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A Summing Up

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A Summing Up is one of a number of short stories by Virginia Woolf set at a party in the Westminster home of Richard and Clarissa Dalloway, the hosts of the central social event in her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925). The story was first published in A Haunted House (1944) and then later reprinted with the collection of stories and sketches Mrs Dalloway’s Party published by the Hogarth Press in London in 1973.

A summing Up

houses in Westminster

A Summing Up – critical commentary

Like all the other stories in the Mrs Dalloway’s Party sequence, this is principally a study in social alienation, egoism, and the life of the imagination. It is yet another example of people interacting politely in what appears on the surface to be a civilized manner, whilst the narrative reveals the emotional and intellectual chasms that separate them.

Bertram Pritchard is an almost comic study of the crashing bore, even though he is ‘an esteemed civil servant and a Companion of the Bath.’

Written down what he said would be incredible — not only was each thing he said in itself insignificant, but there was no connection between the different remarks.

Sasha Latham on the other hand is ‘tall [and] handsome’ but inwardly feels lacking in confidence. Disattending to her fellow guest, she retreats into a series of imaginative speculations concerning the nature and the history of society.

There is no overt criticism of Pritchard, only deeply ironic counterpoint. Sasha Latham even manages to feel sympathetic towards him as she searches through a jumble of memories and sense impressions for some sort of meaningful insight.

And she finds it – very briefly – in the vision of a tree she sees in the garden. She also realises that the revelation might come by accident, and it does as she feels that the human soul ‘is by nature unmated, a widow bird; a bird perched aloft on that tree’ – before the revelation is shattered both by Pritchard guiding her back to what he sees as their social duty in the house, and by the inarticulate shriek she hears from the city that surrounds them.

A Summing Up – study resources

A Summing Up The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

A Summing Up The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

A Summing Up The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

A Summing Up The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

A Summing Up Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

A Summing Up Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

A Summing Up Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

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

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

A Summing Up 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

A Haunted House

A Summing Up – story synopsis

Bertram Pritchard and Sasha Latham are guests at an evening party given by Clarissa Dalloway in central London. They stroll together in the small garden in the shadow of Westminster. He is a civil servant and a complete bore: she is uncertain about herself, but the story is articulated largely from her point of view.

Because Bertram Pritchard is a non-stop talker about trivialities, she stops listening to him and thinks instead of how there is now a civilized society where once there were swamps. She admires the courage and the sophistication of other people to succeed in society – even Bertram Pritchard.

They look over the garden wall, and she becomes conscious of the fact that they are in the middle of a busy city. Then they sit and talk to people she doesn’t actually know, and her thoughts drift back to fragments of what she learned at school. She wonders which of her impressions of the world are the most accurate. She has a visionary experience that the human soul is single and unattached. But at that precise moment an inarticulate cry sounds from within the city, and her vision escapes into the night.

A Summing Up – characters
Bertram Pritchard an ‘esteemed’ civil servant and bore
Mrs Sasha Latham a guest at the party
Clarissa Dalloway a society hostess
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 To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a triptych of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon US

 

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

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

Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia Woolf 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

A Theft

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

A Theft (1987) is one of three stories in the collection Something to Remember Me By. It was originally intended for magazine publication, but was rejected as being too long. Saul Bellow took the unusual step of publishing it as a single volume – directly as a paperback book. The two other stories in the collection are Something to Remember Me By and The Bellarosa Connection.

A Theft

A Theft – commentary

The main theme

The story (or novella) is largely a character study of Clara Velde – her deep emotional conflicts, erratic behaviour, and her problematic relationships with the people close to her. But the most important feature, which unites all these elements, is the complexity of her feelings for ex-lover Ithiel (Teddy) Regler.

Teddy is an intelligent and impressive figure in his own right, but so far as Clara is concerned he is all men; he is the man; but he has remained beyond her reach, unobtainable. This might explain why she has had so many failed marriages. But she has one tangible link that expresses the bond she feels between them. He has given her an expensive emerald ring that she treasures and provides the story with its central symbol.

When she first loses the ring she feels that her world has come apart. She has three children, a successful career, and a loyal but ineffectual husband, Wilder. But after twenty years she still regards Teddy as her soul mate. The ring is a powerful emblem of what he means to her and the love they once shared (which curiously enough, is not really dramatised, even in her retrospective musings).

The ring is recovered, but then disappears again when it is stolen by the boyfriend of her au pair, a petty crook from Haiti. Clara more-or-less fires the au pair Gina, but then immediately feels guilty about how rashly she has acted. Once again she feels that a cornerstone of her identity has been removed, and she flies to Washington where Teddy gives her the support that she needs.

Gina the au pair recovers the ring from her boyfriend and returns it via Clara’s daughter Lucy, who completes the transaction without question or fuss. Clara is not only relieved, but feels she has learned a valuable lesson about herself from the much younger woman.

‘I do seem to have an idea of who it is that’s in the middle of me. There may not be more than one in a million, more’s the pity, that do have. And my own child possibly one of those.

It is a moment of catharsis that draws the very loose ends of the story together. But for all the moral and existential anxiety that arises from these twin episodes, it is worth noting that the only theft which remains outstanding at the conclusion to the story is Clara’s. When the ring first goes missing, she claims on her insurance policy – sixteen thousand dollars – but does not return the money when the ring turns up again in her bedroom. This particular theft is left unexamined.

Weaknesses

The early part of the story concerns Clara’s incontinent confessions about her private life and loves to her assistant Laura Wong. These confidences are largely about her continued enthusiasm for former lover Teddy Regler. But Ms Wong hardly features at all in the latter part of the story – so she is introduced for no meaningful purpose.

The same is true of the early scenes describing Clara’s meetings with Giangiacomo and Spontini in Italy. The fictional character Giangiacomo is a thinly disguised portrait of the Italian radical Giangiacomo Feltrinelli – best known as the publisher of Boris Pasternack’s Doctor Zhivago. The character is introduced, but then blows himself up whilst trying to dynamite power lines. [This was one interpretation of Feltrinelli’s controversial death in 1972.] There seems very little connection between this slightly larger-than-life character and the main theme of the story.

In the case of Spontini, his significance is reduced to a single incident. When he is driving Clara in his car she threatens to ward off his wandering hands with the red hot element of a dashboard cigarette lighter. She goes on later to make him the third of her four husbands – but he too never emerges again in the story with any significance, and it is difficult to understand why he is named and included.

Saul Bellow is rightly celebrated as a writer who can bring fictional characters alive by carefully observed physical details, idiosyncratic speech patterns, and a Dickensian sense of comic exaggeration. These approaches to fictional entertainment work well in the expansive scope of novels—which Henry James called ‘large loose baggy monsters’. But these vivid but inconsequential characters can unbalance the more restrained and delicate requirements of the short story and the novella.

Bellow gives the impression in A Theft of writing that is lower his usual standard. For instance, there is a glaring technical flaw part way through the narrative. The story is told almost exclusively from Clara’s point of view. Even passages that switch briefly into third person omniscient narrative mode have Clara as a point of focus. But following an argument between Clara and Teddy, the narrative suddenly switches from her point of view to his when he leaves her and checks into a hotel:

He went to the bed and sat on the edge but did not lie down. It was not in the cards for him to sleep that night. The phone rang—it was a mean sound, a thin rattle—and Etta said: “Clara has swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. She called me and I sent the ambulance.”

The only justification for this sudden change of perspective is that it allows the shock of her attempted suicide to be seen from his point of view. After this the story switches back again to Clara to give a brief history of her first three marriages.

A Theft – resources

A Theft A Theft – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Theft A Theft – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Theft A Saul Bellow bibliography

A Theft Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Theft Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Theft Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz UK

A Theft Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

A Theft

A Theft – plot summary

Clara Velde is a successful fashion advisor with three children living on Park Avenue in New York City. She has been married four times, but is mostly enthusiastic about her former lover Ithiel (Teddy) Regler. She hires a young Viennese girl Gina Wegman as an au pair, and she confides personal concerns to Laura Wong, her design assistant.

She recalls meeting revolutionary Giangiacomo in Italy, and is pursued by Spontini (who later becomes one of her husbands). When Teddy takes a secretary to South America on a business trip, she moves Frenchman Jean-Claude into his apartment. Clara and Teddy are reconciled, but when he does the same again on another foreign trip, Clara tries to commit suicide. She survives, and goes on to a career of serial matrimony.

She marries four times, and Teddy marries three. She loses the expensive ring he once bought her, claims on the insurance, then finds it but does not repay the insurance money.

When Teddy’s third wife leaves him, Clara goes to Washington to offer comfort. On returning to New York she finds the au pair Gina has had a party with her Haitian lover and lots of friends. Clara is suspicious, and when she discovers that her emerald ring is missing she assumes the boyfriend has stolen it. She orders Gina to return it next day – or leave. She feels devastated again by the loss, but then guilty about her peremptory dismissal of Gina.

Clara visits her psychiatrist, then meets Teddy, who recommends a private investigator. Some time later the ring suddenly reappears on her bedside table. Clara thinks Gina has replaced it, and wishes to thank and reward her. She meets Gina who explains that she returned the ring by giving it to Lucy, her daughter.

A Theft – principal characters
Clara Velde a successful business woman and fashion advisor
Wilder Velde Clara’s lazy fourth husband
Laura Wong Clara’s assistant and confidante
Ithiel (Teddy) Regler a government diplomat, Clara’s former lover
Gina Wegman a young Viennese au pair girl
Bobby Steinsalz Teddy’s lawyer
Lucy Clara’s eldest daughter
Gottschalk a private investigator
Dr Gladstone Clara’s psychiatrist
Mike Spontini an oil tycoon, Clara’s third husband

© Roy Johnson 2017

More on Saul Bellow
More on the novella
More on short stories
Twentieth century literature

A Tragedy of Error

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A Tragedy of Error was Henry James’s first published story. It appeared in The Continental Monthly magazine for February 1864 and was never reprinted during James’s lifetime. In fact it was only eventually rediscovered in the 1950s.

A Tragedy of Error

A Tragedy of Error – critical commentary

In common with some of James’s very earliest tales, this one is not much more that an elaborated anecdote or a squib – though one with a grimly ironic twist in its dramatic conclusion.

Its principal weakness is the second section where Hortense is in conversation with the boatman who rows her in the harbour. Seeking to create plausibility, James invents a long discussion of the sailor’s poverty in order to provide the motivation for accepting her proposal of a paid crime. The extended nature of this section unbalances the composition of the story.

But the predictable outcome is well plotted, and commendable for the understated manner in which the twenty-one year old James leaves the reader to work out the tragedy that is unfolding. No names are mentioned – but we know that through the well orchestrated sequence of events, it is Hortense’s lover who is murdered, whilst her husband arrives safely home.

Interpretation

It is also worth noting, given what we know of James’s work still to be written, that this is a story of an adulterous woman who is prepared to have her husband murdered. In 1864 this could be accepted as a jeu d’esprit, and the story can still be enjoyed in this way. But taken into the context of James’s work as a whole it demonstrates that his psychologically sceptical attitude to women was present from the outset.

A Tragedy of Error – study resources

A Tragedy of Error The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

A Tragedy of Error The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

A Tragedy of Error Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon UK

A Tragedy of Error Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon US

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

A Tragedy of Error

A Tragedy of Error – plot summary

Part I.   Hortense de Bernier receives the sudden news in France that her husband will be joining her the next day on holiday from America. She discusses this embarrassing situation with her lover the Vicomte Louis de Meyrau, who tells her not to worry. But she does worry, and tries to calm her nerves with glassful of brandy

Part II.   Later that day, she goes down to the seafront, and after witnessing a sailor bullying his nephew, she employs him to row her across the harbour. On the way she questions him about his work; he explains his poverty; and eventually she employs him to murder her husband when his ship arrives the next day. He sets a very high price on the agreement.

Part III.   On reaching home, she receives a note telling her that Louis de Meyrau intends to meet her husband on his ship the next day She is unsure about her lover’s motives, and cannot sleep.

Part IV.   Louis de Meyrau meets the ship next day, is told that M. de Bernier has already gone ashore, and asks a boatman to take him to the de Bernier home. When Hortense goes out into the garden of her seafront home, she is met by her husband.

A Tragedy of Error – principal characters
Hortense de Bernier an adulterous French woman
M. de Bernier her husband
Vicomte Louis de Meyrau her lover
Josephine her maid
Valentine her cook
— the boatman
Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adina

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

Adina first appeared in Scribner’s Monthly during May—June 1874. This split across two monthly issues may account for the bipartite structure of the tale. Its next appearance in book form was as part of the collection of tales Travelling Companions published in 1919 by Boni and Liveright, New York.

Adina

Albano – Giorgione (1477—1510)

Adina – critical commentary

Romance

This tale has many elements of the medieval romance or the fairy tale which James had explored around this time (one thinks of Benvolio written the following year) – the discovered gem, the Italian setting, the young girl’s elopement. In fact James draws attention to this very aspect of the tale during his own narrative:

it ought to be out of a novel – such a thing as love at [first] sight; such a thing as an unspoken dialogue, between a handsome young Italian with a wrong, in a starlit garden, and a fanciful Western maid at a window.

And yet there are elements of structural detailing and thematic unity in the narrative of a kind which James would develop in his later tales which lift it above the ordinary romance. The tales has a deeply embedded narrative logic which lifts it above this plane

Geography

The story starts in Rome, where Scrope and the narrator are based. They ride out into the countryside and encounter Angelo – as it happens, near Albano, which will feature later in the tale. Quite apart from the issue of the topaz, they learn his name, where he lives, and the fact that his uncle is a clergyman. All of these details become important later in the story.

When Mrs Waddington takes fright at the prospect of the famous Roman fever, she decamps with Adina to Albano – which is the region south of Rome which includes the papal retreat – and also L’Arricia, which is where Angelo lives. Even though Scrope has taken advantage of Angelo, they are playing on his home territory.

Angelo thus has ready local access to pay court to Adina, and his own uncle on hand to effect the early morning marriage ceremony. The romance elements are there – but they are backed up by the sort of factual details in the tradition of realistic narrative fiction which was James’s natural milieu. Angelo and Adina even go to live in Rome after the marriage ceremony – which completes the geographic symmetry.

Structure, symbol, and parallels

The most obvious feature in terms of artistic devices is Angelo and his full name – Angelo Beati – ‘blessed angel’ – because he does in the end triumph with the ‘prize’ of Adina, who he says in the end is the more valuable: “she’s worth more than the topaz”.

And when Scrope finally throws the topaz back into its historical origins in the Tiber, he is on the Ponte del Angelo, and we already know that Saint Angelo is the young Italian’s patron saint name.

There is also ironic prefigurement of the story-line in Scrope’s observation:

some knowing person would have got word of the affair, and whispered to the Padre Girolamo that his handsome young nephew had been guided by a miracle to a fortune, and might marry a contessa.

Angelo does exactly that – twice. First he attempts to impress his village girl friend Nietta with the few scudi he has gained – but nothing comes of it, because the reward is not big enough to impress her. But then he succeeds on a much bigger symbolic level by enchanting and marrying Adina.

Psychological reading

This is the story of a pretty, wayward girl who breaks her promise to marry a serious though not good-looking man, and who runs off with a penniless, albeit handsome stranger. She is not dissimilar to the deaf-mute girl in Professor Fargo who suddenly runs off with a complete mountebank and charlatan. Adina is easily swayed – at first attracted to and even engaged to an ‘ugly’ classical scholar. But lured by only smiles, glimpses, and maybe the odd message from her window, she agrees to marry somebody she hardly knows.

Even though James was only just turned thirty at the time of the story’s composition, this is one of many of his works which offers a warning against women in general and marriage in particular. It is a theme which runs through many of the tales and into the ‘late phase’ of his greatest novels.

Adina – study resources

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

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

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

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

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

Adina

Adina – plot summary

Part I
The inner narrator and his friend Scrope are in Rome, riding in the countryside, when they encounter Angelo, a handsome young man who has just found an old gemstone in the roots of a lightning-struck tree. Scrope buys it from him at what is obviously a low price. He rationalises his opportunism, but the narrator has reservations about the transaction.

Scrope cleans and polishes the stone,, which turns out to be a golden topaz, the personal intaglio of the Emperor Tiberius. He swears the narrator to secrecy about the discovery, who in turn advises him not to even reveal the matter to a mistress.

When Scrope’s cousin Mrs Waddington arrives in Rome, he falls in love with her step-daughter Adina. Mrs Waddington and the narrator cannot understand why a pretty young girl should fall for an unattractive man such as Scrope. When they all go to Christmas Mass at St Peter’s Scrope and Adina stay out late alone. Next day Scrope reveals that he and Adina are engaged.

The narrator walks out alone next day and meets Angelo, who is eaten up with anger over the topaz and the money, none of which has done him any good. The narrator offers to help him if he can.

Part II
Scrope agrees to meet Angelo, but when they do he refuses to pay any more for the jewel. Adina says she will not wear the topaz because Tiberius was such a cruel emperor. They all meet Angelo in the Borgese gardens. He is composed, but threatens to ‘hurt’ Scrope at some point as revenge for his unfair treatment.

Mrs Waddington and Adina de-camp to Albano The narrator visits them, and on his way back to Rome meets Angelo, who lives nearby. Later he meets Adina alone, praying in a church. She begins to act strangely, and Scrope confesses to the narrator that he is worried about her. When Adina suddenly breaks off her engagement to Scrope, the narrator suspects that she has somehow fallen under the spell of Angelo. He advises Mrs Waddington to leave Albano the very next day. But the following morning a note reveals that Adina has married Angelo and already left with him.

Some time later the narrator goes to see Adina and Angelo who live in Rome. Angelo is radiantly happy, whilst Adina is ‘pale and grave’. But she says she wishes to remain with Angelo and ‘be forgotten’ by her relatives. When the narrator reveals this state of affairs to Scrope as they stroll in the city centre, Scrope throws the golden topaz into the Tiber.

Principal characters
I the un-named outer-narrator
I the un-named inner-narrator, his ‘host’
Sam Scrope their mutual friend, an ugly, cynical classical scholar
Angelo Beati a handsome young Italian
Mrs Waddington Scrope’s cousin, a widow
Adina Waddington her pretty young step-daughter from New England

Adina - Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After Holbein

by

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

After Holbein first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in May 1928. It was subsequently included in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction, Certain People published in 1930.

After Holbein

Danse Macabre

After Holbein – critical comments

The surprising thing about this story is the very fine balance between sympathy and satire in Edith Wharton’s presentation of its two principal characters. There is obviously a critical edge to her depiction of Anson Warley’s naive drift into the perils of old age and Mrs Jasper’s other-wordly existence in the twilight zone of dementia. Both of them are clearly deluded characters. Yet at the same time she is neither cruel nor lacking in sympathy for their plight.

Mrs Jasper is fairly close to a Dickensian character: she has a black wig tinged with purple, and orthopaedic shoes, and she has clearly lost touch with reality – but the characterisation is not calculated to make her look either ridiculous or pathetic. Similarly Anson Warley is presented as a dreamer, sleepwalking into the perils of old age and death.

Servants

It is interesting to note that both of these principal characters are supported by servants who appear to have a genuine concern for their wellbeing. Warley has his valet/manservant Filmore who tries without success to prevent him from going out or exposing himself to health dangers; and Mrs Jasper has Lavinia, a family servant who seems to be almost as old as herself, and whose chief concern is to protect her mistress from embarrassment and exposure to problems.

Also of note is the financial dependence of some of the servants. Miss Cress has every reason to keep Mrs Jasper happy, because her job depends upon it. And she imputes similar sympathetic views to Lavinia as they deal with the issue of the ageing (and absent) butler Munson

and all because poor old Munson’s memory was going, like his mistress’s, like Lavinia’s, and because he had forgotten it was one of the dinner nights … the tears were running down Lavinia’s cheeks, and Miss Cress knew she was thinking “If the daughters send him off—and they will—where’s he going to, old and deaf as he is, and all his people dead? Oh if only he can hold on until she dies, and get his pension …”

Structure

There is a very well organised structure to the story. Two characters. Anson Warley and Mrs Jasper, are preparing themselves for a dinner party later in the evening. They both have servants who help them dress. Both of them have had strokes and are losing touch with the real world. Both of them think they are being harassed or deceived by the people around them. And they are preparing for a dinner which is not scheduled to take place – but which does.

Warley has forgotten where he is supposed to be going. Mrs Jasper only has imaginary dinner parties. Yet because of ancient social connections between them he ends up being an uninvited guest at her house, and they dine together in sublime ignorance of the fact that nobody else is there.

Part of the humour in the story is created by the disparate cultural references which emphasise the differences between the time frame in which the characters are living imaginatively and that in which they actually exist. When Warley goes out his reflections are linked to the real world Manhattan where he lives:

The doctors, poor fools, called it the stomach, or high blood-pressure; but it was only the dizzy plunge of the sands in the hour glass, the everlasting plunge that emptied one of heart and bowels, like the drop of an elevator from the top of a sky-scraper.

In contrast, when the imaginary dinner party is about to begin, Mrs Jasper thinks she hears horse drawn carriages arriving – a clear reference to the nineteenth century which she still inhabits.

After Holbein – study resources

After Holbein The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon UK

After Holbein The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon US

After Holbein Edith Wharton Stories 1911-1937 – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

After Holbein Edith Wharton Stories 1911-1937 – Norton Critical – Amazon US

After Holbein - eBook edition After Holbein – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

After Holbein

After Holbein – story synopsis

Part I.   Anson Warley is an ageing New York bachelor who once had high cultural aspirations, but he has left them behind to give himself up to the life of a socialite and dandy.

Part II.   Despite signs that his health is failing, he chooses to dine out nightly, ignoring the cautions of his manservant Filmore. On the morning of the story he has had a minor stroke which has left him looking pale through lunch, but he is determined to go out to dinner with a few friends.

Part III.   Meanwhile Mrs Evelyn Jasper, a society hostess, is preparing to dress for an elaborate dinner. She is an elderly woman who wears a black wig and orthopaedic shoes. She is suffering from a form of dementia following a stroke, and is protected from reality by an equally old servant who is a family retainer. She imagines guests are arriving in carriages and recites a list of their names, including some who are already dead. Her jewellery is recovered from a safe, and she goes down to the dining room.

Part IV.   Displaying signs of confusion, Anson Warley dresses for dinner and refutes Filmore’s warnings about the night being cold. Once out on Fifth Avenue he suddenly realises that he doesn’t know where he is dining. Mrs Jasper enters his thoughts as he just happens to be passing her house – so he assumes that is where he is supposed to be going.

Part V.   As Anson Warley arrives at the house the staff are appalled at the social embarrassment likely to ensue. Warley has not been invited; there are no other guests; and the staff are worried that the shock might be fatal to Mrs Jasper.

But Mrs Jasper comes into the dining room supporting Warley on her arm and they dine as if everything were normal, exchanging formulaic conversation, and as if they were surrounded by other guests. The footman George serves mediocre food and passes spa water off as wine. At the end of the dinner Mrs Jasper invites Warley to join her after he has had cigars with the other male guests.

Part VI.   Warley’s temperature has been rising all day. Leaving the house, he struggles to get into his coat, and he thinks he is ‘going on’ to some other social event. However, as soon as the cold night air hits him, he dies on the pavement.

After Holbein

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

Principal characters
Anson Warley an ‘ageing’ (63) New York bachelor
Filmore his valet and manservant
Mrs Evelyn Jasper an elderly society hostess with dementia
Lavinia her aged servant
Miss Cress her young nurse

After Holbein

first edition

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

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.

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

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

Afterward

by

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

Afterward was first published in The Century Magazine for January 1910, and was then reprinted in the collection Tales of Men and Ghosts published later the same year. It was one of a number of ghost stories written by Edith Wharton. The genre was very popular at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.

Afterward

Afterward – critical commentary

It is very difficult to analyse or pass critical comment on a ghost story – unless one takes the supernatural premise seriously – for which in this case there seems to be little incentive provided. Edward and Mary Boyne have profited handsomely from the Blue Star Mine venture, and they have a naively romantic notion to retire to a fashionably old English country estate, where the house is so traditional they hope it will be haunted. The opening of the story is pitched at a mildly satirical level, poking gentle fun at their enthusiasm for a home with no heating or electric lighting.

But they have made their money by enduring ‘for fourteen years the soul-deadening ugliness of the Middle West’. The windfall fortune has now made that sacrifice worthwhile. Edward Boyne has profited from America’s system of individual enterprise and free market capitalism, and he can now afford to turn his back on it.

But he has profited at the expense of his colleague Robert Elwell, who introduced Boyne to the Blue Star venture in the first place. Elwell has borrowed money to put into the scheme, but then lost it when Boyne ‘got ahead’ of him in business. Elwell has tried to commit suicide, then has died shortly afterwards, leaving his wife destitute.

Edward Boyne moves to the old house in Dorset and almost immediately begins to behave strangely. When Elwell makes his two ‘visits’ to the house, Boyne recognises his figure on both occasions. The first occurs on the day he attempts suicide, and the second is on the day he dies (in America). Elwell therefore acts as the embodiment of Boyne’s guilty conscience over his dubious business dealings regarding the Blue Star Mine.

This does not explain how or why he disappears, but at least it provides a psychological underpinning to the story, which as a matter of fact might well have a second ‘disappearance’ – that of Mary Boyne herself.

The story begins with Mary in the library at the house in Lyng, recalling to herself the events that have led up to the disappearance of her husband. This gives the impression that hers is the controlling perspective and point of view in the narrative – and that (logically) she is still alive in order to recount the entire story, which is unfolding retrospectively. But the tale also ends with her in the library, receiving the gruesome news from Parvis about the attempted suicide and subsequent death of Elwell. She realises that she has directed the supernatural Elwell to her husband in the same room, and the shock appears to kill her.

She felt the walls of the room rush towards her, like inward falling ruins, and she heard Parvis, a long way off, as if through the ruins, crying to her, and struggling to get at her. But she was numb to his touch, she did not know what he was saying. Through the tumult she heard but one clear note, the voice of Alida Stair, speaking on the lawn at Pangbourne.

“You won’t know till afterward” it said. “You won’t know till long, long afterward.”

If this is the case, it is a neat technical achievement on Edith Wharton’s part – because she has created a narrative which ends with the death of the person from whose point of view the story is being told.

Afterward – study resources

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

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

Afterward - eBook edition Afterward – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

Afterward - eBook edition Afterward – AudioBook format at librivox

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Afterward

Afterward – story synopsis

Part I.   Americans Edward and Mary Boyne make a lot of money in the Blue Star Mine venture and decide to live in England. They choose an old country house in Dorset which they hope will have its own authentic residential ghost. Their English cousin Alida Stair reassures them that there is a ghost, but they won’t know about it. Ned Boyne hopes to write a book on economics and culture, but he seems out of sorts to his wife. She thinks it might be the influence of the haunted house, but since no ghost has ever been seen, this notion cannot be verified.

She locates a concealed panel which provides access to the roof, from where she and Ned see a figure approaching the house. Ned goes down to meet him, but when Mary follows them the man is no longer there. Ned gives her an explanation, but appears to be disturbed.

Part II.   Two months later she thinks she sees the same figure again – but it turns out to be her husband, whose moods appear to change in a disconcerting manner. A letter then arrives announcing legal threats brought against Ned and his dealings with the Blue Star Mine by his former partner Robert Elwell. But Edward reassures Mary that the matters in the letter have now been settled.

Part III.   Next day Mary feels completely reassured and she enjoys a proprietary stroll in the grounds, where she meets a young man who has come to see Ned. Since Ned is busy, he says he will come back again later. But when Mary goes in to lunch Ned is missing. The servants report that he has gone out with the young man. Mary interrogates the staff, but they know nothing about the stranger, except that he was wearing a strange hat.

Part IV.   Two weeks later Ned has still not reappeared and has left behind a fragment of a letter to a Mr Parvis relating to the legal dispute over the Mine. Mary makes extensive enquiries, but there is no trace of Ned. She gradually adjusts to the fact that he may not be coming back.

Part V.   Mr Parvis arrives from the USA to explain that Ned’s partner Robert Elwell lost money in the Mine venture and has died following an attempt to commit suicide. His widow has fallen on hard times. Parvis shows Mary a newspaper clipping which reveals a photograph of the young man who twice called at the house. Mary calculates that the first visit took place at the same time as his attempted suicide and the second later visit was at the time he actually died. The last words she recalls are those of her cousin warning her that “You won’t know [about the ghost] till long, long afterward.”

Principal characters
Edward (Ned) Boyne an American mining engineer
Mary Boyne his wife
Mrs Alida Stair their cousin and friend in England
Trimmle a parlour-maid
Robert (Bob) Elwell Boyne’s business partner in the mine
Parvis a lawyer from Waukesha (WI)

Video documentary

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

Afterward

Edith Wharton’s writing

Other works by Edith Wharton

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

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

Edith Wharton – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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All Passion Spent

by

tutorial, critical commentary, plot, and study resources

All Passion Spent first appeared in 1931 under the imprint of the Hogarth Press, the independent publishing house run by Leonard Woolf and his wife Virginia. Vita Sackville-West had been Virginia Woolf’s lover and they remained good friends, yet they were rivals in literary popularity. Readers today might be surprised to know that Vita Sackville-West’s work around this time sold more copies than that of Virginia Woolf. Sackville-West had best-sellers with The Edwardians (1930) All Passion Spent (1931), and Family History (1932) all of which which portrayed English upper-class manners and life in a critical and often satirical manner.

All Passion Spent

All Passion Spent – critical commentary

Biographical interpretation

Two years before the publication of this novel Vita Sackville-West had suffered the emotional shock of losing her beloved home at Knole when her younger brother inherited the title of Baron Sackville-West on the death of their father. She was passionately attached to the ancestral home, which was known as a calendar home – with 365 rooms, 52 staircases, 12 entrances, and 7 courtyards. It was a disappointment, but the traditional laws of primogeniture meant that inheritance passed automatically to the eldest male heir – both property and title.

As a form of compensation for this disappointment, Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson bought the run down castle at Sissinghurst (Kent) and began its restoration into what is now a world-renowned country house and gardens. This experience might account for the issues of inheritance, property, and the attachment to particular houses that forms the substance of All Passion Spent.

Sackville-West is exploring the issues of spiritual empathy that Virginia Woolf had outlined in Mrs Dalloway (1925). Woolf’s principal characters Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith never meet each other, but their thoughts and attitudes are linked through a series of literary symbols and congruence of attitude, such that when Septimus-Smith commits suicide at the end of the novel, Clarissa Dalloway understands completely why he has done so.

Deborah, Lady Slane, and Mr FitzGeorge have a similar relationship – except the understanding is on his part. He had been struck by her (even ‘fallen in love with her’) as a younger woman when they met in India – he a rich young traveller, and she the wife of the Viceroy. Forty years later he meets her and in an amazing frank and revealing conversation explains how he understands the sacrifices she has made in her life – abandoning her aspirations to be a painter in order to become the wife of a politician.

FitzGeorge is a rich and spoilt bachelor who collects art objects, and Lady Slane is the wife of a very successful politician and diplomat, yet this scene is the artistic highpoint of the novel. Sackville-West does not supply any evidence as to how or why FitzGeorge should have this special insight into Lady Slane’s personal ‘tragedy’ (after all, he is a crusty old private bachelor) but if we as readers are prepared to suspend our disbelief, this is a plea for intuitive understanding and sympathetic recognition of shared values that transcends gender, class, and age group.

This notion is reinforced by the concluding scene of the novel when Lady Slane’s great grand-daughter reveals that she rejects the family’s greedy and acquisitive values and wishes to be a musician. Lady Slane sees her own early life reflected in the girl’s aspirations and feels reassured that this alternative, independent system of values is still alive – even though she dies at this point in the narrative.

Feminism

The feminist notions which pervade the novel should be easily apparent to most readers. Lady Slane has the glimmer of aspiration to an independent existence which comes to her as a young woman. She has the idea of becoming a painter. So far as we know, she does not make a single brush-stroke across a canvas – so there is no evidence that she is in possession of any creative potential: the whole idea goes unexamined. But this is not the point. Any such aspirations are completely ignored by the weight of family and social conventions which force her into a marriage.

Sackville-West does not take a simplistic attitude to this situation. Deborah Lee (to give Lady Slane her maiden name) does not love the man she marries, but she has a reasonably happy married life, has a large family, and is successful as wife to the Viceroy to India, but her socially unacknowledged personal ambition is rather like the grit in the oyster which produces the pearl that is her vision of an alternative life.

Satire

Sackville-West offers a vision of upper-class life that spares no criticism or satirical edge. The novel begins with a six page eulogy to the Earl of Slane who has just died, detailing his public service to parliamentary life in way that makes it quite clear he is a an unthinking nonentity who has done nothing in his life except what the tradition of his class laid before him.

Lady Slane has done the same thing during her lifetime, but the point of the novel is that she had the spark of something more creative within her. She has suppressed this impulse whilst raising her family, but she makes a bold move to express it at the end of her life when she has the opportunity, and she is happy to see the same seeds of creativity in her great-grand-daughter just before she dies.

This criticism of class attitudes extends to the whole Holland family. Lord Slane didn’t even like his children and his wife only felt sympathetic to two of them – the eccentric bachelor Fay and the awkward visionary Edith. But the rest of their children, all conventionally married, are revealed as grasping and hypocritical toadies who pretend to be concerned for their ageing mother but actually do not want the responsibility of looking after her for entirely selfish reasons.

All Passion Spent – study resources

All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – Paperback – Amazon UK
All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – Paperback – Amazon US

All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – (Kindle) – Amazon UK
All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – (Kindle) – Amazon US

All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – DVD – Amazon UK
All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – DVD – Amazon US

All Passion Spent – chapter summaries

Part I

On the death of Henry Holland, the Earl of Slane, the members of his large family are faced with the problem of what to do with their elderly mother, whom they regard as rather simple-minded. They discuss the issue of inheritance in a greedy and competitive manner, all the time protesting their lack of self-interest. They pretend to welcome the responsibility of looking after their mother, which they all secretly wish to evade.

The elderly bachelor son Kay Holland has dinner with an old friend FitzGeorge, who knew Lady Slane in India. There are preparations for a funeral in Westminster Abbey, during which time the mother assumes an unusual degree of authority. After the funeral she suddenly announces that she wants to live in a little house in Hampstead she saw thirty years before – and she doesn’t want any grand-children or her great-grand-children visiting. The family are all shocked – except Edith, who is delighted.

The mother gives away all her jewellery to her eldest son and his wife. She then travels by tube to Hampstead thinking about her late husband and how he didn’t really like his children, except for Edith. She feels a quasi-mystic union with the empty and dilapidated house. The eccentric owner Mr Bucktrout has similar ideas to those of Lady Slane on enjoying old age and avoiding young people. He approves of her as a tenant and is almost reluctant to set the rent.

The family are horrified by the casual nature of this tenancy. Lady Slane and her maid Genoux get on well with the craftsman Mr Gersheron, and Mr Bucktrout begins to present Lady Slane with flowers. They discuss his theories about the imminent demise of the world.

She realises that she has lived at one remove from understanding the world, but now feels more relaxed about it. She rejects the idea of strife and competition, and wishes only to enjoy the support and comforting presence she feels with Mr Bucktrout and Mr Gershon.

Part II

Lady Slane luxuriates in the comfort and solitude of the house and its garden. She looks back on her life and examines the forces that have shaped it. As a girl of seventeen she had a romantic ambition to be a painter, but under family and social pressures she became engaged to Henry Holland. The preparations for their marriage were like an arcane ritual which left her completely puzzled.

At the time, she was not in love with Henry, and she was very conscious that he would continue to enjoy all the freedoms of masculine life, whilst she would gain nothing as a woman except the responsibility of being eternally on hand to look after him. Nevertheless, she felt that she could not escape the weight of expectations placed upon her.

Henry became a faithful and patronising husband, and she became a devoted wife, even though she sacrificed all her ambition to fulfil her role as a wife and mother. She now wonders about the foundation of her own individuality, as a separate entity to her husband, and she questions the relative values of the life he has offered her and the potential life that he has taken away from her. Apart from her favourites Kay and Edith she feels that all her other children belong to Henry.

Part III

Lady Slane lives in seclusion in the Hampstead house with her maid Genoux. Her relatives call infrequently and great-grandchildren are more or less forbidden. She receives a visit from Kay’s friend Mr FitzGeorge who flatters her and brags about his collection of precious objects. He appreciates her almost as a work of art in her own right. He recalls their meeting in India and confesses that he fell in love with her, then moves on to criticise her husband. He reveals to her the truth about the sacrifice she has made in marrying. She admits that he is right, and they agree to remain friends.

Kay Holland notices that his friend FitzGeorge isn’t at the club so often, and is glad that he has stopped asking for an introduction to Lady Slane. But then FitzGeorge suddenly dies, leaving his valuable collection of art objects to Lady Slane. The family members immediately assemble with offers to ‘help’ her, their covetousness and self-interest flimsily masked by a completely insincere pretence of concern. Lady Slane consults Mr Brooktrout and devises a plan to donate the treasures to the nation’s museums.

The family are horrified. Lady Slane remains at a distance from them and keeps track of their doings via the services of a press-cuttings agency. Finally, she is visited by her great grand-daughter who bears her own name and wants to be a musician, rejecting the family’s conventional values. The two of them share an appreciation of independently-generated values and an understanding of each other which spans the generations. Following this meeting of minds Lady Slane dies at the age of eighty-eight.

All Passion Spent – characters
Henry Holland the Earl of Slane, who has just died
Deborah, Lady Slane his widow
Kay Holland elderly son of the family, a bachelor
Mr FitzGeorge his friend, a bachelor art collector
William Holland another son, frugal and stingy
Lavinia William’s equally frugal wife
Genoux Lady Slane’s French maid
Mr Bucktrout eccentric owner of the Hampstead house
Mr Gorshon an eccentric craftsman and builder
Deborah Lee Lady Slane’s great-grand-daughter

© Roy Johnson 2016

More on Vita Sackville-West
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Almayer’s Folly

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Almayer’s Folly (1895) was Joseph Conrad’s first novel, It deals with events which take place around 1887 in the Malay Archipelago, where Conrad had spent some time as a seaman. Many of the characters in the story are based on real people he met around that time. Some of these people crop up again in his second novel An Outcast of the Islands which deals with events that take place earlier, in 1872. An Outcast is what might in modern media terms be called a ‘prequel’ to the first novel. There is also a third volume in the series called The Rescue that deals with events set even further back in the 1850s – but this was not published until 1920.

Joseph Conrad - author of Almayer's Folly

Joseph Conrad

Almayer’s Folly – critical commentary

Race

Despite all the local political rivalries and machinations, the temporal complexities of the plot, and the problem of tracking who is where in geographic terms – the most striking underlying theme in the novel is that of race.

Conrad’s family were Polish political refugees who had been exiled in Russia; he spoke French and English as his second and third languages; and by the time he became a writer he had travelled around the world

Almayer has agreed to marry Captain Lingard’s adopted Philippino daughter in exchange for a business partnership (a subject dealt with at greater length in An Outcast of the Islands). His wife has grown to detest him. This is partly justified by the fact that he is lazy, incompetent, and a boor. But she hates other white men too. She is very conscious that they come with kind words – and carry guns. She shares this view with Lambaka – with whom she has been having an affair.

She also conspires with the other local nationalists in their plots against Almayer and the trading post – and she is complicit in the gruesome disfigurement of the drowned corpse. This is a move designed to cover Dain Maroola’s tracks in his flight with Nina. Mrs Almayer approves of this match – partly because it has brought her money in the form of the dowry, but on racial grounds, because she feels that Nina will bring honour and dignity on herself by association with a Balinese prince.

Almayer himself, on the other hand, feels racially affronted by Nina’s attachment to Dain. He thinks of her as ‘white’ and European educated, and he feels she is lowering and demeaning herself in this relationship – even though Dain is a prince in his own society.

Nina herself undergoes a transformation of consciousness when she falls in love with Dain. She is at first torn between her western and eastern cultural heritage. But the force of her feelings is reinforced by a powerful sense of racial bonding with Dain She is proud to love Dain and devote herself to him. She too, like her mother, scorns the Europeans. She even finally rejects her own father when he demands that she obey him.

Critical approaches

A great deal of the first critical commentary on these early works is focused on their accuracy in relation to what was known of Conrad’s biography. That is, the works were assessed on the basis of the relation between their fictional representations and the real places he had visited, the real people he had met, and even the books he had read.

That is understandable given the conventions of literary criticism at the time. But now we recognise that authors are not in the least obliged to make a faithful copy of ‘reality’. They can pick and choose from the real world and from their imaginations exactly as they see fit. Our only demands as readers is that the result should be convincing.

Setting

In the first part of the novel Almayer recalls his earlier days in Macassar, a provincial capital in southern Indonesia. The remainder and majority of the events take place in the fictional town of Sambir, which is loosely based on Berau in north-east Borneo (today called Kalimantan) very close to the equator.

The river Pantai on which Sambir is based plays an important part in the story. Captain Lingard has established his prosperous trading business based on his monopoly of navigational skills on the river which is the source of much annoyance to his business rivals.

Almayer’s Folly – study resources

Almayer's Folly - Wordsworth edition Almayer’s Folly – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Almayer's Folly - Wordsworth edition Almayer’s Folly – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Almayer's Folly - Kindle edition Almayer’s Folly – Kindle eBook

Almayer's Folly - Dover edition Almayer’s Folly – Dover Thrift – Amazon UK

Almayer's Folly - Dover edition Almayer’s Folly – Dover Thrift – Amazon US

Almayer's Folly - eBook Almayer’s Folly – eBook at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad - biography Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

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

Conrad - Notes on Life and Letters Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Conrad - biography Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Almayer's Folly

Almayer’s Folly – plot summary

Almayer's FollyAt the outset of the novel Almayer thinks back to his earliest days in Macassar when Captain Lingard offered him a partnership in exchange for marrying his adopted Philippino daughter. Since then Almayer’s fortunes have sunk, and he yearns to become wealthy and return to Europe with his half-caste daughter Nina. He now feels distinctly hostile towards his wife – a feeling which is reciprocated. He sends Nina to Singapore to be educated amongst Europeans. The experiment is not successful, and she returns home. Lingard seems to be missing somewhere in Europe.

Almayer begins to construct a large residence and reception centre for British traders and military, but jurisdiction in Sambir passes from British to Dutch hands. Local chief Abdulla offers Almayer money in exchange for his daughter who he wishes to marry to his nephew Reshid – but Almayer indignantly refuses.

Then Balinese prince Dain Maroola (masquerading as a trader) visits Almayer, and although very little trade is done he is visually impressed by Nina. He pays Mrs Almayer money (a dowry) to allow him access to Nina for courtship. Mrs Almayer is happy to do this for financial as well as racial reasons.

Almayer also has grandiose dreams of exploring for gold in the interior of the country. He prepares boats for the expedition, even though he has no idea where this gold is located. Meanwhile Dain meets Nina secretly for romantic trysts, and she feels drawn to him culturally, despite her European ‘education’.

Dain meets Lambaka to discuss policy and despite being threatened, he departs during a thunderstorm to meet Nina. He is apparently drowned during the storm, and washed up as an almost headless corpse at Almayer’s compound the next morning.

Taminah, a simple seller of cakes has secretly observed the Nina-Dain relationship and is desperately jealous because she is herself in love with Dain. She sees Nina as a ‘white’ interloper.

Meanwhile a Dutch ship arrives, the officers of which are looking for Dain, who has blown up his own ship in escaping them, causing the deaths of two Dutch seamen. Almayer temporises, and they accuse Almayer of hiding him.

The Dutch officers demand that he produce Dain. Almayer promises to do so, invites them to dinner, and gets drunk. Finally he produces the dead body. But Babalatchi arrives with the true version of events – that Dain escaped and planted his own bracelet and ring on a dead comrade who was killed during the storm.

Nina leaves home to join Dain, and her mother plans to leave Almayer, supported by the money for the dowry. Almayer is awakened from a drunken nightmare by Taminah, who tells him all that has been going on.

Dain waits in hiding, and is joined by Nina. But they are followed by Almayer, who wants his daughter back and feels racially insulted by her liaison with Dain. The two men challenge each other. Nina refuses to obey her father. Finally, Almayer offers to take them away – just as the Dutch troops arrive in pursuit of Dain.

Almayer takes Nina and Dain to an island where they are to be rescued. He parts from his daughter with great bitterness, after which he goes back to Sambir, sets fire to Lingard’s office (and his own home) then declines into opium addition and eventually dies – as news of the birth of Nina’s child is announced.

Biography

Principal characters
Tom Lingard an experienced sea captain with a monopolistic knowledge of river navigation – ‘Rajah Laut’ (King of the Sea)
Kaspar Almayer Lingard’s Dutch business partner, married to his adopted daughter
Mrs Almayer his Philippino wife, who despises him
Nina Almayer’s beautiful mixed-race child
Ali Almayer’s Malaysian assistant
Babalatchi a one-eyed vagabond, handman to Lakamba
Rajah Lakamba trader-cultivator and war-lord
Said Abdulla bin Selim great trader of Sambir
Sayed Reshid his nephew
Sambir trading post town in Borneo
Dain Maroola a rich and handsome prince from Bali
Bulangi a rice trader (who does not appear)
Taminah Bulangi’s slave girl who sells cakes

Almayer's Folly

Almayer’s Folly – first edition 1895

Further reading

Joseph Conrad - reader Amar Acheraiou Joseph Conrad and the Reader, London: Macmillan, 2009.

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

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

Joseph Conrad - dialogue Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985

Joseph Conrad - novelist Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958

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

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

Joseph Conrad - genre Jakob Lothe, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008

Joseph Conrad - essays Ross Murfin, Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1985

Joseph Conrad - life Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007.

Joseph Conrad - introduction John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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

Joseph Conrad - companion J.H. Stape, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

Joseph Conrad - mariner Peter Villiers, Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner, Seafarer Books, 2006.

Joseph Conrad - his work Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work), London: Northcote House, 1994.

Other works by Joseph Conrad

The novels of Joseph Conrad - An Outcast of the IslandsAn Outcast of the Islands (1896) was Conrad’s second novel, and acts as a ‘prequel’ to the first, Almayer’s Folly. English sea captain Tom Lingard rescues the corrupt Peter Willems and gives him a second chance by setting him up with a business in a commercial outpost. However, Willems lacks the moral fibre to profit from this act of generosity. He becomes obsessed with a beautiful native girl, deserts his wife and is overwhelmed by local political factions. All this takes place in southern Indonesia against a background of British and Dutch imperialist squabbling for supremacy in the region. Willems is eventually abandoned by his protector, feels desolate and isolated, then has to face the wrath of his wife who comes in search of him.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

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

© Roy Johnson 2012

Joseph Conrad links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
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Amy Foster

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Amy Foster (1901) first appeared in the London Illustrated News and was published with Joseph Conrad’s other tales of endurance and extreme conditions, Falk, and The Secret Sharer, to form the collection Typhoon and Other Tales in 1903. What looks at first as if it is going to be a tale of positive redemption turns out to be a grim parable of a tragic or even pessimistic view of the world.

Joseph Conrad - portrait

Joseph Conrad

Amy Foster – critical commentary

The immigrant experience

Yanko’s anguished journey across northern Europe is a deeply felt account of emigration and social isolation – one which reflects the experience of the many thousands of souls who uprooted themselves in their search for a better life in the West. Yanko is culturally and linguistically cut off from everything he experiences in transit.

Conrad’s great artistic achievement in this story is in these passages is to show the world through the emigrant’s naive and unsophisticated point of view. Yanko doesn’t understand where he is or what is going on around him. But we know he is on the railroad, passing through Berlin, or embarking on the ship that is to take him to America – or Amerika, for this was the route to be taken by Kafka’s Karl Rossman only a decade and a half later.

The passages dealing with the shipwreck and its awful aftermath are ones which Conrad imagined many times in his reflections on tragedies and accidents at sea, from Lord Jim and Typhoon to The Shadow-Line.

When Yanko touches dry land the story takes on distinctly Dickensian tones of the inhospitable marshes, and Amy Foster’s gesture of bringing bread to succour a ragged and desperate fugitive in precisely the same location as Pip’s generosity to Magwitch is a pure echo of Great Expectations.

Yanko’s positive determination to survive is a contrast to the xenophobic reaction of the locals, who with the exception of Swaffer and Dr Kennedy treat him abominably. Yanko survives and even prospers, with the ‘immigrant mentality’ of sceptical but stoic endurance. He seems to eventually integrate successfully, and yet ultimately he is betrayed by his own rescuer. Amy denies him in his most extreme moment of need.

Conrad was not a religious man, but there is everything in the story to suggest a Christian reading of the tale. Yanko suffers exile, shipwreck, humiliation, whiplashes, stoning, scorn, and rejection – yet he endures and forgives those who torment him. And he is ‘rescued’ by a simple girl who takes pity on him.

Since Yanko comes from eastern Europe it is common for critics to read the story biographically. Conrad’s family suffered exile at the hands of the Russians, and Conrad himself was technically an outsider in English society – even though he became a naturalized British subject in 1886 as soon as he had completed his examinations for the merchant service.

A great deal is made in the story of Yanko’s inability to express himself – though Conrad had been tri-lingual (Polish, English, French) since his childhood.

The narrative

In common with many of Conrad’s other tales and novels, the narrative is noticeably indirect. An un-named outer narrator introduces the story, but its main events are relayed to us by Dr Kennedy, one of the few local characters who is sympathetic to Yanko and his plight.

Amy Foster – study resources

Amy Foster Amy Foster – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Amy Foster Amy Foster – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Amy Foster Amy Foster – Kindle eBook (includes screenplay)

Amy Foster Amy Foster – DVD film adaptation – Amazon UK

Amy Foster Amy Foster – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Red button Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

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

Red button Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Red button Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Amy Foster

Amy Foster – plot summary

Yanko Goorall is a poor emigrant from ‘the eastern range of the Carpathians’. His family have made sacrifices and raised the money to send him in search of a new life in America, via an unscrupulous organisation. He travels across Europe in very difficult conditions, and is then a sole survivor of a shipwreck off the coast of Kent.

He has lost everything, is hungry, wretched, and knows no English. For days he staggers around the coastal marshlands. When he comes into contact with local inhabitants, they regard him as a madman, shun him, and throw stones at him. Finally, a young woman Amy Foster takes pity on him and gives him something to eat.

A neighbour provides him with some rudimentary shelter, and he gradually starts working and making himself useful. Amy is attracted to his foreign appearance, and falls in love with him. Against opposition from neighbours and relatives, she marries Yanko and they have a son. He is even given a house in return for saving a child’s life.

Some time later Yanko falls ill and rapidly descends into a delirious fever in which he reverts to his native Polish. Amy takes fright and deserts him in his most urgent moment of need, when he is crying out to her for water. Next day he is dead.

Film adaptation

Director Beeban Kidron (1997)

“Amy Foster”, renamed “Swept from the Sea”
starring Rachel Weiz and Vincent Perez

Principal characters
I the unnamed outer narrator
Dr Kennedy a retired naval surgeon, and the principal inner-narrator
Isaac Foster a farmer
Amy Foster his daughter
Mr Smith the tenant at New Barns Farm
Swaffer Smith’s neighbour
Yanko Goorall an east European emigrant
Johnny Goorall Yanko and Amy’s son
Biography

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

Joseph Conrad - writing table

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Joseph Conrad

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

Joseph Conrad Heart of DarknessHeart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

&copy Roy Johnson 2012

Joseph Conrad web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
Joseph Conrad complete tales

An Anarchist

by

tutorial, commentary, web links, and study resources

An Anarchist was written late in 1905. It was first serialized in Harper’s Magazine, 1906, then later collected in A Set of Six, 1908 (UK), 1915 (US). The other stories in this collection are Gaspar Ruiz, The Informer, The Brute, The Duel, and Il Conde.

An Anarchist

An Anarchist – critical commentary

Conrad is amazingly frank in his 1908 take-it-or-leave-it introductory notes to A Set of Six, the collection which includes The Anarchist.

Of The Informer and An Anarchist I will say next to nothing. The pedigree of these tales is hopelessly complicated and not worth disentangling at this distance of time. I found them and here they are. The discriminating reader will guess that I have found them within my mind; but how they or their elements came in there I have forgotten for the most part; and for the rest I really don’t see why I should give myself away more than I have done already.

Conrad obviously had an interest in anarchists and the radical political movements of the late nineteenth century (see The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes) but in the case of The Anarchist he depicts someone who is perceived to be an anarchist by someone else (the ranch manager) – but who is simply a victim of fate.

Paul is an ordinary young working man who is criminalized merely because he resists arrest when drunk. When released from jail he is unable to find work, and falls in with a group of anarchists – without ever sharing their political ideology. And when on the penitentiary island he is not particularly active in the revolt against the State (the prison guards).

However, political theory aside, it could be argued that Paul behaves in a manner which many people would consider anarchic. He has some humanitarian scruples in not joining the prisoner revolt in the penitentiary and its aftermath, yet once in the escape boat, he has no scruples about shooting his two fellow escapees and ditching the evidence. He escapes intact, but then refuses the offer to rejoin European society. He is not so much an anarchist as an ‘outsider’.

An Anarchist – study resources

The Anarchist A Set of Six – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

The Anarchist A Set of Six – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Anarchist The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

An Anarchist A Set of Six – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Anarchist Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

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

The Anarchist Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

The Anarchist Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

An Anarchist

An Anarchist – plot summary

An un-named narrator is on a cattle-ranching island in South America. The manager of the company relates how he saved a runaway convict and, convincing himself he was an anarchist from Barcelona, gave him a job as an engineer on the company’s steam boat.

Paul (the convict) then relates his life history to the narrator. Whilst celebrating his twenty-fifth birthday with friends in Paris, he gets drunk, fights with police, and goes to jail. On release he cannot get work. He falls in with a group of anarchists who support themselves by stealing from the rich. When they attempt to rob a bank the plot is foiled and he is deported to a penitentiary island in Cayenne (French Guiana).

The convicts there organise a mutiny and the prison warders are overthrown. Paul does not participate in the uprising for humanitarian reasons. Whilst hiding in some bushes he watches soldiers pursuing convicts, then on finding a revolver he escapes in a boat. Two other convicts seize control of the boat and they all row off to sea to escape.

Paul produces the revolver and takes charge, forcing the other two to do the rowing. When they spot a passenger schooner, the two men suddenly become very friendly towards Paul, but he shoots them both and pushes the bodies overboard, then throws away the gun.

The schooner picks him up and drops him off at the island where the story began. The narrator invites him to leave the island and return to Europe – but he chooses to remain, having become slightly deranged.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

Principal characters
I an un-named European narrator
Harry Gee the manager of the cattle station
Paul ‘Anarchista de Barcelona’ – actually from Paris
Joseph Conrad’s writing

Joseph Conrad - manuscript page

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

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

Joseph Conrad - writing table

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

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

Joseph Conrad Heart of DarknessHeart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013

Joseph Conrad links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
Joseph Conrad complete tales

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