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Sir Edmund Orme

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Sir Edmund Orme (1891) is one of James’s ghost stories, a literary genre which was very popular towards the end of the nineteenth century. It first appeared in the Christmas edition of the magazine Black and White and features a variation of the supernatural tale in which the ‘ghost’ is only visible to certain people. And although the story contains a suicide and two sudden deaths, the ghost actually appears to have a benign, protective purpose. It is presented as almost a ‘friendly’ ghost.

Sir Edmund Orme

Brighton – 19th century

Sir Edmund Orme – critical commentary

The framed narrative

The story is presented to us by an un-named outer narrator who has come across a written account of events. These have been written by the inner narrator who is also the principal male figure in the story, and is also un-named.

This is a device James used a number of times – most notably in The Turn of the Screw, and like that more famous novella, the story in not in fact fully ‘framed’. That is, we are given an account of the origin of a text, but the story finishes at the end of that text. We do not go back to rejoin the introduction in any meaningful way.

The outer narrator also admits that he has no proof that the events described actually took place. The author of the text, which has been kept in a locked drawer, has written the account for his own purposes. This leaves scope for ambiguities within the tale – as well as for a variety of possible interpretations.

The ghostly element

We normally expect ghosts to be sinister and threatening. They usually appear at night, dawn, or dusk, and have a disreputable appearance and a malevolent purpose. But Sir Edmund Orme appears in broad daylight, in very public places (Brighton seafront, Tranton church) and he is well dressed and behaves with impeccable reserve.

In fact we learn, first from Mr Marden and then from the narrator’s surmise, that Sir Edmund has a protective function. He appears to Mrs Marden as an uncomfortable reminder of her previous cruelty in jilting Sir Edmund in favour of Captain Marden, but he is acting to prevent any repetition of such behaviour by her daughter. The narrator’s analysis is based on the egotistical supposition that he is being protected:

It was a case of retributive justice … The wretched mother was to pay, in suffering, for the suffering she had inflicted, and as the disposition to trifle with an honest man’s just expectations might crop up again, to my detriment, in the child, the latter young person was to be studied and watched, so that she might be made to suffer should she do an equal wrong.

However, it is open for us to observe that the net result of the narrative is the death of two women. First the fifty-five year old Mrs Marden dies on the occasion of the ghost’s last appearance, and second her daughter is dead within a year of marrying the narrator.

This reading of the text is informed by the observation that many of James’s fictions have a fear of women and marriage deeply buried within their concerns. The inner narrator befriends both Mrs Marden and her daughter, but he immediately observes that “One often hears mature mothers spoken of as warnings—sign-posts, more or less discouraging, of the way daughters may go.” And this is followed by a view of himself as a potential target for husband seekers, even though it is expressed as a negative:

I never suspected her of the vulgar purpose of ‘making up’ to me—a suspicion of course unduly frequent in conceited young men. It never struck me that she wanted me for her daughter, nor yet, like some unnatural mammas, for herself.

In other words, women are seen as threats to a bachelor’s independence and freedom from any emotional claims, and ultimately, despite any sympthy their creators show for their female concerns, they will be punished – in the same way as Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The phenomenon was not new, even at the end of the nineteenth century.

Sir Edmund Orme – study resources

Sir Edmund Orme The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Sir Edmund Orme The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Sir Edmund Orme Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Sir Edmund Orme Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon US

Sir Edmund Orme Sir Edmund Orme – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

Sir Edmund Orme Sir Edmund Orme – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

Sir Edmund Orme Sir Edmund Orme – Kindle edition

Sir Edmund Orme The Ghost Stories of Henry James – Wordsworth edition

Sir Edmund Orme Sir Edmund Orme – read the book on line

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Late Victorian Gothic Tales – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Sir Edmund Orme

Sir Edmund Orme – plot summary

An un-named narrator is friendly with a widow Mrs Marden and her attractive daughter in Brighton. When he begins to sense the power of his attraction to the younger woman, her mother starts to behave in an erratic manner. She wishes to promote her daughter’s relationship with the narrator, but cannot conceal her unease – and for reasons which remain mysterious.

When they meet again at a country house, the narrator accompanies Charlotte to church, where they are joined by a young man who does not speak, and who Charlotte does not even seem to notice. Mrs Marden reveals that the man is Sir Edmund Orme, who she once jilted and who subsequently committed suicide. He has been re-appearing to her intermittently ever since, as a sort of punishment and to check that Charlotte does not behave in the same way as her mother. The narrator proposes to Charlotte, but he is turned down.

Some months later they meet again at a musical party in Brighton. The narrator proposes again to Charlotte, and at the same time Sir Edmund appears. Mrs Marden faints and has to be taken home. Next day the narrator visits them and can see ‘the shadow of death’ on Mrs Marden’s face. She urges her daughter to accept the narrator’s offer of marriage, and as Charlotte does so the figure of Sir Edmund reappears in the room for what turns out to be the last time, but Mrs Marden is dead.

Principal characters

I the un-named outer narrator who presents the written account
I the un-named inner narrator who has written the account
Captain Teddy Bostock a friend of the inner narrator
Miss Charlotte Marden a pretty woman of 22
Mrs Marden her mother, a wealthy widow of fifty-five
Captain Marden the man she married instead of Edmund Orme
Sir Edmund Orme the young man who Mrs Marden jilted
Brighton real seaside resort in southern England
Tranton fictional country town in Sussex

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Ghost stories by Henry James

Red button The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)

Red button The Ghostly Rental (1876)

Red button Sir Edmund Orme (1891)

Red button The Private Life (1892)

Red button Owen Wingrave (1892)

Red button The Friends of the Friends (1896)

Red button The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Red button The Real Right Thing (1899)

Red button The Third Person (1900)

Red button The Jolly Corner (1908)

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2012

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

Solid Objects

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

Solid Objects was written in 1918 and first published in The Athenaeum in October 1920. It was reprinted in A Haunted House in 1944.

Solid Objects

Virginia Woolf

Solid Objects – critical commentary

The two men at first appear to be presented in a positive manner, with ‘unmistakable vitality’, though they are almost caricatures of masculinity, with their ‘moustaches, tweed caps, rough boots, shooting coats, and check stockings’. This positive impression appears to be underlined by authorial endorsement: ‘nothing was so solid, so living, so hard, red, hirsute and virile’.

But this turns out to be a form of ironic overstatement, for as soon as they come to rest they lapse into infantile behaviour: Charles skims stones across the water, and John digs a hole in the sand like a child playing sandcastles. As soon as he digs up the piece of glass out of the sand, the remainder of the story plots his steady decline into obsessive monomania and a retreat from the real world.

First of all he attaches all sorts of wonderful characteristics to what is merely a fragment of glass, then he is attracted to bric-a-brac, but this quickly descends into a fascination with bits of rubbish with no value whatsoever.

He neglects and then abandons altogether his parliamentary ambitions, and despite all evidence to the contrary goes on believing that his searches amongst rubbish heaps and back alleys will somehow bear miraculous fruit. His monomania cuts him off from society in general, and in the end he is abandoned by his oldest friend.

Solid Objects – study resources

Solid Objects The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

Solid Objects The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

Solid Objects The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

Solid Objects The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Solid Objects Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Solid Objects Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth Press – Amazon UK

Solid Objects Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth Press – Amazon US

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

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

Solid Objects The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Solid Objects

Solid Objects – story synopsis

Two young men, Charles and John, are walking on a beach. When they sit down for a while Charles skims pieces of slate across the sea and John digs up a piece of glass out of the sand, marvelling at its possible provenance.

The piece of glass becomes a paperweight on his mantelpiece where he keeps papers relating to his parliamentary ambitions, and he begins to look out for more objects of its kind.

One day he discovers a star shaped fragment of china and misses an important appointment whilst retrieving it from behind some railings.

He begins to frequent rubbish dumps and plots of waste ground in his pursuit of objects trouvé, and in doing so neglects all his professional duties.

He suffers disappointments and derision, but is sustained by the belief that his searches will one day be rewarded. He grows older and retreats from society in general.

His old friend Charles visits him and realises that John has lost touch with reality and leaves him – for ever.

Monday or Tuesday – first edition

Monday or Tuesday - first edition

Cover design by Vanessa Bell

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Between the ActsBetween the Acts (1941) is her last novel, in which she returns to a less demanding literary style. Despite being written immediately before her suicide, she combines a playful wittiness with her satirical critique of English upper middle-class life. The story is set in the summer of 1939 on the day of the annual village fete at Pointz Hall. It describes a country pageant on English history written by Miss La Trobe, and its effects on the people who watch it. Most of the audience misunderstand it in various ways, but the implication is that it is a work of art which temporarily creates order amidst the chaos of human life. There’s lots of social comedy, some amusing reflections on English weather, and meteorological metaphors and imagery run cleverly throughout the book.
Virginia Woolf - Between the Acts Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Between the Acts Buy the book at Amazon US

The Complete Shorter FictionThe Complete Shorter Fiction contains all the classic short stories such as The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, and The String Quartet – but also the shorter fragments and experimental pieces such as Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. These ‘sketches’ (as she called them) were used to practice the techniques she used in her longer fictions. Nearly fifty pieces written over the course of Woolf’s writing career are arranged chronologically to offer insights into her development as a writer. This is one for connoisseurs – well presented and edited in a scholarly manner.
Virginia Woolf - The Complete Shorter Fiction Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - The Complete Shorter Fiction Buy the book at Amazon US

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

Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

Solus Rex

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

Solus Rex is the second chapter of an unfinished novel Vladimir Nabokov wrote around 1939/40. (The first chapter was Ultima Thule.) The chapter was first published in Paris as Sovremennyya Zapiski in 1940, then in the collection A Russian Beauty and Other Stories in 1973. It represents a brief transition phase in Nabokov’s writing. When he arrived in Paris to begin the second phase of his exile (the first having been in Berlin) he had toyed initially with the idea of writing and publishing in French. But he quickly switched to his third language and from 1940/41 onwards wrote in English when he emigrated to America to begin the third phase of his exile.

In this story, as with its counterpart, it is difficult to escape the suspicion that Nabokov embellished the prose style of the text whilst engaged in the process of translation. The piece has many of the features of his late, Rococo mannerism – the persistent use of alliteration, a straining for obscure vocabulary, and a wilful, almost irritating wordplay. There is certainly a case to be made for a scholarly comparison of the original 1940 Russian text with its revised counterpart of thirty years later. That would make an interesting research project for someone in comparative literary studies.

Solus Rex

Vladimir Nabokov

Solus Rex – critical commentary

There are some very faint traces of a connection between Solus Rex and its companion piece in the abandoned novel, the ‘story’ Ultima Thule. It is just possible that the events of Solus Rex, which take place in a country called Ultima Thule, are the story which Gosopin Sineusov, the protagonist of the first chapter, has been asked to illustrate. He is mentioned in the second chapter of the novel – although he is given a different Christian name and patronymic.

These connections are also pre-echoes of later fiction by Nabokov – particularly Pale Fire (1962), which also features the relationship between one level of fictionality and another, plus a similar fantasy-land called Zembla (‘a distant northern land’). The difference between them however is that Zembla is the invention of a madman, the novel’s narrator, Charles Kinbote. There is no comparable distancing device in the case of Ultima Thule.

It also has to be said that whereas Pale Fire is inventive and amusing, Solus Rex is amazingly below par by Nabokov’s usual standards. The literary style is annoyingly mannered, cluttered with over-long sentences stuffed with chained clauses, unnecessary parentheses, and contorted syntax. The events of the narrative are unfocussed, at a schoolboy level of invention, and not the slightest bit funny.

As in the case of Ultima Thule, Nabokov left behind his comments on the unfinished status of the ‘story’, and confirmation that the narrative had not been planned in detail before it was written.

Prince Adulf, whose physical aspect I imagined, for some reason, as resembling that of S.P. Diaghilev (1872-1929), remains one of my favourite characters in the private museum of stuffed people that every grateful writer has somewhere on the premises. I do not remember the details of poor Adulf’s death, except that he was despatched, in some horrible, clumsy manner, by Sien and his companions, exactly five years before the inauguration of the Egel bridge.

Solus Rex – study resources

Solus Rex The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Solus Rex Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

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

Solus Rex First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection of photographs

Solus Rex Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Solus Rex Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

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

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

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

Solus Rex Neil Cornwell, Vladimir Nabokov: Writers and their Work, Northcote House, 2008.

Solus Rex Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: An Illustrated Life, Overlook Press, 2005.

Solus Rex Norman Page, Vladimir Nabokov: Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1997

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

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

Solus Rex – plot summary

Ultima Thule is a fairy tale island in the far north where it rains for 306 days in every year. It is ruled by a king called K who has taken over after the thirty-seven year reign of his predecessor and uncle, King Gafon. The narrative is a retrospective account of K’s earlier life centred on a bizarre power struggle between K and Prince Adulf (the heir apparent).

K has greasy hair, doesn’t wash, and wears foppish clothes. In his student days he meets Prince Adulf (also known derisively as Prince Fig) who is King Gafon’s degenerate son. Adulf believes that the history and traditions of this Nordic realm are founded on a hidden system of magic and sorcery. K agrees with him, but does not know why.

The two cousins go horse-riding, where the Prince seems to be planning something with K in mind. A few days later he invites K to a gathering of his reputedly self-indulgent friends. The company seems strangely heterogeneous but harmless enough. But when Adulf publicly performs a sex act on a pretty young man, K leaves in disgust.

When K reports the incident, his guardian the Count excuses the incident as ‘hygienic’ and passes K on to an economist called Gumm. In the two years that follow K learns that old King Gafon has excused the behaviour of his licentious son Adulf. K wonders why there isn’t public resentment, but the lower classes actually enjoy the spectacle of Adulf’s behaviour, which is widely reported in the press.

However, there is criticism and opposition to Prince Fig amongst the intelligentsia, but they are afraid to act because of a fear of the possible consequences. Eventually, a philosopher Dr Onze volunteers to spearhead a prosecution of Prince Fig. A trial reveals all sorts of pornographic iniquities committed by Fig, the details of which fill the newspapers and further enhance his reputation as a popular royal ‘rogue’. When the trial ends, the jury finds the prosecutor Dr Onze guilty and sentences him to eleven years hard labour. But then King Gafon pardons him.

Two years later K is still studying and is invited to a meeting of the opposition to the royal family. When he gets there he realises from the silences and the signals in the room that they are plotting to assassinate Fig. He feels uncomfortable and asks to leave.

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

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Pale FirePale Fire is a very clever artistic joke. It’s a book in two parts – the first a long poem (quite readable) written by an American poet who we are encouraged to think of as someone like Robert Frost. The second half is a series of footnoted commentaries on the text written by his neighbour, friend, and editor. But as we read on the explanation begins to take over the poem itself, we begin to doubt the reliability – and ultimately the sanity – of the editor, and we end up suspended in a nether-world, half way between life and illusion. It’s a brilliantly funny parody of the scholarly ‘method’ – written around the same time that Nabokov was himself writing an extensive commentary to his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire Buy the book at Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire Buy the book at Amazon US

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

Something to Remember Me By

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tutorial, study guide, web links, further reading

Something to Remember Me By (1990) first appeared in Esquire magazine. It then became the title story in a collection of three novellas published in 1992. The two other stories in the collection are The Bellarosa Connection and A Theft.

Something to Remember Me By

Something to Remember Me By – commentary

The main theme

At a superficial level this story could easily be perceived as a comic farce. An adolescent boy is duped by an unscrupulous prostitute who steals his clothes. He is forced to return home dressed as a woman. But when the elements of the story are viewed differently, it can be seen as almost a Biblical parable of descent into shame and personal humiliation. Beneath the comic-grotesque surface there is a deadly serious purpose.

The story is set during the Depression; young Louie’s mother is dying of cancer, and Chicago is in the grip of midwinter ice and snow. He is not particularly successful at school; and he is forced to miss the Discussion Club meeting to do his after-school job as a delivery boy. He sets out on his journey in a bleak mood and hostile weather.

His assignment takes him straight to a house of mourning where he is confronted by a dead young girl in her open coffin. Then the friendly relative he hopes to meet is not in his office, but Louie is confronted instead by another female lying down, but this time completely naked. Her appearance is disturbing to Louie, but she appears to hold out some sort of sexual promise.

He is taken to a sleazy boarding house and a featureless room where his expectations are quickly shattered. She not only tricks him by reneging on her erotic signals; she steals all his clothes and money, leaving him as naked as the condition in which he found her. He is then forced to dress in women’s clothes to make his way home.

As he descends into what he calls at the outset of the story as ‘a whirlpool, a vortex’, his principal fear is the wrath of his father:

If I were to turn up in this filthy dress, the old man, breaking under his burdens, would come down on me in a blind, Old Testament rage.

The drugstore attendant takes him for a female, and Louie begins to feel that he is losing his identity. At this point he is referred to a destination even lower down the social scale – an illegal drinking den or speakeasy. The bartender points out the errors in Louie’s behaviour: “In short, you got mixed up with a whore and she gave you the works”. But the bartender is prepared to help him, by giving him a further degrading task – carrying home the habitual drunk McKern.

When Louie reaches yet another sordid boarding house, he is confronted by two further sources of humiliation in the form of two young girls – McKern’s daughters. The younger girl follows him into the bathroom and sits on the edge of the bath, watching him whilst he lifts up his dress to pee into the toilet. Then the elder girl invites him to join the meal of three pork chops he has cooked for them – which as an orthodox Jew he finds nauseating:

All that my upbringing held in horror geysered up, my throat filling with it, my guts griping.

So he has been cheated, robbed, degraded, shamed, and humiliated at a personal, social, and even a religious level. And when he finally arrives back home his father greets him with a blow to the head – which Louie receives with gratitude, because it suggests his mother has not died during the day.

The novella

This story appears in a collection whose sub-title is ‘Three Tales by Saul Bellow’. At just over 10,000 words in length it might well be considered as a long short story. Certainly there are many stories and tales of this length, and many are longer. But it has all the structural and the thematic density of a novella and has a good claim to be regarded as such.

What are the defining factors of the novella? How does it differ from the long short story or even the short novel? The critical consensus seems to be loosely based on the Aristotelian notion of the unity of elements in a single work. That is, the character, the events, their duration, the location, and the main theme or issue should be as tightly concentrated as possible.

The events of the story are concentrated on a single character – the younger Louie. The incidents take place over a single day – starting from his breakfast and ending back home in the early evening. The drama takes place in a single location – Chicago. Even the tone of the story is remarkably consistent – its atmosphere dominated by the bleak winter weather and the ice-bound streets of the city.

The central metaphors of the story are sex and death, which the elder Louie flags up at the beginning of his narrative:

In my time my parents didn’t hesitate to speak of death and the dying. What they seldom mentioned was sex. We’ve got it the other way round.

The young Louie has a girlfriend (Stephanie) whose body he fondles under her raccoon-skin coat, and he is powerfully excited by the sight of the whore’s naked body on the gynaecologist’s examination table. We are also given to understand that the prostitute has been used in some sort of sexual experiment: Louie’s brother-in-law tells him about the doctor:

“He takes people from the street, he hooks them up and pretends he’s collecting graphs. This is for kicks, the science part is horseshit.”

But the very sight of the woman’s breast only serves to remind the young Louie of his mother’s mastectomy – and she is dying of the cancer that was its cause. Moreover the very purpose of his after-school errand is to deliver flowers to a family whose young daughter has died – a daughter who he sees, lying in her coffin.

Death even hovers over the composition and purpose of the narrative itself. The elder Louie, at the age of a ‘grandfather’ and prior to his own death, is passing on the story to his only son as a supplement to a reduced inheritance:

Well, they’re all gone now, and I have made my preparations. I haven’t left a large estate, and that is why I have written this memoir, a sort of addition to your legacy.

The story acts as a very dark and negative sort of ‘coming of age’ parable, an initiation into the basic facts of life (sex and death) for young Louie. The older man has decided to pass on the episode to his own son – though given that the older Louie is now the age of a ‘grandfather’ it might come as a warning too late.

Aristotle also believed that one of the most important elements of tragic drama was that the action of the story should be continuous. That is – a unity of time and events. Louie’s experiences unfold in one continuous movement – from his home, to the other side of the city, and then back home again. There are no digressions or interruptions, no temporal shifts or extraneous elements in the action. The story forms, as one critic claims (echoing the American dramatist Eugene O’Neil) one Short Day’s Journey into Night.

The symbolic significance of these events and the successful unity of their design outweigh the brevity of the narrative to make this a powerful candidate for a remarkably short novella

Kafka

There are distinct similarities between Louie and any number of Kafka’s protagonists, and many of the issues in the story (and the themes in Bellow’s other works) explore elements of the Jewish experience.

Louie is something of the Holy Fool figure. He is well intentioned, but he keeps making matters worse for himself. He prepares an explanation for turning up to his brother-in-law’s dental surgery, then asks himself:

Why did I need to account for my innocent behaviour when it was innocent? Perhaps because I was always contemplating illicit things Because I was always being accused.

Later, carrying the drunk McKern in a fireman’s lift on his shoulders, he thinks of ‘This disgrace, you see, whilst my mother was surrendering to death’. Finally, when summarising his experiences, he reflects in similarly telling language: ‘The facts of life were having their turn. Their first effect was ridicule … [then] I could have a full hour of shame on the streetcar’.

This combination of the grotesque with self-criticism and an acute sense of embarrassment is very similar to the scenes which are abundant in Kafka’s work. Indeed they seem to reflect a particularly Jewish experience and perception of the world – and they are also present in the work of writers such as (Polish) Bruno Schultz and (Italian) Italo Svevo – real name Aron Ettore Schmitz.

Something to Remember Me By – resources

Something to Remember Me By Something to Remember Me By – Penguin – Amazon UK

Something to Remember Me By Something to Remember Me By – Penguin – Amazon US

Something to Remember Me By A Saul Bellow bibliography

Something to Remember Me By Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin – Amazon UK

Something to Remember Me By Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin – Amazon US

Something to Remember Me By Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays & studies – Amz UK

Something to Remember Me By Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays & studies – Amz US

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

Something to Remember Me By

Something to Remember Me By – summary

As an old man Louie is recalling an incident from his youth, offering the account to his only son as an ‘addition’ to a meagre legacy.

He remembers being a seventeen year old boy, going to school on a freezing day in a Chicago winter when his mother is dying. He is an indifferent scholar, but an avid reader. After school he has a part-time job making deliveries for a local florist.

He travels across town with a bunch of lilies for what turns out to be the funeral of a young girl, who he sees lying in her coffin. Afterwards he calls at the practice of his brother-in-law Philip, a dentist.

Philip is not there, but next door in the office of a gynaecologist he encounters a naked woman on an examination table. He is excited by the incident, especially when she then invites him back to her apartment.

In a sleazy boarding house she asks him to take off his clothes and get into bed. But then she throws his clothes out of the window to an accomplice in the alley and runs off, leaving Louie naked.

He finds a woman’s dress and a bed jacket in the wardrobe, puts them on, and goes to the local drugstore in search of Philip. The druggist treats him sardonically and recommends a nearby illegal bar.

At the speakeasy its bartender correctly guesses that Louie’s problems arise from his naive lack of experience. He predicts there will be trouble when he gets back to his family. But he offers him clothes from a rubbish pile in exchange for taking home a regular customer who is drunk.

At another run-down rooming-house, Louie is met by the man’s two young children. One girl follows him into the lavatory, then her sister asks him to cook their meal – which turns out to be pork chops.

Louie is late getting home, feels guilty and anxious about his mother, and is in fear of his father. He tries to regain the house undetected, but his father appears and immediately begins to beat him. Louie is relieved, because this suggests his mother is still alive.

© Roy Johnson 2017

More on Saul Bellow
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Twentieth century literature

Souls Belated

by

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

Souls Belated was first published in the collection of stories The Greater Inclination (1899). It was one of the first of many stories Edith Wharton wrote on the subject of divorce. She did not dissolve her own marriage to her husband Edward (‘Teddy’) Wharton until much later in 1912, but the subject was very much a live social issue at that time. Indeed she wrote a comic version of divorce and its consequences in another story The Other Two published in 1904.

Souls Belated

Souls Belated – critical commentary

The principal irony in Souls Belated is that an American man and his married but not-yet-divorced lover are travelling in Europe where they meet an English couple who are doing the same thing. Not a great deal is made of this parallel except that it emphasises how those people who flout the conventions of upper-class society are forced to move outside it. Both couples are hiding from the censure of their social group in a country where they are not so well known.

Lydia is escaping from the stifling conventions of upper-class New York (which models itself on traditional English snobberies and social distinctions). She thinks these restrictions destroy an individual’s possibility of intimacy with another person. Later, in an apparent volte face, she comes to think that ironically upper-class marriage actually helps people to stay emotionally apart from each other because of the social obligations it entails – ‘children, duties, visits, bores, relations’.

She knows that conventional upper-class marriage is stifling; she wishes to live freely with the man she loves; but she can only do so by staying outside polite society, or by being married to him – because that society will not tolerate any other form of arrangement between individuals. She is unable to find a solution to her dilemma, and that is possibly why the story ends with her problem and her relationship with Ralph Garrett unresolved.

Souls Belated – study resources

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

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

Souls Belated - eBook edition Souls Belated – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

Souls Belated - eBook edition Souls Belated – AudioBook format at Gutenberg

Edith Wharton - biography Souls Belated – paperback edition

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Souls Belated

Souls Belated – plot summary

Part I   Lydia Tillotson has been oppressed and bored by her marriage to a very conventional New York businessman, who still lives with his controlling mother. She has fallen in love with Ralph Garrett and left her marriage to live freely with him, away from American society. Whilst in Italy she receives notice that her husband has filed for divorce. Garrett thinks they should follow society’s conventions and get married. She argues that they should preserve the purity of their relationship by remaining single.

Part II   They stay in a hotel in the Italian lakes where social life is very strictly controlled by snobbish upper-class English visitors, notably Lady Susan Condit. The social group within the hotel have already ostracised a newly arrived couple, the Lintons.

Part III   Lydia is approached privately by Mrs Linton, who reveals that she is in fact Mrs Lodge, travelling incognito and carrying on an intrigue with Lord Trevanna. She has guessed that Lydia is in a similar position and threatens to reveal the fact unless she helps her.

Part IV   When Lydia reveals this to Ralph, he informs her that Mrs Cope has just received a message containing what is presumed to be her divorce, and has left the hotel precipitately. Lydia reverses her views and thinks that marriage is a good institution, but only for keeping people apart – because it forces them to busy themselves with social duties. She also argues to Ralph that because she loves him, she needs to leave him.

Part V   Next day she leaves the hotel early in the morning and goes down to the lakeside steamer. Ralph watches her from his room – but she turns back and doesn’t leave.

Principal characters
Lydia Tillotson a married American woman
Ralph Gannett her lover, an American would-be writer
Mr Linton an English guest at the hotel – actually Lord Travenna (22)
Mrs Linton an English grande dame guest at the hotel – actually Mrs Cope
Lady Susan Condit an English social arbiter at the hotel

Souls Belated

first edition – cover design by Berkeley Updike

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video documentary

Other works by Edith Wharton

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

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

Edith Wharton – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

Edith Wharton – short stories
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South from Granada

by

life, art, culture, and food of 1920s Spain

Gerald Brenan was a Bloomsbury Group fringe figure who spent much of his adult life living in and writing about Spain. This is his much-loved travel memoir which recounts setting up home in the Alpujarras in the 1920s – a beautiful but fairly remote area of the south between Granada and the coast. It’s a joy to read for all sorts of reasons – partly because of his amazing fortitude and resourcefulness, and partly because of the empathy he shows towards everything with which he comes into contact.

South from Granada At first he lived on next to nothing, with no water, gas, or electricity, settling in a village miles from anywhere. His idea was to spend his time reading, catching up on an education which he had not received at public school. His food came virtually straight off the land – for this area is rich in fruit, vegetables, and the olive oil for which it is famous. He integrates completely with the locals, and gives wonderfully sympathetic accounts of their customs and behaviour. Anything he wants to buy is miles away in Almeria, Orgiva, or Malaga, and his account includes expeditions we would now consider positively heroic:

I set out therefore on foot by the still-unfinished coast road, buying as I went bread, cheese, and oranges, and sleeping on the beaches. Since I was in poor walking condition, I took five days to do the hundred a fifty miles.

He is amazingly at one with nature. I imagine a keen botanist would find double pleasure in his description of excursions into the Sierra Nevada. And literary fans will be amused at his accounts of visits from Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, then Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. His portrait of Strachey’s calvary on the outing to Lanjaron, riding over mountains side-saddle on a mule, carrying a parasol, and complaining of piles – is pricelessly funny.

There are chapters on the calendar of village life, of festivals and religious beliefs, and in particular the powerful local superstitions; a whole section on local food – paella, bacalao, and gazpacho – all quite common now, but at the time, like food off another planet.

There’s a chapter which creates en passant a whole analysis of the Bloomsbury Group and most of its major figures, plus why he felt that by 1930 it had outlived itself as a cultural force. His description of the pleasures and riches of walking in the mountains would take you several holidays just to re-trace his steps.

He offers a history of the region which starts at the Mesolithic Age and traces its development in terms of agriculture, architecture, politics, and land cultivation. He even throws in a chapter describing a guided tour to the brothels of Almeria.

It’s no wonder why this book has remained a popular classic which never goes out of print. Read it if you are interested in Spain, Bloomsbury, or just an account of life, art, and culture from a sensitive and intelligent human being. He went on to write one of the definitive accounts of the Spanish Civil War – but it’s this book which you will want to keep on your shelf.

© Roy Johnson 2008

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Gerald Brenan, South from Granada, London: Penguin, 2008, pp.336, ISBN 0141189320

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Studying Fiction

by

guide to the basics of literary analysis – plus short stories

Many adult students have spent most of their lives reading fiction in the form of stories and novels. However, when it comes to making a formal academic study of literature – especially at undergraduate level – it’s hard to find the right words in which to express your understanding of a text. That’s why this book was written. Studying Fiction is an introduction to the basic concepts and the technical terms you will need when making a study of prose fiction.

Studying Fiction It shows you how to apply the elements of literary analysis by explaining them one at a time, and then showing them at work in a series of short stories which are reproduced as part of the book. The materials are carefully graded, so that you start from simpler literary concepts, then work gradually towards more complex issues. The guide contains stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Katherine Mansfield, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and Charles Dickens. All of them are excellent and very entertaining tales in their own right. The guidance notes help you to understand the literary techniques being used in each case.

Eight chapters deal separately with issues such as the basics of character and story; point of view, symbolism, irony, and theme; literary language and ‘appreciation’; the techniques of close reading; the social context of literature; narrators and interpretation; and an explanation of literary terms.

The book works as a form of self-instruction programme. You first of all read the story; then a particular literary concept is explained in relation to the story; a series of questions are posed [with answers] which allow you to test your understanding; and the chapter ends with suggestions for further reading.

OK – this is what’s called an ‘author’s own review’, so I’ve tried to be as unbiased as possible. If anybody else wishes to produce a review, I’ll be happy to add it. Alternatively, you can read somebody else’s review at Amazon here

© Roy Johnson 2000

Studying Fiction Buy the book at Amazon UK

Studying Fiction Buy the book at Amazon US

Roy Johnson, Studying Fiction, Manchester University Press, 1994, pp.226, ISBN 0719033977

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Summer

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and plot summary

Summer was written in what Edith Wharton described as ‘a high pitch of creative joy’ in 1917, and was first published by D. Appleton later the same year. Wharton regarded it as a twin piece to her earlier novella Ethan Frome (1911) (and she even called it ‘my hot Ethan’). Like the earlier narrative the events of the story are set in a small, poor town in a remote part of New England.

Summer

Summer – critical commentary

Novella – or short novel?

It is often difficult to tell the difference between a short novel and a novella. The distinction cannot be measured in the number of words – and neither the novel nor the novella can easily be defined. But there is general agreement that a novella should be shorter than most novels – and that it should demonstrate a marked degree of unity of place, time, theme, action, atmosphere, and character. The novella also usually has some sort of unifying symbol(s) or metaphor(s). It usually compresses its themes into a shorter space by eliminating all superfluous incidents, having fewer characters, and concentrating on a central issue. Summer amply fulfils these requirements. It is approximately 50,000 words long – which is shorter than most full length novels.

Unity of place

Charity has been raised in the small rural town of North Dorner, and that is the location in which all the significant action takes place. Charity feels claustrophobically stifled by its intrusive small-minded parochialism and she years for a more sophisticated environment, even though she lacks the cultural knowledge or experience to define what that might be.

Her state of being is affected by two other locations which act as equal and opposite alternatives to her. When she visits the larger town of Nettleton with Harney she is very impressed by the shops, the soda-fountains, the hotels, and the restaurants which represent a more sophisticated level of existence. But the town also includes very negative elements. It is where her childhood friend has become more or less a prostitute, and the town also has a ‘doctor’ who acts as an abortionist. The town has attractions, but there appears to be a price to be paid for them for a girl such as Charity.

On the other hand, she knows she was born on the Mountain, and thinks that she can escape North Dormer by going back to her roots. But the Mountain hangs over her as a location of both her genetic origins and a source of social stigma. It is a place of poverty, lawlessness, and squalor – as she discovers when she goes back in search of her mother, who has died in abject poverty, apparently an alcoholic.

These are equally unacceptable alternatives, and it is mark of the coherence of the narrative that she opts for the realistic choice of staying in North Dormer with her new husband Mr Royall.

Unity of time

The story starts in the early summer and ends with the onset of autumn, and the events of the narrative are fairly continuous, with no leaps or breaks in the action. This is another sense in which the novella as a literary form is rather like the Greek ideal of classical tragedy – continuity of time, place, and unfolding of drama. Charity experiences youthful longing, her first taste of romantic love, initiation into sexual life, disillusionment, and ‘mature’ acceptance of reality – all within a few weeks.

Unity of characters

The entire narrative is focussed on three characters – Charity, Mr Royall, and Lucius Harney – who are locked in an emotional struggle. Charity wants a life larger than North Dormer seems to offer her, and she sees Harney as a potential for something more expansive and exciting. Her guardian Royall has his own designs on Charity, but he also has an over-riding concern for her ‘reputation’ and he sees Harney as an opportunistic interloper who wishes to take advantage of Charity whilst having his own future mapped out elsewhere – which turns out to be the case.

Harney comes into North Dormer as an outsider (he is a cousin of Mrs Hatchard) and is attracted to Charity. He establishes their secret ‘home’ together in the abandoned house, but he has no intention of pursuing their relationship beyond the temporary physical pleasure he enjoys with her. This is a crucial element in the cultural ambiance of small-town North Dormer – because Charity’s social reputation will be severely damaged if she is ‘tainted’ with the reputation of a sexual relationship with an outsider.

Her fate will be even worse if she has a child out of wedlock. This is why Royall’s intervention is the decisive factor. He offers her the protection of an unsullied reputation. She even has the outside chance to pass off the birth of her child as Royall’s rather than Harney’s, given that the conception and her marriage are so close together.

Unity of theme

What is the principal theme of Summer? It is a ‘coming of age’ story. Charity matures from a naive, romantic, and inexperienced girl to a young adult who has learned some difficult lessons and made realistic choices – all in the space of a few weeks. Between early summer and the onset of autumn she has rebelled against a parent figure, fallen in love, become sexually experienced, experienced emotional betrayal, and faced up to her problematic origins, before making a choice which represents a realistic compromise for her future.

Social movement

Charity’s story is also one of social aspiration. She has come from the desperate background of the social outlaws, drunks, and riff raff on the Mountain, and has a place in a small sleepy town in the middle of nowhere. Instinctively, she yearns for a more sophisticated and exciting milieu. But she has no education, no skills, and no social capital – except her good looks. These are never explicitly mentioned in the narrative, but since the two principal males find her attractive, it is reasonable to assume that they exist.

However, she knows that to trade on her sexual allure can easily lead to pregnancy and being trapped in an under-class of the socially stigmatised. She has the example of her childhood friend before her. So – eventually she marries into a very respectable middle class milieu – as the wife of a small town lawyer – which is quite an advance on her origins as the illegitimate child of an alcoholic

Loose ends

Royall’s desire to protect Charity and her reputation is a constant throughout the story, and is therefore credible as his motivation. But Wharton seems to fudge the conclusion somewhat. Royall makes no sexual overtures to Charity after they are married (although he has done so previously), and she does not reveal to him the fact that she is pregnant with Harney’s child. This would presumably be a grim emotional burden to Royall – though he might not be shocked by the news if the pregancy were to be revealed – though this is beyond the time frame of the novel.

There is also the issue of Royall’s adoption of Charity in the first place. He has sentenced her father for a serious crime (manslaughter) – but we are given no convincing reason why Royall should adopt the daughter at the criminal’s request – except, as the text suggests, as an act of charity, which provides an itonic link with her name.

In fact it is worth noting that her nominative identity is entirely shaped by Royall. She has been given her first name Charity by Royall and his wife ‘to commemorate Mr Royall’s disinterestedness in “bringing her down” [from the Mountain] and to keep alive in her a becoming sense of her dependence’. And her surname (until she marries him) is not Royall at all, but Hyatt, as the people on the Mountain know only too well.

Edith Wharton's house - The Mount

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

Summer – study resources

Summer Summer – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Summer Summer – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Summer Summer – Bantam Classics – Amazon UK

Summer Summer – Bantam Classics – Amazon US

Summer Summer – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Summer Summer – free eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Summer""

Summer – plot summary

Part I.   Charity Royall is a young woman in North Dormer, a small country town in New England. She works in the local library, is bored, and yearns for a life with more sophistication and excitement. A young architect Lucius Harney comes to the library in search of local history.

Part II.   Charity has been ‘brought down from the Mountain’ (a region of outlaws) by Mr Royall, a widower and lawyer who acts as her guardian. She feels sorry for him because he is so lonely, but he has made sexual advances to her – which she has scornfully rejected. She has taken up the job of part-time librarian in order to earn enough money to get away from the locality. When she makes this clear to Royall he proposes marriage – an offer she flatly refuses.

Part III.   Charity feels in need of protection, so at her request Royall hires a woman to live in the house and do the cooking. Royall reproaches Charity for leaving the library early, and she threatens to leave.

Part IV.   Lucius Harney returns to the library, whereupon Charity reproaches him for having criticised the condition of its books to the custodian Mrs Hatchard . He reassures her that he means no harm and suggests that he can improve ventilation of the building.

Part V.   Some time later woodcutter Liff Hyatt from the Mountain interrupts her summer musings. She tells him that Harney wants to sketch one of the primitive mountain houses. She wonders if she and Hyatt are related and ponders the identity of her mother. She promises to take Harney up to the Mountain and reveals to him that she was born there, suddenly feeling a certain pride in the fact.

Part VI.   Harney begins taking his meals in the Royall house, where they discuss the primitive and oppositional culture of the Mountain. Royall recounts visiting the mountain to retrieve a young girl from one of its drunken outlaws he has convicted. Charity overhears this account which turns out to be the story of her origins. She senses that Harney is interested in her but feels mortified by the cultural gulf that separates them. They visit some very poor people living in a primitive house near a swamp, which makes her feel ashamed of her origins.

Part VII.   Next day Harney arrives with the clergyman Mr Miles to discuss the ventilation of the library. Charity is disappointed that Harney seems less interested in her than the day before. She goes out at night to his lodgings and watches him in secret. But she fears disturbing him in case he thinks it is a signal of sexual submission which she does not want to provoke, knowing what its consequences would be in a small town.

Part VIII.   The following day Royall chastises her for having visited Harney’s house at night. He has seen the relationship between the two young people developing, and has suggested to Harney that he should leave (to protect Charity’s reputation). Royall once again proposes marriage to Charity. Harney arrives at the house to say an inconclusive goodbye – and next day sends her a message from a nearby village.

Part IX.   Charity starts seeing Harney again. He is friendly, but no more. Two weeks later they go to a fourth of July celebration in a larger town. Charity is impressed by urban novelties. Harney buys her a jewelled brooch and takes her to a french restaurant for lunch.

Part X.   They go on a boat trip around the local lake, then watch a spectacular firework display, during which they exchange passionate kisses. Charity sees a childhood friend who has become a tart in the company of her guardian Royall, with whom she has an angry confrontation.

Part XI.   The following morning, filled with shame about the incident, she runs away from home, heading back to the Mountain. But she is overtaken by Harney, who takes her to an abandoned house in the countryside.

Part XII.   Harney persuades her to return home, and they begin meeting each other every day in secret at the abandoned house. She becomes deeply enamoured of him.

Part XIII.   At some local celebrations Mr Royall makes an impressive speech on parochial fidelity. But Charity sees Harney with another woman in the audience and realises that she cannot compete with sophistication.

Part XIV.   Some days later she is waiting at the abandoned house when Royall appears. He asserts his right to keep her out of trouble. When Harney turns up Royall challenges them both with the question of marriage. Harney announces to Charity that he is going away but will marry her on his return.

Part XV.   Harney leaves for New York and is non-commital about his return date. Charity hears that he is due to marry Annabel Balch. She writes to him urging him to fulfil his commitment. She also fears that she might be pregnant, and visits a doctor (an abortionist) in the nearby town for confirmation. She thinks the child will give her a strong claim on Haarney, but he writes confirming that he is going to marry Miss Balch. Charity feels that escaping and going back to the Mountain is her only option

Part XVI.   Next morning she sets off with great difficulty for the Mountain, intending to seek out her mother. She is overtaken by Liff Hyatt and the clergyman Mr Miles who are also going to see her mother. When they arrive her mother has already died – in abject poverty and squalor. Her mother is buried, and Charity stays on, thinking to ‘rejoin her people’.

Part XVII.   But during the night she realises that she does not want her own child growing up amongst primitive and degenerate people – and she sets off to walk back home again. She is rescued by Royall, who has driven out to look for her. He makes his third proposal of marriage.

Part XVIII.   She feels a numb sense of relief at being protected by Royall. They are married in a simple ceremony, then retire to a hotel overlooking the same lake she visited with Harney. After retrieving her brooch from the abortionist (and being cheated by her) she writes to Harney saying she is married but will always remember him.

Summer – characters
Mr Royall a small town lawyer, a widower, and Charity’s guardian
Charity Royall his young ward, a librarian (her real name is Hyatt)
Mrs Hatchard custodian of the library
Lucius Harney Mrs Hatchard’s cousin, a young architect from New York
Verena Marsh Royall’s deaf cook
Liff Hyatt a mountain woodcutter, a relative of Charity’s
Mr Miles a clergyman
Dr Merkle an unscrupulous abortionist
Summer – further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Edith Wharton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2015

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More on the novella
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Sylvia Beach

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Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) was an American-born bookshop owner and publisher who emigrated to Paris and became a central figure in the expatriate community between the first and second world wars. She is best known as the owner of the bookstore Shakespeare and Company and as the publisher of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922).

She was born in Baltimore, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and the grand-daughter of missionaries. At birth she was christened Nancy Woodbridge Beach, but she adopted the name Sylvia later. In 1901 the family moved to France when her father was appointed a minister at the American Church in Paris.

Sylvia Beach

Sylvia Beach (left) with Adrienne Monnier

She spent the next few years living in Paris until the family moved back to America when her father became a minister in Princeton. However, she made return trips to France, then lived in Spain and later worked for the Red Cross in Serbia.

During the later years of the First World War she went back to Paris as a student of French literature. She had very little formal education, though by the time she finally settled in Paris in 1916 she could speak three foreign languages – French, Spanish, and Italian.

In 1917, at the age of thirty, she entered Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop, joined the lending library, and found the woman who became her lover and life partner. She also discovered her vocation and in 1919 opened her own bookshop as Shakespeare and Company in a nearby former laundry. The business functioned as both a bookshop and a lending library. Both women’s enterprises were financed by their parents.

“My loves were Adrienne Monnier and James Joyce and Shakespeare and Company”

Primed with customers from Monnier who were interested in English literature, the new bookshop was an immediate success. One of her first loyal customers was Valery Larbaud who later became a translator of James Joyce’s work. Other early subscribers included Andre Gide, Eric Satie, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Joyce himself. Sylvia Beach formed an immediate bond with Joyce, who was then in the middle of writing Ulysses.

As far as the business was concerned, she was astonishingly inefficient. She kept almost no records, and didn’t even put prices on the books she was trying to sell. Hours were spent chatting to people who just happened to have called by – but she was well liked for being so receptive.

Beach took up the crusade on behalf of Joyce’s unpublished novel Ulysses when his principal benefactress Harriet Shaw Weaver failed to find people who would even set up the book in print.. It was considered ‘indecent’ by everyone – including Virginia Woolf.

When she decided to publish the novel herself she sent out publicity leaflets which had the interesting effect of attracting more American writers to visit her shop, eager for news of a work that was considered scandalous even before it was published. The visitors were also encouraged by a collapse of the Franc, which made living cheaper against the dollar.

Sylvia Beach poured all her time, money, and emotional resources into the production of Ulysses. Joyce sponged off her mercilessly – as he did off everyone else. The novel’s early years are now quite well known. It was vilified as ‘obscene’ and its author branded a ‘lunatic’. This only increased sales.

But not everyone was pleased. Gertrude Stein thought Shakespeare and Company was lowering the tone of the Left Bank by publishing indecent material. She also believed that the true genius of literary modernism was none other than her good self. She studiously avoided both Beach and Joyce at all cultural events.

Sylvia Beach

James Joyce

Beach stayed out of these social squabbles and concentrated on the task in hand. She began a game of cat and mouse with the authorities who wished to supress Joyce’s work. Copies of Ulysses were smuggled to America and England, and occasionally the customs officers would confiscate her parcels and destroy their contents. [My ‘old’ copy of the Bodley Head edition has this shameful record of prurient vandalism reproduced as a preface.]

She befriended more Americans in the next wave of expatriates – writer Ernest Hemingway and composers George Antheil and Aaron Copeland. In 1926 she brought out a fourth edition of Ulysses, which was printed with copies of revisions and corrections to the original text. Meanwhile Joyce had begun work on his next book Finnegans Wake which was to take him seventeen years to complete.

The cross-cultural fertilizations that took place in this period are well illustrated in the figure of John Dos Passos. He was a visitor to Sylvia Beach’s bookshop at the time he was writing Manhattan Transfer. He was naturally influenced by Ulysses, but he also met Soviet cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein with whom he discussed the techniques of collage, fast-cut editing, and montage, all of which he incorporated into his literary style.

Sylvia Beach

John Dos Passos

There was a small cloud on this endlessly sunny horizon when Ford Maddox Ford threatened to open a rival bookshop offering lower prices. Sylvia simply removed all his works from her own shop, his sales dropped, and his plans collapsed.

Whilst the fast sets of the Hemingways and the Scott Fitzgeralds passed their summers in month-long parties in Pamplona and Antibes, Sylvia and Adrienne retreated to an isolated farm in the Savoy mountains, living on fresh milk and sleeping in a hayloft.

By 1926 the American influence on Paris was in full spate. Josephine Baker was a succes de scandale in Le Revue Negre. Beach made her contributions to this fashion by organising a Walt Whitman exhibition and helping to promote the sensational performance of George Antheil’s Ballet Mechanique that ended in a riot.

But the American connection was not all sweetness and light. Samuel Roth, a notorious publisher in New York, brought out a pirated copy of Ulysses. The novel was not protected by copyright at this time because America had not signed the Bern agreement.

Sylvia Beach orchestrated an international protest, and meanwhile supported Joyce through gritted teeth when extracts from Work in Progress (which became Finnegans Wake) began to appear, much to general bewilderment. Harriet Weaver, his principal benefactress predicted that it would eventually become a ‘curiosity of literature’. History might prove her right.

In 1927 Beach’s mother was arrested in Paris on a charge of shoplifting in Galleries Lafayette. Rather than face the public humiliation of a trial, she committed suicide. Sylvia was devastated and, exhausted by her efforts to fight the Roth piracy, she put a little more distance between herself and Joyce.

Sylvia Beach

Ulysses – first edition

Around this time Samuel Beckett appeared and was added to the roster of unpaid ‘assistants’ to Joyce, who continued to cadge, borrow, and even steal money from anybody who had any.

This decade of license and excess – ‘The Roaring Twenties’ – came to an abrupt halt in October 1929 with the Wall Street crash. But not everyone suffered: Joyce continued to fund his lavish lifestyle with other people’s money and started the new age of austerity by biting the hand that had fed him for the previous ten years. He cheated Sylvia Beach out of the rights to Ulysses which she had gone to so much trouble to publish for him.

Yet with the burden of Ulysses removed, her financial position at the shop at first actually improved. But on the other hand, many of her expatriate American customers began returning to their homeland. The value of the dollar was falling, and European stormclouds were gathering. She was forced to sell off some of her precious first editions and manuscripts, and a ‘friends of Shakespeare and Company’ fund was established to keep the shop alive.

In 1936 Beach paid her first visit to America for twenty-two years. On return to Paris she found that a rival had moved in to live with her lover Adrienne. The political uncertainties of the late thirties were no good at all for business, and she only kept the shop going thanks to generous gifts from friends and a series of sponsored internships.

At the outbreak of war and the occupation of Paris by the Germans, Sylvia opted to stay put and keep the shop open. But when a Nazi officer threatened to close the business because she would not sell him a copy of Finnegans Wake, she hid her entire stock in an attic at the top of the building, where it remained throughout the war.

She was arrested in 1942 and interned at Vitell, later to be released following the influence of a friend in Vichy. At the liberation in 1944 she did not, contrary to popular myth, re-open the shop after it was ‘liberated’ by Ernest Hemingway. Instead, she organised help for her friends and began to write her memoirs.

Adrienne, her mentor, mother-figure, and lover committed suicide in 1955 to escape the double pains of rheumatism and Menieres disease. Beach lived on to establish a permanent home for her archive of Joyce materials at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and she died in her beloved Paris in 1962.

© Roy Johnson 2018

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Noel Riley Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties, London: Penguin, 1985, pp. 447, ISBN:

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Sympathy

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

Sympathy was probably written in the spring of 1919. It contains some similarities to Virginia Woolf’s other experimental shorter fiction written around that time, but was not published during her own lifetime. The typescript is housed in The Monks House Papers, archived at the University of Sussex library.

Sympathy

Sympathy – critical commentary

Speculation as narrative

This ‘story’ is one of a number of short fictions by Virginia Woolf in which she takes an object, a person, or some trivial event as the starting point for quasi-philosophic meditations and imaginative fantasies. Like the others which follow this approach to narrative — The Mark on the Wall, The Lady in the Looking Glass — she traces the logic, the rhythms, and the association of ideas common in unspoken thought.

She imagines her way into the trivial details of another person’s life, and she is quite prepared to invent, to speculate, and elaborate her own inventions – and then suddenly cancel it all as unsatisfactory. What holds the narrative together are small echoes and repetitions , plus a certain resolution to the subject – which here is tinged with irony given the title of the piece and its conclusion.

The narrator is never named or given any distinguishing marks of identity, but there is no reason at all to suppose that it is anyone other than Woolf herself – using the device of ‘thinking aloud’ as a vehicle for fictional narrative.

Prose style

The prose and its rhythms are reminiscent of Kew Gardens and her other experimental fiction she was writing around the same time. and she even quoted the closing phrase here in her later story Monday or Tuesday:

The sycamore shakes its leaves stirring flakes of light in the deep pool of air … the geraniums glow red in the earth. A cry starts to the left of me … Wheels strike divergently; omnibuses conglomerate in conflict …

This was the sort of prose writing which was to lead to the great experiments in Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse.

The conclusion

But the conclusion to the piece is distinctly ambiguous. The narrator receives a letter from someone we take to be the dead man’s widow, who however speaks of him in the present tense — ‘Humphry is managing the business’ — which suggests that he is still alive.

It is just possible that the letter could have been written before his death, but that is not very likely, for the following reasons. High Wickham [actually ‘Wycombe’] in Buckinghamshire is not very far from the centre of London; and in the early part of the twentieth century there were up to three three deliveries of post a day.

But then the letter-writer goes on to say that she will be ‘in London, buying mourning’, which in turn suggests that he is dead after all. Yet the narrator concludes ‘O don’t tell me he lives still! O why did you deceive me?’

Woolf clearly felt some hesitancy about this issue, since there was an alternative and more explicit ending to the story in the typescript for the story which she deleted:

Do you mean to tell me that Humphry is alive after all and you never opened the bedroom door or picked the anemonies, [sic] and I’ve wasted all this; death never was behind the tree; and I’m to dine with you, with years and years in which to ask questions about the furniture. Humphry Humphry you ought to have died!

Sympathy – study resources

Sympathy The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

Sympathy The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

Sympathy The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt – Amazon UK

Sympathy The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt – Amazon US

Sympathy Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Sympathy Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth Press – Amazon UK

Sympathy Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth Press – Amazon US

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

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

Sympathy The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Sympathy

Sympathy – story synopsis

An un-named narrator reads in the Times that a young friend of the family has recently died. She regrets not having taken more notice of him, how life goes on, and how his widow will feel, and how she is likely to change because of her private experience. The narrator realises that her own sympathies might change and wonders what gestures of consolation she might offer. She imagines going for a walk with the young man and their picking flowers together. She then returns to the present moment and thinks how death can change our perceptions of the everyday world.

She sees death as a positive force the young man has carried within himself, giving him the power to remove himself from the world which those remaining must inhabit and confront.

She reflects that even though he has gone, other people may be oblivious to the fact and will be acting as if he were still alive. She reproaches herself for having so little consciousness of him, and how the world of material objects will outlast human mortality. This leads her to reflect that these objects will also outlast her own life. ‘So will the sun shine on glass and silver the day I die’. Her reverie is interrupted by the arrival of post, including an invitation from the young man’s widow.

Monday or Tuesday – first edition

Monday or Tuesday - first edition

Cover design by Vanessa Bell

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Jacob's RoomJacob’s Room (1922) was Woolf’s first and most dramatic break with traditional narrative fiction. It was also the first of her novels she published herself, as co-founder of the Hogarth Press. This gave her for the first time the freedom to write exactly as she wished. The story is a thinly disguised portrait of her brother Thoby – as he is perceived by others, and in his dealings with two young women. The novel does not have a conventional plot, and the point of view shifts constantly and without any signals or transitions from one character to another. Woolf was creating a form of story telling in which several things are discussed at the same time, creating an impression of simultaneity, and a flow of continuity in life which was one of her most important contributions to literary modernism.
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Kew GardensKew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
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Virginia Woolf: BiographyVirginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
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Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

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

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