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The Real Right Thing

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The Real Right Thing first appeared in Collier’s Weekly for December 1899 at a time when Henry James was producing a number of his famous ghost stories. Its first publication in book form was in The Soft Side in 1900, alongside tales such as The Third Person, The Tree of Knowledge, John Delavoy, The Great Condition, and Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie.

The Real Right Thing

The Real Right Thing – critical commentary

This tale is something of a curiosity. It is one of the shortest of all James’s tales – less than 5,000 words – and has a number of elements that suggest that he might have been in two minds regarding the inner purpose of the narrative.

Biography

With regard to the overt subject matter – the biography of a writer – there is certainly no doubt that James was very conscious of matters regarding privacy, indiscretions, revelations, and the dangers of the exposure of a writer’s life to public scrutiny. He made a ‘bonfire’ of his own personal papers, and wrote a number of other stories on this theme which essentially support the idea that writers are entitled to their privacy, even after death. The most famous example is The Aspern Papers.

Withermore becomes gradually conscious that Ashton Doyne might not wish to have his ‘life’ exposed to the public, and coupled with the ‘ghost story’ element of the narrative, the biographical project is abandoned. In this sense, the story is a triumph for the dead writer, and possibly even a wish-fulfilment on James’s part, since he certainly had things to conceal from the public in his own life.

Mrs Doyne

But there are other curiosities. Mrs Doyne is introduced as a Dickensian harpy , an almost grotesque figure: ‘her big black eyes, he big black wig, her big black fan and gloves, her general gaunt, ugly, tragic … presence’. She also has a curious habit of speaking from behind the fan, which she holds up to conceal her face.

She is also presented as a rather ambiguous figure, with two implications that there was something seriously amiss in her relationship with her husband:

Doyne’s relationships with his wife had been, to Withermore’s knowledge, a very special chapter — which would present itself, by the way, as a very delicate one for the biographer … She had not taken Doyne seriously enough in life, but the biography should be a solid reply to every imputation on herself.

But having set up these tantalising hints, James makes nothing more of this issue in the rest of the story, which then becomes another variation of the ‘ghostly tale’.

The ghost story

James was a great devotee of the ghost story – and he prided himself in avoiding the contemporary clichés of the genre. His greatest work of this type is of course his macabre and chilling The Turn of the Screw, but he also produced variations such as the comic ghost story The Third Person and a tale which actually contains a benevolent ghost in Sir Edmund Orme.

James is very good at creating the elements of suspense and mystery associated with ghost stories – which were very popular at the end of the nineteenth century. The year before (1898) he had successfully summoned up the images of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel in The Turn of the Screw without ever describing them. His method (or literary conjurer’s trick) is to have his protagonists imagine the ghosts – and readers are invited to share this vision.

The governess in The Turn of the Screw never actually sees Peter Quint or Miss Jessel: she imagines she has seen them, and wishes them into being. And here in The Real right Thing Withermore (and Mrs Doyne) feel the presence of Ashton Doyne’s spirit. James does not resort to any hackneyed spectral presences, no ectoplasms, or shadows behind the curtain. Withermore invokes the spirit of Ashton Doyne because he is writing in his room; he is surrounded by his furniture, and his personal effects. He is also delving into his private life to create the biography.

So James has him sense the presence of the dead Ashton Doyne, guarding his own work and reputation. It is almost as if the ghost is a transferred embodiment of Withermore’s guilty conscience. He wonders about the desirability of creating a biography the moment he sets to work on it.

But in The Real Right Thing there is neither innovation nor explanation. Withermore begins to feel empathetically close to Doyne because he is working in the author’s study, and at first he feels his biographical research is being assisted by the spirit of the ‘great’ man. But then for no particular reason that is given to us, the influence turns negative, and Withermore begins to have doubts.. Then he feels that the spirit of Doyne is positively blocking his efforts and finally even access to the study. When Mrs Doyne urges him to continue with his efforts, even she is unable to gain access to the room, which we are led to believe is being ‘guarded’ by Doyne’s spirit.

This is not very persuasive, and the tale comes to a rather abrupt end with the abandonment of the projected biography. All in all, the tale does not hang together very well to compare with the best that James wrote on the same theme.

Structural weakness

At around 5,000 words this is certainly the shortest of James’s tales, but also probably one of the least successful. It deals with a subject very close to James’s own heart in the later phase of his life – a fear that inquisitive biographers might spoil the carefully cultivated public image of the successful auteur.

James protected his own reputation by burning all his private papers and writing his own biography. He promoted the idea that a writer’s standing should be based on his work, and should not be sullied by any unsavoury details from his private life. As it is expressed in this tale ‘The artist was what he did – he was nothing else’. And confirmed bachelor Henry James also had (as we now know) something to hide, as he gave way to the homo-erotic impulses he increasingly felt.

The story begins well enough with all the ingredients of a potentially complex narrative: an inexperienced biographer with doubts regarding his task; access to all the great writer’s papers; and a widow with ambiguous motives. Similar ingredients had produced the masterpiece The Aspern Papers ten years previously.

Mrs Doyne is a figure almost out of Grand Guignol: Withermore is struck by ‘her big black eyes, her big black wig, her big black fan and gloves’. And she is later described as a figure like ‘some ‘decadent’ coloured print, some poster of the newest school’. She speaks from behind her fan, covering her lower face. There is every reason to believe (at first) that she might be secretly controlling the ‘special box or drawers’ and the ‘opening of an old journal at the very date he wanted’ which guide Withermore’s efforts. But nothing is made of this dramatic character. She is at first ambiguous, but then she simply colludes with Withermore in his supposition that the spirit of Doyne is guarding his reputation.

This dramatic weakness reinforces the more important structural flaw in the story – that having first ‘encouraged’ Withermore’s efforts in Part II, the spirit then turns against him to deter his efforts in Part III. No reason is provided for this change. Withermore is simply enthusiastic one moment, then despondent the next. The only logical explanation for the differences between Parts II and III is inconsistency or a change of mind on Withermore’s part. And the fact that the entire project of the biography is abandoned amplifies the sense of bathos. Nothing is achieved.

The Real Right Thing – study resources

The Real Right Thing The Ghost Stories of Henry James – Wordsworth edn – Amazon UK

The Real Right Thing The Ghost Stories of Henry James – Wordsworth edn – Amazon US

The Real Right Thing The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Real Right Thing The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Real Right Thing Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Real Right Thing Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

The Real Right Thing The Real Right Thing – Gutenberg Consortia eBook

The Real Right Thing

The Real Right Thing – plot summary

Part I. On the death of the writer Ashton Doyne, his widow commissions his younger colleague George Withermore to write a biography. She gives Withermore free access to all Doyne’s papers and invites him to use Doyne’s former study as a place of work. Withermore realises that writing a biography will bring him into intimate contact with his former colleague, more so than when he was alive.

Part II. Withermore feels that Mrs Doyne is watching him, but they agree that the ‘spirit’ of Doyne they both feel present will help them in the enterprise and should be encouraged. As he reads more of Doyne’s private papers Withermore feels himself more closely connected with his subject, and he feels that Doyne is almost present in the room, helping him in his researches and composition.

Part II. Withermore is distressed to realise that he is disconcerted when the presence of Doyne’s spirit is not available to him. On one such occasion he compares notes with Mrs Doyne and they feel that Doyne’s spirit somehow passes between them. Withermore begins to feel that he is delving too deeply into Doyne’s life, and when the spirit reappears it is a warning against such intrusion. He fears that if he continues to work on the biography it will invoke Doyne’s disapproval. He finally tests this notion by approaching the study, only to find Doyne’s spirit forbidding entry. Mrs Doyne checks and finds the same – so they agree to abandon the projected biography.

Principal characters
Ashton Doyne a ‘great’ writer, recently deceased
Mrs Doyne his ugly widow, who wears a black wig and speaks from behind a black fan
George Withermore a young and inexperienced newspaper journalist

Henry James's Study

Henry James’s study

Ghost stories by Henry James

Red button The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)

Red button The Ghostly Rental (1876)

Red button Sir Edmund Orme (1891)

Red button The Private Life (1892)

Red button Owen Wingrave (1892)

Red button The Friends of the Friends (1896)

Red button The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Red button The Real Right Thing (1899)

Red button The Third Person (1900)

Red button The Jolly Corner (1908)

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

The Real Thing

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

The Real Thing was written in 1891 and first appeared syndicated in a number of American newspapers the following year: the Illustrated Buffalo Express, the Detroit Sunday News, the Indianapols News, the Louisville Courier-Journal, and the Philadelphia Enquirer. It also appeared in the English Black and White magazine at the same time. Its first appearance in book form was in The Real Thing and Other Tales published by Macmillan in 1893. It is worth noting that on its first appearance the tale itself carried illustrations, as was quite common with stories and serialised fiction at that time.

The Real Thing

Victorian illustration

The Real Thing – critical commentary

This is a very popular, well-known, and much reprinted tale – possibly because it is so short, so touching, and because it seems to offer an easy glimpse into the theories of art that James wrote about so obscurely in the famous ‘Prefaces’ to the New York edition of his collected works.

Major and Mrs Monarch are truly pathetic figures. They are an upper-class ‘gentleman’ and ‘lady’ who have fallen on hard times after losing their money. They cling to their snobbish notions of class and status – yet they are virtually empty figures. The narrator conceives of them as the products of a purposeless, trite, and conventional lifestyle. They also naively believe that their sense of good manners and visual appeal are marketable commodities – but they are mistaken.

Their humiliating attempts to become useful to the narrator are given an excruciatingly ironic twist when they end up serving tea and acting as housekeepers – in place of the two lower-class figures of Miss Churm and Oronte, who successfully occupy the places as models the Monarchs were seeking.

At an artistic level, this is the ‘success’ of the tale. Major and Mrs Monarch think they are ‘the real thing’ as representatives of class types – and that they will be useful to the narrator in his work as an illustrator. But they lack plasticity; they can only ever be what they are – stuffed dummies with no character at all. Miss Churm and Oronte on the other hand are capable of becoming ‘suggestive’ for the narrator’s purposes, and are visually creative.

In other words, the story illustrates that a superficial appearance of being ‘the real thing’ is not sufficient to guarantee artistic success. The narrator’s drawings using the Monarchs as models are deemed a failure by his friend Jack Hawley and the publisher’s artistic director. But when he reverts to using Miss Churm and Oronte as models, he succeeds and gains the commission for the whole series of illustrated novels.

The Real Thing – study resources

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

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

The Real Thing Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Real Thing Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Real Thing The Real Thing – Classic Reprint edition

The Real Thing The Real Thing – Kindle edition

The Real Thing Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition

The Real Thing The Real Thing – eBook formats at Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

The Real Thing

The Real Thing – plot summary

Chapter I.   Major and Mrs Monarch arrive at the studio of the un-named narrator, a painter of portraits and a magazine illustrator. They are offering themselves as artists models, having fallen on hard times after losing their money. They perceive that there will be a demand for their ideal embodiment of a gentleman and a lady.

Chapter II.   The narrator surmises that they are the product of ‘twenty years of country-house visiting’ – pleasant but empty characters. They have heard that the narrator will be illustrating the first volume of a deluxe edition of an important writer’s work, and they assume that he will need models to illustrate fashionable society types. The narrator is hesitant, but they are desperate and persistent. Whilst there, they disapprovingly meet the narrator’s cockney employee, Miss Churm who is lower-class but a very successful model.

Chapter III.   The narrator uses Miss Churm, who can adapt herself to whatever is required, whilst Major Monarch desperately tries to make himself useful around the studio. But when Mrs Monarch tries to be a model she is too stiff, and is always the same, whereas Miss Churm can become any number of different types. But when the narrator asks Miss Churm to make them all tea, she resents the implied demotion in her status. Suddenly an Italian street vendor turns up, looking for work. The narrator takes him on first as a model and then as housekeeper.

Chapter IV.   The drawings the narrator produces using the Monarchs as models all look exactly the same, whereas Miss Churm and the Italian Oronte lend themselves to his invention. He begins to work on the first novel for the deluxe edition – Rutland Ramsay. His friend fellow painter Jack Hawley dismisses the illustrations featuring the Monarchs as rubbish, and the publisher doesn’t like them either. So whilst the narrator poses Oronte as a model, the Monarchs make tea, in a reversal of roles. The narrator hints to the Monarchs that they are no longer required, but they return, only to offer their services to him as servants. The narrator accepts this arrangement, but then pays them off. He obtains the commission for the remaining books in the series, and feels he has had an interesting experience.

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Principal characters
Major Monarch a tall English former soldier and a ‘gentleman’ (50)
Mrs Monarch his smart wife of 40, with no children
I the un-named narrator, a painter and illustrator
Miss Churm a cockney artist’s model
Oronte an Italian street pedlar and model
Jack Hawley an artist, the narrator’s friend
Claude Rivet a painter, the narrator’s friend

Henry James's Study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

Henry James The 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 to whom Verena becomes more and more attracted. The dramatic contest to possess her is played out with some witty and often rather sardonic touches, and as usual James keeps the reader guessing about the outcome until the very last page.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

 

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

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

The Reckoning

by

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

The Reckoning first appeared in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, New York, 1902. The story was subsequently included in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction, The Descent of Man and Other Stories published by Charles Scribner’s in 1904. It is one of the many stories she wrote which featured the ‘new ethics’ emerging from the relaxation of the divorce laws in the United States.

The Reckoning

The Reckoning- critical commentary

This is an amazingly mature work for the relatively young Edith Wharton, and proof positive that she was thinking critically about the issues of personal liberty within marriage, the grounds for divorce, and the possible consequences of sexual liberty, long before her own affair with Morton Fullerton in 1908 and her eventual divorce from her husband Teddy Wharton in 1912.

In tone, subject, and style the story represents a transition between the nineteenth and the twentieth century tradition of short stories. It has the understated world weariness of Maupassant and Chekhov, and the incisive, critical realism which was to come in the same decade from James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

Stucture

The story is very elegantly structured in three well balanced sections. The first introduces the Westall’s, their pact of individual liberty within marriage, and Julia’s first doubts when she sees her husband’s interest in a younger woman.

The second section provides a flashback to Julia’s first marriage to John Armant, in which she felt trapped by a relationship that to her had become stale. This explains the origins of her agreement with Clement that an individual must have the right to move on when the time comes. But now in the present, after ten years marriage to Clement, she feels threatened by the very agreement she has helped to generate between them.

The third section represents the lessons she learns. Feeling sure that Clement is leaving her for Una Van Sidern, she returns to her former home and realises that when she left her former husband John Arment, she took no account of his feelings at the time. He confirms that he was an unwilling participant in the divorce – but he forgives her in retrospect.

The Reckoning – study resources

The Reckoning The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon UK

The Reckoning The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon US

The Reckoning Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

The Reckoning Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Reckoning The Descent of Man and Other Stories – Project Gutenberg

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Reckoning

The Reckoning – story synopsis

Part I.   Clement Westall has been speaking on radical proposals for personal freedom within marriage to a gathering of New York socialites at the Saturday salon of the Van Siderns. His wife Julia previously shared his views but now feels uneasy about their being made known in public – especially when they are enthusiastically embraced by the twenty-six year old Una Van Sidern, to whom her husband admits being attracted.

Part II.   Julia felt trapped in her first marriage to John Armant, and she married Clement Westall on the understanding that individuals should be free to move on by mutual consent when they felt the marriage had served its useful purpose. But after ten years of marriage to Westall she has come to believe that these ideas no longer apply in her own case. So when he plans to go ahead with another speech at the Van Siderns she asks him not to go. He asserts their old agreement to move on when they wish to form a new relationship.

Part III.   When he leaves to join the Van Siderns she feels her whole world collapse, as if she had been caught out by a new rule of her own making. She wanders about New York all day, uncertain what to do with her tumultuous emotions. Finally she ends up at her old home where her first husband still lives. She explains to him that Clement Westall is about to leave her for a younger woman, which has forced her to realise that when one person wishes to leave a marriage, the other may not, and may not understand the need for separation. She realises that this might have been the situation when she divorced John Armant, which he confirms to have been the case. She asks his forgiveness – which he grants her.

Principal characters
Clement Westall a New York lawyer and socialite
Julia Westall his wife
John Armant Julia’s first husband
Una Van Sidern a 26 year old socialite

Edith Wharton's house - The Mount

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

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

Edith Wharton's writing

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.

Edith 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

The Rescue

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Rescue was first published by J.M.Dent & Sons in 1920. It forms one part of The Lingard Trilogy, of which the other two are Conrad’s first novels, Almayer’s Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896). All of them feature Tom Lingard, an independent and adventurous sea captain. Although it was the last in the series to be published, The Rescue: A Romance of the Shallows deals with events which pre-date the earlier stories. The sequence is what might be called a ‘trilogy in reverse’. Conrad began writing the novel in 1897, but a year later put it to one side, uncertain how to continue the narrative. He took up the work again twenty years later in 1918.

The Rescue

first edition – J.M.Dent & Sons 1920

The Rescue – critical commentary

The strengths

It is strange that after the tremendous achievements of his ‘middle period’ — from Lord Jim and Nostromo to Under Western Eyes — Conrad should fall back into the sub-standard ‘adventure story’ pattern of Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands – although The Rescue is entirely consistent with the other two parts of the ‘Lingard Trilogy’ in being over-long, politically confusing, and full of clumsy, unconvincing plot devices.

The main strengths of the novel are in the characterisation of the central figure captain Tom Lingard, and the powerful but doomed romantic liaison he forms with Edith Travers. Lingard is of course something of a stock figure of boy’s adventure stories – the tough, fearless, and heroically moral character who is limited only by his lack of sophistication.

Lingard left his Devonshire roots when still a teenager and has lived as a seaman and an ‘adventurer’, eventually building up the capital to buy his beloved brig, the Lightning. But his roving bachelor life has not prepared him to cope with the experience he undergoes when the Lightning meets the Hermit.

When Lingard comes into contact with the beautiful Edith Travers, he cannot understand his own feelings or his reaction to her. It is Conrad’s triumph to present a narrative in which Lingard cannot understand why he wants to look at and talk to this seemingly remote women – when it is quite obvious to the reader that he is falling in love with her. He does not have the emotional vocabulary to deal with the experience.

She is in a similar position – having immured herself in a carapace of unfeeling rectitude as a response to her loveless marriage to Martin Travers. She takes a critical, distant attitude to everyone (except d’Alcacer) but feels herself melting before the power of Lingard’s emotional honesty, his frankness, and his positive attitude to life.

She tries to control her own reactions, but realises that he represents an elemental life force. The two would-be lovers also trust and understand each other at a level which does not need articulation and cannot be explained to outsiders. This is a very romantic notion – which is intensified since the relationship is unconsummated and doomed to failure.

The weaknesses

The Rescue has many of the story elements of his earlier novels. These include the fearless and upright young seaman; the friendship with a native prince; the relationship with a native girl; the setting of the Malay Archipelago; and lots of named characters who have no real significance in the story. But apart from the relationship between Lingard and Mrs Travers (discussed above) Conrad does not explore any new themes with these subjects.

There are a number of other irritating weaknesses in the novel. Despite all the lengthy and elaborate scene-setting, topographical description, and atmosphere-creation, it’s very hard to conceptualise the events and where they are taking place. The same is true of the rival native factions who are fighting for power. We are not provided with any persuasive reasons why they are in conflict with each other; they are difficult to tell apart; and they are simply not so convincing as his European characters. (It has to be said that the same is true of the two other novels in this trilogy, Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands.)

At a very trivial level – but surprisingly for one so technically conscious of maritime issues as Conrad – the Travers run aground sailing in what he describes as a yacht. It continues to be described as a yacht for almost the entire novel – but then in the last few pages is suddenly referred to as a schooner. Now whilst it is true that a schooner may serve as a yacht (‘a recreational ship’) he also just as suddenly gives it a name – the Hermit. This has the unfortunate effect of suggesting that he was not he was not concentrating or had not fully conceptualised the materials of the book

Narrative chronology

Conrad is famous for the manner in which he radically re-organised the chronology of events in his narratives. In Lord Jim for instance the crucial initiating episode when Jim (and the rest of the crew) abandon the Patna is not described in detail at the start of the tale where it belongs: it is constructed retrospectively from a number of different sources as the novel progresses – that is, as a series of flash backs. The technical term for this device is analepsis.

Very often this strategy can intensify dramatic tension in the story, or it can be used to withhold information from the reader so as to create mystery or a ‘double perspective’ in which an event already encountered needs to be seen in a different light. Conrad also uses this device quite frequently to create dramatic irony.

Sometimes he uses the opposite device – prolepsis, or the flash forward. At some point in the story we are told what happens later, and are left wondering what happened in the ‘gap’, the connection between the two parts, or how the later even came about.

But it has to be said that the reasons for using these devices are not always made plain or are simply not convincing. The Rescue contains just such a case in point. The most unnecessary flash forward occurs at the end of Part IV in which considerable time and effort has been expended to build up dramatic tension describing Lingard’s attempt to rescue the two men (d’Alcacer and Travers) who have been captured by the local natives.

Yet for no discernible reason, Part V begins with the two men safely back on board the Emma, and the explanation of how Lingard negotiated their release is delayed until much later. Dramatic tension is thrown away with no dramatic gain.

Narrative chain

Conrad is also fond of constructing his narratives from a number of different sources or narrators. In The Rescue he chooses an omnipotent third person narrative mode – with no outer narrator such as Marlow who recounts much of Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness. But he still chooses a number of different sources by having characters such as Jaffir (the messenger) transmit lengthy accounts of events which have happened elsewhere to another character (Lingard).

Because events are happening in a number of different locations, Conrad also resorts to the clumsy and fairly unconvincing device of people writing long letters to each other – even though the two principal locations (the brig and the yacht) are positioned quite close to each other. The letters are doubly unpersuasive since they are written in the form of dramatic fictional narratives rather than personal correspondence, and they are clearly Conrad continuing his account of events under another guise.

The Rescue – study resources

The Rescue The Rescue – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

The Rescue The Rescue – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Rescue The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

The Rescue The Rescue – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

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 Rescue Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Rescue Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

The Rescue Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Rescue

The Rescue – plot summary

Part I. The Man and the Brig

Young Tom Lingard is the owner and captain of a sailing ship, the Lightning which lies becalmed at night, somewhere in the Malayan archipelago. With his chief mate Shaw he discusses the problems that women can cause. Suddenly they are approached by a search party in a boat seeking help for a yacht which has become stranded on mudflats on a nearby island.

Carter, the commander of the boat is interrogated in rather a hostile and suspicious manner which leaves him puzzled, but his boat is put in tow. When they reach the island Lingard handles his brig skillfully, but it transpires that he was heading for the island himself. He fires a warning shot into the interior, then joins the stricken yacht.

Part II. The Shore of Refuge

The story backtracks to explain how Lingard first came into contact with the Wajo leader Hassim, and their instant bond of friendship. Lingard goes to visit Hassim, but is warned off by Jaffir, who reports that Hassim is now a fugitive in a civil war. But Lingard takes a long boat on shore to rescue him, and the sortie is a success.

Lingard begins trading in arms and saving money to help Hassim in the re-conquest of Wajo. He is followed around by Jorgenson, an old sea-captain whose life has been ruined. When Lingard explains his plans to Jorgenson, the older man warns him against taking action, and offers his own life as an example of failure. But in the end, with no future prospects, he agrees to join in the venture, along with his prematurely aged native wife.

Lingard has previously visited local chief Belarab to ask for help, and offers him guns in exchange for manpower. Lingard feels that since he has saved Hassim’s life, he is tied to him in some mysterious way. He buys the old schooner Emma and runs it aground close to Belarab to use as a weapons store, placing Jorgenson in charge.

Part III. The Capture

When Lingard arrives on the stricken yacht he is met with hostility from its owner Mr Travers, who thinks he is a vulgar adventurer, intent on profiting from salvaging the yacht. Lingard sees the yacht and its passengers as merely annoying obstacles who have come between him and his plans.

The passenger d’Alcacer is in flight from Europe following the early death of his wife and is friendly with the owner’s enigmatic wife Edith Travers. Whilst Lingard and Travers trade insults with each other, d’Alcacer takes an instant liking to Lingard and tries to mediate. But the dispute is interrupted by the sudden arrival of Hassim and his sister Immada.

Mrs Travers is fascinated by Immada’s attractiveness, but the girl and her brother reproach Lingard for recently neglecting them, and leave with him when the interview comes to a fruitless conclusion.

On her own after dinner on the yacht, Mrs Travers reflects upon the failure of her romantic dreams. Suddenly, Lingard rows up alongside to talk to her, telling her he feels completely detached from his British roots and more at home with the Malaysians.

He wants her to help him by pretending to be frightened on the yacht, so that they will have no alternative but to accept Lingard’s offer to house them on the brig. He tells her the whole background story, which touches her romantic sentiments. She feels existentially elated by his frankness and emotional honesty. She is preparing herself to act on his behalf when she is told that her husband and d’Alcacer have been kidnapped whilst walking along the shore.

Back on the brig, Lingard reads a letter he has received from Jorgenson describing disquiet amongst the natives who want to attack the stranded yacht. The letter warns of a threat from rival local leader Tengga to seize the arms stored on the Emma.

The letter goes on to describe the arrival of Sherif Daman, who also wants the arms for the recapture of Wajo. Lingard receives Carter on board as emissary from the yacht. Carter cannot understand Lingard’s or Mrs Travers’ motivation in the affair. Then chief mate Shaw protests against Lingard’s plans – because he appears to be siding against fellow white men on the yacht.

Part IV. The Gift of the Shallows

Lingard nevertheless goes ahead, and takes Mrs Travers from the yacht onto the brig. He is overawed by her attractiveness and the knowledge that she understands him. He appears to be falling in love with her, but is not aware of it himself. She asks him to rescue d’Alcacer and her husband.

Hassim arrives on the brig with his sister and reports on his visit to the camp where the two prisoners are being held. Lingard decides to recapture the prisoners single-handedly, and he puts Carter in charge of the brig. Immada protests that he is putting himself at risk, whereupon Mrs Travers declares that she will go with him, much to the consternation of Carter, whilst Shaw is outraged at being left with no clear orders.

When Lingard and Mrs Travers reach the Emma Jorgenson is truculent and hostile . Lingard questions Mrs Travers somewhat jealously about d’Alcacer, whilst she in her turn thinks that Lingard is enamoured of Immada, by who they are joined on board with Hassim.

Part V. The Point of Honour and the Point of Passion

Travers has been rescued and Mrs Travers has adopted native dress on board the Emma. Travers delivers an embittered and pompous lecture to his wife, criticising her behaviour. They argue about Lingard, about whom Travers is arrogant and snobbish.

Travers and d’Alcacer have been released temporarily into Lingard’s care. Mrs Travers has had further heart-to-heart conversations with Lingard, and is deeply impressed by his character and his personality. She too appears to be falling in love, but doesn’t want to admit it to herself. She would like to share what she knows about Lingard with d’Alcacer, who she regards as a good friend – but she doesn’t.

The story backtracks to describe Lingard’s arrival at Daman’s stockade to negotiate the temporary release of Travers and d’Alcacer. The manoeuvre is successful because of Lingard’s high prestige in the locality.

On board the Emma Lingard and Mrs Travers exchange confidences about their earlier lives until they are joined by d’Alcacer, who has been observing their growing intimacy. After dinner d’Alcacer quizzes Mrs Travers about Lingard, who he calls ‘the Man of Fate’. They wonder what will happen to them, and d’Alcacer guesses that Lingard will be heart-broken over Mrs Travers. He asks her to give him a sign if she thinks they are about to die.

Lingard calls Mrs Travers into his room where they interrogate each other and verbally admit their mutual attraction. Lingard has received a letter from Carter saying that (with good intentions) he has attacked some of the natives from on board the Lightning – which automatically puts Lingard’s plans into jeopardy.

Lingard has despatched Jaffir to find Hassim and Immada, and Jaffir has suggested that the only solution to the problem will be to return the two prisoners to Daman. Lingard and Mrs Travers agree that this must be done quickly. She gives d’Alcacer the warning signal he has requested.

d’Alcacer braces himself philosophically for what he thinks will be certain death, whilst realising that Mr Travers is ill with some sort of fever. When it is time for them to go, Travers claims that his wife is in the grip of some sort of fashionable craze, but it is he himself who is clearly delirious. After a heated departure from Mrs Travers, Lingard takes the two men on shore to deliver them up.

Part VI. The Claim of Life and the Toll of Death

On board the Emma, Mrs Travers regrets the quarrelsome way she and Lingard parted. Jorgenson meanwhile appears to be making fuses for some sort of explosions. As signs of fighting start up on shore, Mrs Travers wants to join Lingard.

Hassim abandons negotiations with Belarab and is heading back to the Emma when he is intercepted by Tengga’s fighters. Jaffir runs to the ship with Hassim’s ring and reports to Jorgenson. Mrs Travers is then persuaded to take the ring as a signal to Lingard..

Mrs Travers is rowed onto shore and reaches the stockade bearing a torch, where Lingard is there to receive her. Because she distrusts Jorgenson and does not realise the significance of the ring, she does not pass on to Lingard the message it represents.

Lingard, d’Alcacer, and Mrs Travers talk to each other in turn around a fire. The Spaniard is mainly concerned with the possibility of being murdered the next day, whilst Lingard thinks Mrs Travers could not help herself but join him. She accepts his devotion and tells him nothing, so as not to disturb him. Meanwhile an envoy from Tengga fails to persuade Jorgenson to leave the Emma.

Two days later, following an explosion of some kind, Lingard is on the Lightning where Carter relates rescuing Jaffir. Lingard recalls in flashback awakening alongside Mrs Travers and being summoned to see Belarab.

Belarab has been informed through spies of all elements of Daman’s and Tengga’s machinations. In the morning mists there appear to be attacks imminent, but when a flotilla of canoes surrounds the Emma, Jorgenson blows up the ship, whereupon Belarab releases the prisoners.

Jaffir’s story continues with his escape from the Emma. He tells Lingard about the ring, then dies. Lingard takes Carter as mate on the Lightning then invites Mrs Travers by letter to meet him on shore.

Next morning d’Alcacer rows Mrs Travers out where she meets Lingard. She wants to confess about the undelivered ring, but he already knows the truth and tells her it would not have made any difference. She departs, returns to the yacht, and throws the ring into the sea. The yacht and the Lightning depart in opposite directions.

The Rescue – principal characters
Tom Lingard young captain of the brig Lightning
Shaw fat first mate on the Lightning
Haji Wasub boatswain on the Lightning
Carter young mate on the yacht Hermit
Hassim nephew of a native chief
Immada his sister, a princess
Daman leader of the Illanuns
Jorgenson experienced but discredited ex-captain
Belarab local native chief
Martin Travers arrogant owner of the yacht Hermit
Edith Travers his beautiful and romantic wife
d’Alcacer recently widowed former Spanish embassy attache
Tengga native would-be chief
The Rescue – glossary
brig large sailing ship used for war or commerce
calash light carriage with collapsible top
cuddy a small cabin on a ship
gharry an eastern horse-drawn carriage
kris an asymmetrical dagger with a wavy blade
pangeran the son of a ruler
parang a big Malayan knife or machete
peon a low-ranking soldier or worker
prau long narrow sailing boat
sampan a flat-bottomed wooden Chinese boat
sarong large length of fabric wrapped around the waist
serang the boatswain of a Lascar or East Indian crew
Joseph Conrad – video 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.
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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.
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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’.
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© Roy Johnson 2014

Joseph Conrad web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Return

by

tutorial, critical commentary, web links, and study resources

The Return: was completed in early 1897, while Conrad was writing the story Karain: A Memory. It was never published in magazine form; but was collected in Tales of Unrest, which appeared in 1898. The other stories in the collection were Karain: A Memory, The Idiots, An Outpost of Progress, and The Lagoon.

The Return

L’ennui – Walter Sickert (1860-1942)

Conrad’s own comment on the story is that “[A]ny kind word about The Return (and there have been such words said at different times) awakens in me the liveliest gratitude, for I know how much the writing of that fantasy has cost me in sheer toil, in temper, and in disillusion.” He also once remarked, acknowledging that he suffered while writing this psychological chef-d’oeuvre of introspection – “I hate it.”

The Return – commentary

The most striking feature of this story is its similarity in subject and psychological intensity to the scene in The Secret Agent (written almost a decade later) when Adolf Verloc’s wife Winnie realises that he husband is responsible for the death of her mentally-retarded brother Stevie. Verloc is so consumed by his own egotism that he fails to recognise the devastating effect this revelation has on her, and he pleads solipsistically that she should try to see things from his point of view.

Alvan Hervey the protagonist of The Return is a similar monster of smug, self-regarding egoism, and this unrelenting narrative is a superb study in the psychological ravages of jealousy. It explores with relentless force the kaleidoscopic intellectual and psychic responses to emotional shock – particularly the realignment of a sense of identity that is required .

Conrad’s introductory notes to Tales of Unrest discuss the genesis of this tale in a curious mixture of metaphors:

The Return is a left-handed production. Looking through that story lately I had the material impression of sitting under a large and expensive umbrella in the loud drumming of a heavy rain-shower. … Mentally, the reading rendered me dumb for the remainder of the day, not exactly with astonishment but with a sort of dismal wonder … notwithstanding all its apparatus of analysis the story consists for the most part of physical impressions; impressions of sound and sight, railway station, streets, a trotting horse, reflections in mirrors and so on

It is almost as if Conrad is too embarrassed to discuss the real issue of the tale which is the shock of experiencing jealousy for the first time. His comments are also another reminder (if we need one) not to take what authors say about their own work too seriously – or as anything other than one opinion or interpretation.

It’s also interesting to note that Conrad does not include the searing psychological pain of physical, sexual jealousy in Hervey’s catalogue of distress – though at the end of the nineteenth century it is unlikely that explicit reference to such matters would have been acceptable by publishers.

Footnote

A curious feature of this tale is that it includes three expressions which are the titles of other literary works:

  • ‘another turn of the screw’
  • ‘a handful of dust’
  • ‘watch and ward’

Henry James’s story The Turn of the Screw appeared in 1898, a year later than Conrad’s tale. The term ‘a handful of dust’ crops up in T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land which appeared in 1922, and was also used as the title for Evelyn Waugh’s novel of the same name in 1934. The term ‘watch and ward’ is a traditional expression which means a ‘continuous watch or vigil’. It was used by Henry James for the title of his first short novel published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly in 1871, then in book form in 1878.

The Return – study resources

The Return Tales of Unrest – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

The Return Tales of Unrest – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Return The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

The Return Tales of Unrest – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Return 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 Return Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

The Return Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Youth

The Return – principal characters
Alvan Hervey a worker in the City of London
— his wife
The Return – plot summary

Alvan Hervey is a very conventional person who works in the city of London and commutes from the suburbs. He marries a woman with very little personality and sponsors a literary-political magazine whose editor he regards as an ‘ass’. The couple cultivate writers and establish a weekly causerie in French style. Their house is filled with comfortable furnishings and works of art.

On arriving home early from work one day, he finds a letter from his wife to say that she has left him and gone off with the editor. Hervey is overwhelmed by shock and outrage, and thinks it would have been preferable if she had died. He feels besmirched and humiliated by the passion that the experience raises in him.

He does not know how to understand or deal with the situation, and races through a cascade of different notions in his mind. He moves rapidly from feelings of injured pride, fear, and desolation, to anger, existential anguish, and despair.

Whilst he is in the middle of this powerful shock to his entire system of feeling and belief, his wife comes back to the house. She sits before him without speaking, whilst he asks her banal questions which do not reflect his true feelings. He is trapped in an attitude of false pride and bad faith.

She tells him her letter was a mistake. He criticises the editor, but then it transpires that she has intended going off with him but has changed her mind. He then gradually assumes a self-congratulatory and completely bogus attitude of magnanimity towards her. He thinks back to the occasion of his proposing to her and, lost in self-pity, fails to recognise a gesture of reconciliation she makes towards him.

When she offers to leave he stops her but, it is clear that she realises his protestations are no more than shallow self-obsession, and she regrets coming back to the house.

He starts to lecture her pompously on morality and duty – an appeal which gradually turns into self pity and hectoring condescension. Oppressed by his behaviour, she again tries to leave but he prevents her and accuses her of being mentally unhinged.

He rants on about public duty and his own merciful forgiveness until she begins to laugh hysterically. He throws a glass of water in her face and demands that she think of his feelings. Then he insists that they go down to dinner and argues that everything will be normal again.

When they go to dinner he is obsessed with concealing everything from the servants, and he realises that he does not know what is going on in his wife’s mind. He thinks the same of the two servant girls, and sees all women as ‘unknowable’.

He claims to love his wife, but she explains to him why he doesn’t. At the end of the evening he works himself into a terminal frenzy, convincing himself that there is something deficient in his wife. So he challenges her oppressively, asking her if she is prepared to live with unanswered questions and lack of trust hanging over them. She is willing to do that, but he is not, so he leaves the house – never to return.

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.
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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 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
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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
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Joseph Conrad links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
Joseph Conrad complete tales

The Return of the Native

by

tutorial, commentary, web links, and study resources

The Return of the Native first appeared as a serial in Belgravia magazine between January and December 1878. This was a publication which specialised in sensation fiction. It was then published in the popular three-volume novel format later the same year by Smith, Elder. Hardy made extensive revisions to the text when it was reprinted as part of the first collected edition of his works in 1895 and later for Macmillan’s Wessex Edition in 1912. These revisions however do not affect the substance of the plot: they were mainly to do with substantiating the geography of the story and drawing the fictitious place names more closely in line with the topography of Dorsetshire which Hardy had re-imagined as Wessex.

The Return of the Native

‘Something was wrong with her foot’

original illustration by Arthur Hopkins

The Return of the Native – critical commentary

Setting

One of the features that concentrates the novel and its drama is that every single scene is set in Egdon Heath and its immediate surroundings. The heath is shown in all seasons, and its vegetation and wild life is documented with almost scientific accuracy.

It is interesting to note that for those who wish to escape rural isolation, Budmouth is the nearest urban centre. Eustacia has come from there, and it is the town with its ‘promenades and parades’ to which she wishes to escape in the novel’s finale.

Hardy makes no attempt to glamourise the countryside: it is harsh terrain; people get soaking wet when it rains; and even those who make their living from it have to wear protective clothing to guard against the furze.

Melodrama

It was very common in the nineteenth century for novels to have complex plots and lots of dramatic tension. Novels first appeared in serialized form, and performed a similar function to television soap operas today. Even though Hardy is now seen as a bridge between these conventions and those of the modern era, he was repeatedly drawn to arrange his stories in a way in which drama tips over into melodrama. A central scene from the novel illustrates this point very well: the episode in which Mrs Yeobright is refused entry to Clym’s house.

She has decided to seek reconciliation with her estranged son, but when she arrives at the house Clym is asleep, and Eustacia is entertaining her ex-lover Wildeve. Hardy devises clever plotting in order to make these circumstances and coincidences to seem plausible to the reader. But when Mrs Yeobright turns to go back home, full of anger and resentment at being refused admission, it is tipping over into melodrama to have her then bitten by a snake. Though it has to be said that Hardy had flagged up their presence on the Heath earlier in the novel.

Sexual liberties

It is also interesting to note how often in his fiction Hardy explores the boundaries of sexual liberty. At a time when both men but particularly women were supposed to remain chaste until marriage, Hardy is adept at exploiting circumstances in which these restraints could be circumvented or challenged.

In a scene which takes place outside the time frame of the narrative, Thomasin Yeobright and Damon Wildeve have travelled to Southerton in order to be married. The marriage does not take place because the paperwork was made out for Budworth.

The importance of this detail is that they have stayed somewhere away from home, as a couple, without being married. It is not clear if sexual intimacy took place or not, but the mere possibility that it could have done puts a stain on Thomasin’s character, for which her aunt reproaches her: “It is a great slight to me and my family and when it gets known there will be a very unpleasant time for us”.

A very similar set of circumstances obtain in Hardy’s earlier novel of 1872, A Pair of Blue Eyes in which the protagonists Stephen Smith and Elfride Swancourt have a failed elopement to Plymouth (then London) which results in their being absent from their home town for one night together (which they spend travelling on trains) – but this is enough to put her social reputation entirely at risk.

The Return of the Native

original three-volume 1878 edition

The Return of the Native – study resources

The Return of the Native The Return of the Native – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Return of the Native The Return of the Native – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Return of the Native The Return of the Native – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Return of the Native The Return of the Native – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Return of the Native The Return of the Native – York Notes (Advanced) – Amazon UK

The Return of the Native The Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle eBook

The Return of the Native The Return of the Native – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Return of the Native The Return of the Native – audiobook version at LibriVox.org

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

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

Red button Authors in Context – Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

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

The

The Return of the Native – characters
Diggory Venn young handsome man (24) covered in red dye for most of the novel, and a persistent peeping tom and eavesdropper
Grandfer Cantle a yokel who reminisces about his role in Napoleonic wars
Chistian Cantle a young unmarried man (31) who is a self-elected loser
Mrs Yeobright a proud and strict woman, the daughter of a curate
Clement (Clym) Yeobright her son, ex-jewellery salesman, would-be schoolmaster
Thomasin (Tamsin) Yeobright Mrs Yeobright’s niece
Damon Wildeve an inn-keeper and former engineer
Eustacia Vye a passionate and romantic woman, Wildeve’s former lover
Susan Nonsuch a country woman
Johnny Nonsuch her son, young boy who carries messages
Captain Drew a retired seaman, Eustacia’s grandfather
Olly Dowden a country woman, maker of brooms
Timothy Fairway a rural worker
The Return of the Native – plot summary

Book the First – The Three Women

November bonfire celebrations are taking place on Egdon Heath. A group of locals decide to celebrate the nuptials of Thomasin Yeobright and Damon Wildeve, but it turns out that they were not married because of irregularities in the marriage licence. Damon goes to meet Eustacia Vye, his former lover, who has been waiting for him on the Heath. She charges him to remain faithful to her.

Their conversation is overhead and transmitted to Diggory Venn, who has been turned down as a suitor to Thomasin, but has remained faithful in his love for her. He spies on Damon and Eustacia, who cannot resolve their feelings for each other. Venn then asks Eustacia to leave Damon for Tamsin, which she refuses to do. Mrs Yeobright intervenes to protect her niece’s good name by telling Wildeve that Tamsin has another suitor (Venn). Damon and Eustacia continue to equivocate.

Book the Second – The Arrival

Eustacia hears her name linked with the absent Clym Yeobright, and becomes fired up romantically by his reputation alone. Tamsin continues to worry about her local reputation since she and Wildeve are still not married. Eustacia tries to meet Clym on his return to Egdon Heath, but fails in her attempt.

She arranges to take part in the Christmas mummers play, where she meets Clym, falls further in love with the mere idea of him, and becomes jealous of Tamsin. She breaks off her relationship with Wildeve, who goes back to Tamsin again and is accepted by him. Tamsin finally marries Wildeve, and is given away by Eustacia (all of which is arranged by Diggory Venn).

Book the Third – The Fascination

Clym has returned from being a jewellery shop salesman in Paris with the intention of setting up a school, despite his mother’s disapproval. He recruits Eustacia to his scheme, and his mother criticises both his lack of ambition and his connection with a flirt who has no money.

Clym falls for Eustacia and decides he wants to marry her, but she thinks that their love might not last. Eventually they agree to marry in fourteen day’s time. Clym leaves home and sets up a small rented house on the Heath. His mother is full of bitter disappointment. She sends inherited money to Tamsin but Christian loses it all gambling against Wildeve, who then loses it all in his turn to Diggory Venn, who gives it all back to Tamsin (though half was intended for Clym).

Book the Fourth – The Closed Door

The Return of the NativeMrs Yeobright checks on the money with Eustacia and they argue about Clym. The money is eventually distributed fairly, but Clym becomes estranged from his mother and Eustacia argues more virulently with Mrs Yeobright. Eustacia wants social advancement and the glamour of a life in Paris, but Clym wishes to stay in his local parish and start the school.

When he is struck with an eye ailment through reading too much, he decides to become a humble furze-cutter. Eustacia goes to a rural dance and meets Wildeve again – and is observed by Diggory Venn once more, who then begins an active campaign to distract Wildeve’s attentions towards Eustacia (all in order to protect Tamsin).

Venn encourages Mrs Yeobright to reconcile herself with Clym, and Clym feels he ought to do the same. Mrs Yeobright finally goes to Clym’s house, but arrives when he is asleep and Eustacia is being visited by Wildeve. Mrs Yeobright finds the door closed against her, and is mortified. When Clym wakes up he goes in pursuit of his mother and finds her collapsed on the Heath, having been bitten by an adder. Eustacia follows, meets Wildeve en route to discover that he has inherited eleven thousand pounds, and arrives at the Heath as Mrs Yeobright is dying from exhaustion, snake bite, and a broken heart.

Book the Fifth – The Discovery

Clym falls ill after his mother’s death and reproaches himself for not having made contact with her.Then he learns from Diggory Venn and young Johnny the true sequence of events that led to his mother’s failed visit. He confronts Eustacia, who admits to all except Wildeve’s identity as the person who was in the house with her. Clym is convinced that she is having an affair with someone, they argue, and eventually agree to separate. Eustacia goes back to live at her grandfather’s house and momentarily contemplates suicide.

Eustacia then plans to leave for Paris via Budworth, with Wildeve’s financial assistance. Clym writes to Eustacia inviting her back, and Tamsin has differences with Wildeve regarding Eustacia. Failing to receive Clym’s letter, Eustacia sets off to meet Wildeve and is caught in a storm on Egdon Heath. Susan Nonsuch curses Eustacia with a wax effigy. Tamsin seeks Clym’s help, and despatches him to check on Eustacia and Wildeve, who appear to be eloping. Eventually, Clym and Wildeve meet on the Heath. Eustacia falls into a weir, both men try to save her, but Eustacia and Wildeve are drowned.

Book the Sixth – Aftercourses.

Diggory Venn becomes a prosperous dairy farmer. Clym thinks to take up with Tamsin (as his mother once wished) but she marries Diggory Venn instead. Clym becomes an itinerant preacher, still devoted to the memory of his mother.

The Return of the Native – bibliography

Gillian Beer, ‘Can the Native Return?’ in her Open Fields: Essays in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 31-54.

Kristin Brady, ‘Thomas Hardy and Matters of Gender’, in Dale Kramer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 93-111.

Pamela Dalziel, ‘Anxieties of Presentation: The Serial Illustrations to Hardy’s The Return of the Native‘, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 51.1 (1996), 84-110.

Terry Eagleton, ‘Nature as Language in Thomas Hardy’, Critical Quarterly, 13 (1971), 155-172.

Joseph Garver, The Return of the Native, Penguin Critical Studies, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988).

Jennifer Gribble, ‘The Quiet Women of Egdon Heath’, Essays in Criticism, 46.3 (1996), 234-257.

Nicola Harris, ‘”The Danse Macabre”, Hardy’s The Return of the Native, Browning, Ruskin and the Grotesque’, Thomas Hardy Yearbook, 26 (1998), 24-30.

Robert Langbaum, Thomas Hardy in Our Time, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).

Phillip Mallet, ‘Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native‘, in Jay Parini (ed. and introd.), British Writers: Classics, vol. i (New York: Scribner’s, 2003), 291-310.

Mary Rimmer,’A Feast of Language: Hardy’s Allusions’, in Phillip Mallet (ed.), The Achievement of Thomas Hardy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 58-71.

Dennis Taylor, ‘Hardy Inscribed’, in Phillip Mallet (ed.), The Achievement of Thomas Hardy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 104-122.

Brian Thomas, The ‘Return of the Native’: Saint George Defeated (New York: Twayne, 1995).

Map of Wessex

Hardy’s WESSEX

The Return of the Native – further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hardy’s study

Thomas Hardy's study

reconstructed in Dorchester museum

Other works by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Tess of the d'UrbervillesTess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) is probably the most popular of Hardy’s late, great novels. The sub-title is ‘A Pure Woman’, and it is a story which explores the tragic consequences of a young milkmaid who becomes the victim of the men she encounters. First she falls for the spiritual but flawed Angel Clare, and then the physical but limited Alec Durberville takes advantage of her. This novel has some of the most beautiful and the most harrowing depictions of rural working conditions which reveal Hardy as a passionate advocate for those who work the land. It also has a wonderfully symbolic climax at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. There is poetry in almost every page.
Thomas Hardy Tess of the d'Urbervilles Buy the book at Amazon UK
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The WoodlandersThe Woodlanders (1887) Giles Winterbourne, an honest woodsman, suffers with the many tribulations of his selfless love for Grace Melbury, a woman above his station in this classic tale of the West Country. She marries the new doctor, Edred Fitzpiers, but leaves him when she learns he has been unfaithful. She turns instead to Giles, who nobly allows her to sleep in his house during stormy weather, whilst he sleeps outside and brings on his own death. It’s often said that the hero of this novel is the woods themselves – so deeply moving is Hardy’s account of the timbered countryside which provides the backdrop for another human tragedy and a study of rural life in transition.
Thomas Hardy The Woodlanders Buy the book at Amazon UK
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Wessex TalesWessex Tales Don’t miss the skills of Hardy as a writer of shorter fictions. None of his short stories are really short, but they are beautifully crafted. This is the first volume of his tales in which he was seeking to record the customs, superstitions, and beliefs of old Wessex before they were lost to living memory. Yet whilst dealing with traditional beliefs, they also explore very modern concerns of difficult and often thwarted human passions which he developed more extensively in his longer works.

Thomas Hardy Wessex Tales Buy the book at Amazon UK
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Thomas Hardy – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

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

The Reverberator

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Reverberator is a short novel (especially short by Henry James’s standards) which was first serialised in Macmillan’s Magazine between February and July in 1888. Later the same year it was published as a two volume then a one volume novel. It deals with issues which are amazingly contemporary – the power of the press, the individual’s right to privacy, and the journalism of celebrity gossip.

The Reverberator

first edition 1888

The Reverberator – critical commentary

Most of Henry James’s earlier works first appeared serialized in newspapers and magazines. He was well acquainted with the practicalities and the economics of publishing, but more importantly he was aware of the essential nature of journalism, which in the nineteenth century as now in the twenty-first was a force for potential mischief as well as for spreading enlightened intelligence.

The novel deals with three elements which still affect the public’s ambivalent relationship with the popular press: the promotion of celebrity gossip for commercial gain; the public’s ‘right to know’ (about the behaviour of the upper classes); and an individual’s right to privacy.

George Flack is an early example of a type we have seen over and again at the recent (UK) Leveson Inquiry into the behaviour of the press – the muck-raking journalist who is quite frank about his unscrupulous methods of obtaining information, and whose defense rests on the argument that he is merely supplying a public demand.

Flack tells Francie what information he wants from her, and reveals what use he will make of it. On his part, there is no concealment or pretence. The Probert family wish to preserve their right to privacy, including details such as adultery and petty theft by members of the family. There is even an argument made (without any supporting evidence) that the members of the family secretly enjoy the notoriety that Flack’s article affords them. All of these issues have emerged at the Leveson Enquiry: Henry James was writing about them 124 years earlier.

As a further illustration of fundamental journalistic practices, it is worth noting that Flack has a general brief to gather information and fashionable subjects, but the smaller details of his creations are supplied by what we would now call local ‘runners’. It is Miss Topping who digs out the embarrassing facts of the Probert family behaviour and passes them to Flack as the scandalous meat of his article..

James was to explain these issues again in his 1903 story The Papers which deals with the deliberate creation of celebrity culture via publicity fuelled corrupt journalism. James was personally very sensitive to the question of privacy, and protected his own by eventually burning a lot of his private papers

It is worth noting that whilst the Probert family wishes to protect its privacy and takes pride in social connections that go back ‘a thousand years’, Gaston pére and his children are in fact Americans who have married into French society. They are emigrants from Carolina.

The Reverberator – study resources

The Reverberator - paperback edition The Reverberator – Melville House paperback – Amazon UK

The Reverberator - paperback edition The Reverberator – Melville House paperback – Amazon US

The Reverberator - Kindle edition The Reverberator – Kindle edition [FREE]

The Reverberator - Digireads edition The Reverberator – Digireads paperback – Amazon UK

The Reverberator - Digireads edition The Reverberator – Digireads paperback – Amazon US

The Reverberator - Library of America edition The Reverberator – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Reverberator - Library of America edition The Reverberator – Library of America – Amazon US

The Reverberator at Project Gutenberg The Reverberator – eBook versions at Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

The Reverberator

The Reverberator – plot summary

Newspaper society journalist George Flack visits Fidelia and Francina Dosson at their Paris hotel, having met them the previous year on a transatlantic crossing. He introduces them to Parisian life and persuades Francie to have her portrait painted by a ‘rising Impressionist’, George Waterlowe, through whom they meet his friend Gaston Probert, an American who was born in Paris.

Delia has ambitions for her younger sister – an engagement, but not yet marriage. Gaston is taken by Francie and he wants to know what it would be like to be a ‘real’ American. George Flack and Gaston are rivals for Francie.

Falk has ambitions for his newspaper the Reverberator, and he proposes marriage to Francie, who turns him down. Some months later, whilst Falk has returned to the USA, Gaston is torn between his love for Francie and a social reserve on behalf of his sisters, who have married into rather snobbish upper-class French society. He arranges for his sister Suzanne to meet Francie, but she refuses to endorse his plan to marry her. Gaston ask Mr Dosson’s permission to marry his daughter, and gets his approval.

Members of Gaston’s family eventually consent to meet the Dossons in order to approve them socially, and all appears to be going well. But Mr Probert pére still has reservations based on grounds of class distinctions and family traditions. American-based business connections require Mr Dosson to leave, but since this would leave his two unmarried daughters unchaperoned, Gaston is asked to go in his place.

Flack returns from America and asks Francie to take him to see the portrait, because he wants to write about it for the Reverberator. On visiting, he is snubbed by Gaston’s sister Mme de Cliché, but Francie talks to him freely about the family into which she is about to be married.

When Flack writes a gossip article about the portrait and the family in the Reverberator, they are all incandescent with rage and summon Francie to a family summit meeting, which is inconclusive. Mr Dosson takes a nonchalant attitude to the affair and wonders why anyone should get upset about an article in a newspaper. When Gaston returns from the USA, Francie admits that she has supplied Flack with the information for his article.

Mr Dosson writes to Flack in Nice, who then visits Francie, justifies his article, castigates the Proberts, and declares his love for her. She rejects him, but says that she will not marry Gaston.

Gaston visits the Dossons and vainly tries to make them compromise for the sake of the Proberts’ family pride. Francine and her father refuse. Gaston seeks advice from Waterlowe, who says he must reject his family in order to create a sense of freedom and independence for himself. Even though his father cuts him off with no money, that’s what Gaston does, and Francie accepts him.

Principal characters
George Flack the European correspondent for the American newspaper, The Reverberator
Whitney Desson a rich American financier
Miss Fidelia Desson his plain but sensible elder daughter
Miss Francina Desson his pretty but naive younger daughter
Charles Waterlowe an American ‘rising Impressionist’ painter in Paris
Gaston Probert an American who was born in Paris and has never been to America
Countess Suzanne de Brécourt Gaston’s sister
Mme Marguerite de Cliché Gaston’s sister
Mme Jeanne de Douves Gaston’s sister
Mr Probert Gaston’s distinguished father (originally from Carolina)
Miss Topping Flack’s assistant journalist in Paris (who never appears)
Setting

The setting throughout the novel is Paris, but it is worth noting that all the characters in the story are American – either visiting on a long term basis (the Dossons) resident (Flack) or born there (Probert). Two characters (Flack and Probert) visit America during the course of events, but this is merely a plot device to get them temporarily off stage.

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

Henry James - study Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Henry James - biography Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, HarperCollins, 1985.

Henry James - letters Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

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

Critical commentary

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

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

Henry James - narrative Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

Henry James - studies Daniel Mark Fogel, A Companion to Henry James Studies, Greenwood Press, 1993.

Henry James - essays Jonathan Freedman, The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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

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

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

Henry James - critical essays Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.

Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2012

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

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes

by

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

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly magazine for February 1868. Its initial appearance in book form was as part of the collection A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales published in Boston by Osgood in 1875. This is the first of James’s ghost stories, although unlike his other studies in this genre, his ghost doesn’t make an appearance until the very end of the tale. The family name of Willoughby was changed to Wingrave in later versions of the story.

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes

Woman before Mirror – Jakab Marastoni (1804-1860)

This is the one of four stories James wrote with the American Civil War as a background. The other stories are Poor Richard (1867), The Story of a Year (1865) and A Most Extraordinary Case (1868). James was eligible to serve in the war, but did not. Shortly before being enlisted he sustained a back injury which made him exempt.

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes – commentary

The melodramatic and Grand Guignol final scene of this tale was very much in keeping with the fashion for ghost stories which became popular at the end of the nineteenth century. This was a period which gave rise to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890) and Dracula (1897), But James was obviously mainly interested in the subconscious sexual sibling rivalry between the two sisters Viola and Perdita. In particular its vivid manifestation in the scene where Viola actually dresses up in Perdita’s wedding clothes in front of the mirror.

It is a work of James’s period of literary apprenticeship, and he would later make use of the ghost story in far more original ways in works such as Sir Edmund Orme (1891), Owen Wingrave (1892), and his most famous tale, The Turn of the Screw (1898).

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes – study resources

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon US

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes – plot summary

Bernard Willoughby returns from Oxford University and travels in France with his college friend Arthur Lloyd, who makes a very positive impression on Bernard’s two sisters, Viola and Perdita. The two girls are in competition for Lloyd’s attention, but conceal the fact from each other and from everybody else.

When eventually Perdita reveals that Lloyd has asked to marry her and has given her a ring, Viola feels wounded but tries to be stoical about her disappointment. But after the wedding, Perdita discovers Viola secretly wearing her wedding clothes.

Lloyd and Perdita settle in Boston, Viola goes away to recover from her disappointment, and then Bernard marries.Perdita gives birth to a daughter, then dies, leaving all her clothes in a locked trunk for her daughter when she grows up.

Viola goes to live with Lloyd to look after her young niece, and Lloyd eventually marries her. Three years later she begins to covet Perdita’s collection of clothes, and she quarrels with Lloyd, who refuses to give them up. However, she gets hold of the key to the locked trunk.

When she fails to appear for dinner one night, Lloyd goes in search of her and finds her in the attic, before the open trunk. She is dead, with the marks of ‘ten hideous wounds from two vengeful ghostly hands’.

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes – characters
Mrs Willoughby a widow
Bernard Willoughby her son, who becomes a lawyer
Viola Willoughby her eldest daughter, tall, attractive
Pedita Willoughby her younger daughter, small, unattractive
Arthur Lloyd Bernard’s rich English college friend
Ghost stories by Henry James

Red button The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)

Red button The Ghostly Rental (1876)

Red button Sir Edmund Orme (1891)

Red button The Private Life (1892)

Red button Owen Wingrave (1892)

Red button The Friends of the Friends (1896)

Red button The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Red button The Real Right Thing (1899)

Red button The Third Person (1900)

Red button The Jolly Corner (1908)

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

The Sacred Fount

by

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

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

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

The Sacred Fount

the first English edition 1901

The Sacred Fount – critical commentary

The original idea

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

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

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

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

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

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

Problems of interpretation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sacred Fount – study resources

The Sacred Fount The Sacred Fount – Library of America – Amazon UK

Red button The Sacred Fount – Library of America – Amazon US

Red button The Sacred Fount – Kindle edition

The Sacred Fount The Sacred Fount – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Red button The Sacred Fount – audiobook at Librivox

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James – biographical notes

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

The Sacred Fount

The Sacred Fount – plot summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sacred Fount

Henry James – caricature by Max Beerbohm

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

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

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

The Shadow Line

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

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

Joseph Conrad - portrait

Joseph Conrad

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

The Shadow Line – critical commentary

Narrative structure

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

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

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

Steam and Sail

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

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

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

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

Youth and experience

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

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

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

Novel, novella, story?

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

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

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

The title

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

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

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

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

The Shadow Line – study resources

The Shadow Line The Shadow-Line – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Shadow Line The Shadow-Line – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Shadow Line The Shadow-Line – Kindle eBook (annotated)

The Shadow Line The Shadow-Line – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Shadow Line The Shadow-Line – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Shadow Line The Shadow-Line – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Shadow Line The Shadow-Line – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Shadow Line The Shadow Line – eBook versions 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

The Shadow Line

The Shadow-Line – plot summary

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

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

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

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

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

Biography

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

The Shadow Line

first edition, J.M.Dent 1917

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.

Critical studies

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

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

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

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

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 novels by Joseph Conrad

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

Red button Joseph Conrad – a collection of web links

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, further reading, and web links.

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2012

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Twentieth century literature
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