the coffins to see them one last time. Later the same day she gives birth to a dead child.

VI – iii Sue and Jude recover financially, but Sue falls into intellectual despair and wishes to punish herself. She feels that their relationship has been wrong, self-indulgent, and that she really still belongs to Phillotson. She and Jude argue over this reversal in her beliefs. She insists that Jude leave her and that they revert to being just friends.

VI – iv Phillotson is brought abreast of events by Arabella. He thinks to accept Sue back again, and writes to tell her so. Sue announces to Jude that she is going to re-marry Phillotson, even though she does not love him.

VI – v Sue returns to Phillotson, but is forcing herself on principle. He plans a wedding for the next day. Widow Edlin thinks it is an ill-advised venture. They marry in a joyless manner, and Phillotson accepts that the marriage will be loveless and sexless – but good for his career prospects.

VI – vi Arabella argues with her father and asks Jude for temporary shelter. She brings him news of Sue’s marriage, which sends him back to the public house to drown his sorrows. Arabella gets him drunk, then seduces him.

VI – vii Arabella moves Jude into her father’s house with an intention of re-marrying him. She organises an all-night drinking party, then the following morning Jude marries her for a second time whilst he is still drunk.

VI – viii Jude falls ill, and gets Arabella to write to Sue, asking to see her again. But Arabella doesn’t post the letter. Jude goes in the rain to see Sue. They reproach each other, declare their enduring love, then separate.

VI – ix Arabella meets Jude at the station, and they walk through Christminster whilst he repudiates all his old intellectual heroes. Sue thinks she must make the ultimate sacrifice of making herself sexually available to Phillotson – which she does with great reluctance and distaste.

VI – x Jude becomes ill again. Mrs Edlin tells him about Sue’s capitulation to Phillotson, and it breaks his spirit. Arabella flirts with the quack doctor Vilbert.

VI – xi Arabella checks on Jude, and finds he is dead. She nevertheless goes out to the boating party in Christminster with Vilbert. Two days later Mrs Edlin and Arabella exchange views across Jude’s open coffin. Mrs Edlin reports that Sue is worn down and miserable. Arabella thinks that Sue will not feel any peace until death finds her.

Jude the Obscure – principal characters

Jude Fawley	young stonemason with academic ambitions
Sue Bridehead	Jude’s free-spirited but frigid cousin
Arabella Donn	sensuous daughter of a pig farmer
Richard Phillotson	a rather puritanical schoolmaster
Little Father Time	Arabella and Jude’s melancholy son
Pruscilla Fawley	Jude’s great-aunt
Mr Vilbert	a quack physician
Mr Cartlett	Arabella’s Australian husband

Hardy’s study

reconstructed in Dorchester museum

Jude the Obscure – further reading

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Authors in Context – Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy – Amazon UK

Thomas Hardy: The Tragic Novels – Amazon UK

Thomas Hardy: The Tragic Novels – Amazon US

A Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Palgrave Advances in Thomas Hardy Studies – Amazon UK

Other works by Thomas Hardy

Tess 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.
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The 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.
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Wessex 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.
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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.

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

Julia Bride

June 9, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Julia Bride first appeared in Harper’s Magazine in March-April 1908. It is collected in Volume XII of The Complete Tales of Henry James (Rupert Hart-Davis) 1964.

The Metropolitan Museum – Frank Waller (1842-1923)

Julia Bride – critical commentary

The woman question

Readers of this story will not fail to recognise its similarity to Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth which was published three years earlier. Henry James was great friend and admirer of his fellow American writer, and her heroine Lily Bart faces very similar problems to those of Julia Bride. However, Wharton takes her heroine’s situation to a further extreme than James. Lily Bart is actually reduced to working for her living, and is so unused to it she becomes a drug addict. This is something James seems almost to hint at in his remarks to his ‘Preface’ to the New York Edition of his Collected Works:

Julia is ‘foreshortened’, I admit, to within an inch of her life; but I judge her life still saved and yet at the same time the equal desideratum, its depicted full fusion with other lives that remain undepicted, not lost.

This seems to be Henry James’s way of saying that this is a short story – not the more fully developed novella or the full length novel that Edith Wharton brought off so successfully. He cannot pretend to encompass the full resolution of Julia Bride’s situation or those of the people who surround her. So technically, the story ends in an unresolved state.

But there seems to be very little alternative to seeing her story as a tragedy with a fairly conclusive ending. After all, it is very unlikely that a young woman with such a disreputable family background, no money, and six failed engagements behind her would ever find success in the upper echelons of old-fashioned and hidebound American society.

Julia is caught in the pincer movement of the new possibilities of social fluidity, class mobility, and personal freedoms offered by American society, and the rigid ethics, snobbery, and financially-based social codes that America had imported from Europe.

New social movements such as divorce and re-marriage are available under the freedoms of an open, democratic, and republican society which has freed itself from the organizational shackles of its European forebears. It is even possible to become engaged more than once. But the deeper ideological undercurrents of this society are deeply enmeshed in capital accumulation and preserving status via intermarriage amongst an elite class.

As is commonly remarked amongst commentators on this story, Julia will always be a Bride, but it is unlikely she will ever get married.

Public places

It is worth noting that the main events of the story are enacted in very public places. The narrative begins in the Metropolitan Museum and its denouement takes place in Central Park. Julia is able to talk to Basil French and then Mr Pitman without putting her reputation at risk, because they are in public view in the museum. She then arranges to meet Murray Brush in the Park for similar reasons.

At the end of the nineteenth century and even the beginning of the twentieth, young unmarried people had to be very circumspect about who they met, and in what circumstances. This was particularly true for women. A hidden irony in this story is that Julia has already compromised herself socially by having six previous engagements.

Even visits to family homes had to be carefully orchestrated so as not to give rise to any social comment, and of course the visit itself would be carefully monitored for both content and duration. This explains the frequency with which broughams and cabs outside someone’s front door are featured in stories and novels of the period. The livery of the vehicle would be a clear indication of ownership. It was a society in which everybody knew everybody else’s business, and social reputations were held in very high esteem – albeit often at a theoretical level.

Of course all this only pertained to the very small social elite which constituted the upper class and the aristocracy of a given European or American society. This is one of the things which makes novels a rich form of social history – because they include a record of the manners and morals of this part of society at the time, the details and social nuances of which are not easily obtainable elsewhere.

Julia Bride – study resources

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

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

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

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

Julia Bride – Digireads reprint – Amazon UK

Julia Bride – eBook at Project Gutenberg

Julia Bride – read the story on line

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

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

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Julia Bride – plot summary

Part I. Julia Bride is being courted by Basil French, the son of a wealthy but very traditional New York family. They meet in the Metropolitan Museum then part leaving her worried. He wants to know more about her background, and she is reluctant to let him know that her mother has been divorced twice (and is soon likely to be so for a third time). Moreover Julia herself has been engaged six times. In the museum she meets Mr Pitman, her mother’s second husband, with whom she has remained friendly.

Part II. She hopes he might be able to help her out of her social dilemma, but in fact he wants her to help him in a similar but contradictory manner. He asks her to plead his innocence with Mrs Drack, a wealthy widow who he hopes to marry. Julia in her turn wants Pitman to eradicate in the eyes of Basil French both her mother’s guilt in her divorce, and her own six previous engagements – largely by telling lies. Julia feels kindly disposed to Pitman, and ends up singing his praises to Mrs Drack. At Pitman’s suggestion Julia then contacts Murray Brush, the most recent of her ex-fiancées and asks him to announce publicly that their relationship was only ever one of close friendship. She hopes this will effectively wipe her slate clean so far as Basil French is concerned.

Part III. Brush readily agrees, and for good measure announces that he is going to be married to Mary Lindeck. He wants Julia to meet her and promises that she will help in their endeavour. But as this apparently successful meeting continues, Julia begins to feel that Murray is agreeing to her plan in the hope of meeting the much richer Frenches with a view to socially advancing himself and his wife to be. Julia is devastated by this realisation, feels that she is doomed to failure, and is left in a tragically sentimental admiration of Basil French – a man who can have such an effect of others, and whom she will never gain.

Principal characters

Julia Bride	a beautiful single young American girl with a chequered past
Mrs Connery	her mother (47) who has been divorced twice
Mr Pitman	the second of her mother’s husbands
Basil French	the rich young son of a wealthy traditional family
Mr Connery	Julia’s mother’s third husband – ‘irrepressibly vulgar’
Mrs David E. Drack	a wealthy and overweight widow
Murray Brush	Julia’s most recent ex-financé
Mary Lindeck	Murray Brush’s fiancée

Henry James and Edith Wharton go motoring

Other works by Henry James

Washington Square (1880) is a superb early short novel, It’s the tale of a young girl whose future happiness is being controlled by her strict authoritarian (but rather witty) father. She is rather reserved, but has a handsome young suitor. However, her father disapproves of him, seeing him as an opportunist and a fortune hunter. There is a battle of wills – all conducted within the confines of their elegant New York town house. Who wins out in the end? You will probably be surprised by the outcome. This is a masterpiece of social commentary, offering a sensitive picture of a young woman’s life.
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The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
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The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
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Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julia Stephen

January 8, 2014 by Roy Johnson

Julia Stephen (1846-1895) was Virginia Woolf’s mother – and you can see their resemblance very clearly in the picture below. She was born in Calcutta, India to parents Dr John and Maria Pattle Jackson, and was the youngest of their three daughters. She was also the niece of famous Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. In 1848 she moved back to England with her mother and sisters to live in Hendon, her father following some years later.

Photo by Julia Margaret Cameron

One of her sisters, Sarah, married the Victorian politician and historian Henry Thoby Prinsep, whose home at Little Holland House was an important meeting place for writers, painters, and politicians. Visiting her brother-in-law’s house, the very attractive Julia became something of a famous society beauty and was a model for painters such as Edward Burne-Jones, George Frederick Watts, and William Holman Hunt.

In 1867 she married the barrister Herbert Duckworth, with whom she had three children, the youngest of whom (Gerald) went on later in life to establish the Duckworth publishing company. Her marriage was blissfully happy, and when her husband died suddenly in 1870 she went into a profound state of shock which left her in a permanent state of stoical gravity and bereavement

Through her friend Anne Thackeray, the daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, she met the biographer and essayist Leslie Stephen, who at that time was married to Thackeray’s other daughter, Harriet.

Julia was influenced by Leslie Stephen’s writings on agnosticism, and when his wife died suddenly in 1875 she helped him to move to a house nearby her own in Hyde Park Gate in Kensington. Stephen declared his love for her in 1877, but she felt that she could not ever marry again, so they agreed to remain very close friends. However, a year later she changed her mind and they both married for a second time.

Four children appeared in quick succession – Vanessa (1879), Thoby (1880), Virginia (1882), and Adrian (1883) – and they lived together with the three children from her first marriage, George, Stella, and Gerald Duckworth. Julia participated (erratically) in the home education of her daughters, but a great deal of her emotional energy went into supporting her husband Leslie, who suffered from depression. She also nursed her own parents until their deaths.

In fact she dedicated herself to looking after other people, and spent a great deal of her time to nursing the sick and dying. She travelled around London visiting hospitals and workhouses, and in 1883 she published Notes from Sick Rooms which is a discussion of good nursing practice and includes a rather witty section discussing the discomfort caused by crumbs in bed. Despite these humanitarian activities, she signed a petition against female suffrage in 1889, believing that a woman’s role in society should be limited to philanthropy and the domestic sphere.

Following a bad bout of influenza she died in 1895 at home in Hyde Park Gate, and was buried in Highgate cemetery.

The Bloomsbury Group is a short but charming book, published by the National Portrait Gallery. It explores the impact of Bloomsbury personalities on each other, plus how they shaped the development of British modernism in the early part of the twentieth century. But most of all it’s a delightful collection of portrait paintings and photographs, with biographical notes. It has an introductory essay which outlines the development of Bloomsbury, followed by a series of portraits and the biographical sketches of the major figures who had such a profound influence on the world of literature and the arts between 1900 and 1940.
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Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

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

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group
Twentieth century literature

Karain: A Memory

October 4, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, characters, and study resources

Karain: A Memory was written in February-April 1897 and published in the November 1897 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine. Its first appearance in book form was as part of Tales of Unrest published by in 1898, which was Conrad’s first collection of stories. The other stories in the book were The Idiots, An Outpost of Progress, The Return, and The Lagoon.

Karain: A Memory – plot summary

Part I. An un-named narrator describes the first visit of his schooner to the small fiefdom of Karain in an isolated part of the Malayan archipelago. Karain is a colourful and confident leader who the narrator likens to an actor. He is surrounded by loyal followers, and he buys illegally-traded guns and ammunition from the narrator.

Part II. At night Karain visits the schooner, always with an armed attendant at his back. He asks the narrator questions about Queen Victoria and tells him about his own mother who was a local ruler: he is her son from a second marriage. Once he was attacked by natives from beyond the nearby mountains but he killed most of the attackers and the rest never came back. He dispenses justice amongst his `people’, is much revered, and enjoys huge banquets.

Part III. The narrator visits him for two years, perceives him to be planning a war, and tries to warn him about forces beyond his own domain; but he fails to understand such concepts. On the occasion of his last visit the chief’s old henchman has died and Karain himself is ill. The trade in munitions takes place, then there is a tropical storm.

Karain suddenly appears on the schooner, having swum to the ship after escaping from his stockade. He fears that some invisible spirit is pursuing him, and he wants the crew to take him away.

Part IV. Karain relates how a Dutchman set up home in the locality of his friend Pata Malara. Then Malara`s sister joins the Dutchman, bringing dishonour onto her family. When the Dutchman leaves with the sister, Malara decides to follow and strike vengeance. Karain decides to go with him out of loyalty to his friend. They sail to Java and go on an extended and fruitless search which lasts for two years or more.

Karain falls in love with the image of Malara`s sister who they are hunting down. Eventually they find them both, whereupon Malara wants to kill his sister to avenge the family`s honour. He gives Karain a gun to shoot the Dutchman, but instead Karain shoots his friend Malara.

Part V. Karain runs away and survives in a forest, but he is visited by the ghost of Malara. He moves on and meets an old man who becomes his henchman, protecting him from `the dead’. But now that old man has died Karain has become vulnerable again to spirits. He thinks he will be safe amongst people who do not believe in the spirit world. He wants them to provide him with a weapon or charm against his demon.

Part VI. Hollis produces a box containing a sixpence which bears Queen Victoria`s head. He makes it into a charm, then they present it to Karain and convince him it will keep the spirit at bay. Karain goes back to his people.

The story ends with the narrator meeting Jackson in London some years later, and they recall Karain amidst the bustle of the capital city.

Study resources

Tales of Unrest – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

Tales of Unrest – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

Tales of Unrest – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Karain: A Memory – principal characters

—	an un-named narrator
Karain	a war lord of three coastal villages, originally from Les Celebes
Pata Malara	Karain’s friend
Hollis	a young mate
Jackson	an old guitar-playing sailor

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

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

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
Joseph Conrad complete tales

Katherine Mansfield criticism

May 11, 2015 by Roy Johnson

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

Katherine Mansfield criticism is a bibliography of critical comment on Mansfield and her works, with details of each publication and a brief description of its contents. The details include active web links to Amazon where you can buy the books, often in a variety of formats – new, used, and as Kindle eBooks and print-on-demand reissues. The listings are arranged in alphabetical order of author.

The list includes new books and older publications which may now be considered rare. It also includes versions of older texts which are much cheaper than the original. Others (including some new books) are often sold off at rock bottom prices. Whilst compiling these listings a paperback copy of Antony Alper’s biography The Life of Katherine Mansfield was available at Amazon for one penny.

The Life of Katherine Mansfield – Antony Alpers, Oxford University Press, 1987. This is one of the first serious biographies, written by fellow New Zealander and Mansfield scholar Antony Alpers.

Katherine Mansfield – Ida Constance Baker, London: Michael Joseph, 1971. A memoir by Mansfield’s long-suffering yet most devoted friend.

Katherine Mansfield (Writers & Their Work) – Andrew Bennet, Northcote House Publishers, 2002. This book offers a new introduction to Katherine Mansfield’s short stories informed by recent biographical, critical and editorial work on her life and on her stories, letters and notebooks.

Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer – Gillian Boddy, Penguin Books, 1988.

Illness, Gender, and Writing: The Case of Katherine Mansfield – Mary Burgan, Johns Hopkins Press, 1994. This study shows how Mansfield negotiated her illnesses in a way that sheds new light on the study of women’screativity. It concludes that Mansfield’s drive toward self-integration was her strategy for writing–and for staying alive.

Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories – Pamela Dunbar, Palgrave Schol Print, 1997. A new evaluation of Katherine Mansfield reveals her as an original and highly subversive writer preoccupied with issues like sexuality and the irrationality of the human mind.

Katherine Mansfield – Joanna FitzPatrick, La Drome Press, 2014.

Katherine Mansfield (Key Women Writers) – Kate Fullbrook, Prentice Hall, 1986.

Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories – Cherry A. Hankin, London: P{algrave Macmillan, 1983.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence – Melinda Harvey, Edinburgh University Press, 2015. This study shows that ‘influence’ is as often unconscious as it is conscious, and can be evidenced by such things as satire, plagiarism, yearning and resentment.
Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller – Kathleen Jones, Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Weaving together intimate details from Katherine Mansfield’s letters and journals with the writings of her friends and acquaintances, this study creates a captivating drama of this fragile yet feisty author: her life, loves and passion for writing.
Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction – Sydney Janet Kaplan, Cornell University Press, 1991.

Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays – Gerri Kimber (ed), London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. A collection which ncludes essays by major scholars in several areas including musicology, postcolonial theory, epistolary and biographical studies, representing recent developments in Modernist studies and thus exploring her continued literary legacy to contemporary writers.

Katherine Mansfield and World War One – Gerri Kimber (ed), Edinburgh University Press, 2014.The articles in this volume provide us with a greater appreciation of Mansfield in her socio-historical context. In offering new readings of Mansfield’s explicit and implicit war stories, these essays refine and extend our knowledge of particular stories and their genealogy.

Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story – Gerri Kimber, Palgrave Pivot, 2014. This volume offers an introductory overview to the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, discussing a wide range of her most famous stories from different viewpoints. The book elaborates on Mansfield’s themes and techniques, thereby guiding the reader – via close textual analysis – to an understanding of the author’s modernist techniques.

Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe: Connections and Influences – Gerri Kimber (ed), London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. This collection of essays offers new interpretations of Katherine Mansfield’s work by bringing together recent biographical and critical-theoretical approaches to her life and art in the context of Continental Europe.

Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public – Jenny McDonnell, London: Palgrave Schol Print, 2010. This study provides the first comprehensive study of Mansfield’s career as a professional writer in a commercial literary world, during the years that saw the emergence and consolidation of literary modernism in Britain.
Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View – Jeffrey Meyers, Cooper Square Publishers, 2002. This study chronicles her tempestuous relationships (that mixed abuse with devotion) and the years she fought a losing battle with tuberculosis.

Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction – Patrick D. Morrow, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1993. This book attempts to analyze a major part of Mansfield’s fiction, concentrating on an analysis of the various textures, themes, and issues, plus the point of view virtuosity that she accomplished in her short lifetime.

The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks – Margaret Scott, University of Minnesota Press, 2002. The first unexpurgated edition of her private writings. Fully and accurately transcribed, these diary entries, drafts of letters, introspective notes jotted on scraps of paper, unfinished stories, half-plotted novels, poems, recipes, and shopping lists offer a complete and compelling portrait of a complex woman.

Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life (Literary Lives) – Angela Smith, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. This study explores Mansfield’s idiosyncratic aesthetic by focusing on her position as an outsider in Britain: a New-Zealander, a woman writer, a Fuavist, and eventually a consumptive.

Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life – Claire Tomalin, London: Penguin, 2012. A biography which captures the creative zest of a writer who was sexually ambiguous, craving love yet quarrelsome and capricious, her beauty and recklessness inspiring admiration, jealousy, rage and devotion.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism – Janet Wilson (ed), London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Reinterpretations and readings enhanced by new transcriptions of manuscripts and access to Mansfield’s diaries and letters. These essays combine biographical approaches with critical-theoretical ones and focus not only on philosophy and fiction, but class, gender, and biography/autobiography.

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

Kerfol

June 15, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

Kerfol first appeared in the Scribner’s Magazine number 59 for March 1916. The story was included in the collection Xingu and Other Stories published in New York by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1916. It is one of the many ghost stories Edith Wharton wrote and was also included in the collection Ghosts published in 1937.

cover design by Parish Maxfield

Kerfol – critical commentary

The principal feature of interest in this story is the manner in which the narrative is unfolded. The un-named narrator is encouraged to buy the old Brittany chateau, and visits a perfectly credible if slightly romantic old building with a moat, high walls, a garden and a tower. The only strange element is the absence of human habitation and the presence of so many unusually quiet dogs.

This introductory episode is then contrasted with and expanded upon in the reconstruction of the murder trial which the narrator makes from old court records. These events reveal the passionate drama of the imprisoned beauty (Anne) her cruel husband (Yves) and her would-be lover (Hervé). who is a relative and namesake of the friend of the narrator in the fictional ‘present’.

The ghosts of the story are not those of former human beings, but dogs seeking vengeance on the man who has strangled them to terrorise his wife. This is a reasonable variation on the Gothic horror story which has lingered from its heyday in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to its fashionable revival at the begriming of the twentieth.

Edith Wharton wrote a number of ghost stories, and like her friend Henry James who did the same, she tried to create inventive variations on the plots and themes of this genre. Kerfol has a number of standard elements – the old deserted chateau, a wicked ‘King’, his beautiful young wife, and the would-be swain (all figures out of medieval romance) but to make the ghosts a pack of avenging dogs is something of a novelty, even if the outcome so far as Anne is concerned provides the tale with a conventionally grim ending and tragic victim.

Kerfol – study resources

The Works of Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Works of Edith Wharton – Amazon US

The New York Stories – NYRB – Amazon UK

The New York Stories – NYRB – Amazon US

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Descent of Man and Other Stories – Project Gutenberg

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Kerfol – plot summary

Part I. At the suggestion of his friend Lanvirain, an un-named narrator goes to visit an old semi-fortified mansion in Brittany. He is impressed by its age and the sense of history it exudes. No guardian or owners appear, but he is met by a pack of assorted dogs which are mysteriously quiet. When he returns to his friend’s house that night, Mrs Lanvirain tells him that the dogs are the ‘ghosts of Kerfol’.

Part II. Next day Lanvirain lends him an old book containing the history of Kerfol, which the narrator then transcribes to reconstruct the historic events that constitute the remainder of the story.

Part III. Some time during the seventeenth century, the lord of Kerfol, widower Yves de Cornault takes a new young wife Anne. The marriage is childless but successful. He is very strict with her, but showers her with valuables. After one trip away on business, he brings her a little brown dog.

When de Cornault is suddenly found mutilated and dead in the mansion, suspicion falls on his young wife, because she is discovered in the same place, covered in blood.

There is a trial, throughout which she maintains her innocence. But she is prepared to admit that on the night of the murder she had an assignation with Hervé de Lanvirain. She also claims that her husband had strangled her pet dog.

She met Lanrivain whilst on a religious visit, and he offered her his sympathy and support. When he leaves for a foreign journey, she gives him the dog’s collar as a memento. Her husband returns to the mansion and strangles the dog with the same collar. She obtains another dog, but he strangles that one too. The same thing happens to further dogs.

She then receives a secret message from Lanvirain and that night goes to meet him. When her husband suddenly appears at the top of the stairs, she claims he was attacked and mauled to death by a pack of dogs.

At the trial she is not convicted, but put in the care of her husband’s family. They shut her up in the dungeon at Kerfol where she dies many years later, having gone mad.

Kerfol – Principal characters

I	an un-named narrator
Hervé de Lanvirain	his friend
Yves de Cornault	despotic lord of Kerfol
Anne de Cornault	his pretty and much younger wife
Hervé de Lanvirain	her would-be lover

Edith Wharton’s writing

Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
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The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
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Edith Wharton – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

how to start analysing prose style

Sample text

Joseph Conrad prose style – analysis

Close reading exercises

Other novels by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad links

a selection of web-based archives and resources

Joseph Conrad links

critical survey and literary essays

tutorial, study guide, resources, and web links

Jude the Obscure – a note on the text

Jude the Onscure – critical commentary

Jude the Onscure – study resources

Jude the Onscure – chapter summaries

Jude the Obscure – principal characters

Hardy’s study

Jude the Obscure – further reading

Other works by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy – web links

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Julia Bride – critical commentary

Julia Bride – study resources

Julia Bride – plot summary

Principal characters

Further reading

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

Bloomsbury Group – web links

tutorial, commentary, characters, and study resources

Karain: A Memory – plot summary

Study resources

Karain: A Memory – principal characters

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Further reading

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad links

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

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

Kerfol – critical commentary

Kerfol – study resources

Kerfol – plot summary

Kerfol – Principal characters

Further reading

Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton – web links

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