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An Imaginative Woman

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An Imaginative Woman was first published as a serial in Pall Mall Magazine in 1894. It was originally part of Wessex Tales (1896) but Hardy moved it into his collection Life’s Little Ironies (1912) for reasons that he explains rather cryptically in his preface, but which throw some light on how he meant it to be understood:

turning as it does upon a trick of Nature … a physical possibility that may attach to a wife of vivid imaginings, as is well known to medical practitioners and other observers of such manifestations.

There isn’t actually any ‘medical’ issue involved in the denouement of the story, so Hardy seems to be indulging in a little teasing provocation in this explanatory note. But it does hint at the crucial dramatic irony on which the story hinges that is discussed in the critical commentary below. It’s one of a number of stories Hardy wrote on the theme of injudicious or unsatisfactory marriages – For Conscience’ Sake and To Please His Wife are other typical examples. And of course Hardy had his own experience as first hand evidence of early-life romances which can lead into middle-aged misery.

An Imaginative Woman

Thomas Hardy

An Imaginative Woman – critical commentary

Irony – I

Contemporary readers can be forgiven if they do not spot the very delicate but crucial irony that Hardy inserts into the pivotal scene in the story when Ella undresses herself for a quasi-erotic solitary contemplation of Trewe’s photograph. Her rapture is interrupted when her husband Marchmill returns unexpectedly, and after refusing her hint that he sleep in another room (a passage from the original manuscript omitted from The Pall Mall Magazine publication) he kisses her and says “I wanted to be with you tonight.”

The very understated implication is that they have sex together that particular night. It was impossible to be explicit about such matters, writing at this time. So Marchmill’s final suspicion at the end of the story that his wife has been unfaithful to him during their holiday is doubly ironic. It was something she was trying desperately to achieve – but failing to do so. But the major point is that the child is certainly Marchmill’s, even though he rejects it.

The reader knows that Ella never gets to see or meet Trewe, even though she puts on his clothes, worships his photograph, and sleeps in his bed. Marchmill on the other hand is oblivious to his wife’s feelings and aspirations throughout the story, yet when he finally does come to feel a form of retrospective jealousy his suspicions lead him to a conclusion which is understandable but false.

This might seem to be playing fast and loose with the reader, but Hardy was writing under the very severe restrictions exercised by publishers at the time. It should be remembered that he stopped writing novels because of the outrage generated by Jude the Obscure. He turned his attention to poetry instead, and is now regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the period.

Irony – II

A second example of irony is that Trewe’s last poems were entitled Lyrics to a Woman Unknown, and he leaves a letter addressed to a friend in which he explains his yearning for a woman he has not actually met:

I have long dreamt of such an unattainable creature, as you know; and she, this undiscoverable, elusive one, inspired my last volume: the imaginary woman alone

So, at the same time that Ella has been pining after a Trewe she had never met, he has been searching for a female soul mate. They never actually meet; neither of them get what they want; and they both end up dead. You can see why Hardy is renowned for his tragic pessimism.

A curious feature

Robert Trewe commits suicide in the story by shooting himself in the head with a revolver – and yet he is buried in a cemetery. In the nineteenth century the stigma against suicide meant that the church would not normally allow someone who had taken their own life to be buried in consecrated ground. Hardy was well aware of these social prohibitions, as he had already demonstrated in Far from the Madding Crowd when Fanny is forced to bury her illegitimate dead child outside the graveyard. So it is slightly puzzling that he include such a scene in this story – unless he was merely reflecting the loosening of a formerly rigid social convention.

An Imaginative Woman – study resources

An Imaginative Woman Life’s Little Ironies – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

An Imaginative Woman Life’s Little Ironies – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

An Imaginative Woman Life’s Little Ironies – Wordsworth Classics edition – Amazon UK

An Imaginative Woman The Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle eBook

An Imaginative Woman Life’s Little Ironies – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

An Imaginative Woman Life’s Little Ironies – audiobook version at Project Gutenberg

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

An Imaginative Woman

An Imaginative Woman – plot summary

An Imaginative WomanElla Marchmill is a romantic young woman with an artistic temperament and an unfulfilled personal life. She is bored with her marriage, and has written and published poetry under the pseudonym John Ivy. On holiday with her husband and three children in Solentsea (Southsea) they find lodgings normally occupied by a young poet Robert Trewe, who moves out to accommodate them.

Ella finds scraps of poetry written on the walls of Trewe’s room, reads the books he has left there, and becomes caught up in a romantic dream of their being soul mates, even though she has never met him or even seen him.

Various arrangements are made whereby he might call at the lodgings, giving her the chance to meet him, but they all come to nothing. Then she writes to him under her pseudonym and sends him some of her poems.

The Marchmills return home, and a family friend who is on holiday with Trewe is invited to stay en route back home. The friend arrives, but Trewe does not, apologising that he is in a depressed state of mind.

Shortly afterwards, Trewe commits suicide. Ella travels secretly to the burial, and is followed there by her husband, who is tolerant of her behaviour,

Ella subsequently has a fourth child, and dies as a result. Her husband finds that she has kept a photograph of Trewe and a lock of his hair as a romantic memento. He compares the hair with that of his new young son and falsely concludes that there has been a liaison between his wife and the poet whilst they were on holiday. He rejects the child.

Principal characters
William Marchmill a gunsmith from the English midlands
Ella Marchmill his wife, a romantic and unfulfilled woman (30)
Mrs Hooper a widowed boarding house landlady
Robert Trewe a romantic poet (30)

Map of Wessex

Hardy’s WESSEX

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
Thomas Hardy Tess of the d'Urbervilles Buy the book at Amazon US

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

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

Thomas Hardy – web links

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

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

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

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

Thomas Hardy web links 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.

Thomas Hardy web links 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.

Hardy at IMDB 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 web links 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’.

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

© Roy Johnson 2012

More on Thomas Hardy
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An International Episode

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tutorial commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

An International Episode was first published in The Cornhill Magazine for December 1878—January 1879. It later appeared in book form later the same year published by Harper in New York.

An International Episode

An International Episode – critical commentary

This is one of many tales exploring the ‘international theme’ made famous by Henry James. As an American who had lived in Europe (and in England in particular) for many years, he very frequently put European characters in an American setting, and vice versa – exploring the manners, morals, and behaviour of one group on another.

And with feet in both camps (as it were) he was able to create satirical sketches which offered accounts of each group showing their characteristics as seen by the other. In An International Episode for instance it is obvious that he contrasts the voluble, good-natured hospitality of the Americans with the cold and unfriendly way in which the Americans are treated by the English upper class on their stay in London.

However, it has to be said that overall, this tale is marked by a sense of uncertainty in both its characterisation and construction – as if James was not quite sure how to handle the international theme at this relatively early stage. For instance, Mrs Westgate is introduced as a lightweight chatterbox, full of contradictory and repetitive soliloquies on the differences between American and European society.

Yet when she visits London only a few months later she is a different character altogether, guarded and scheming in her ambition to outdo the English aristocrats. As she declares to her younger sister: ‘The policy I mean to follow is very deep’. And indeed, during the confrontation with the Duchess of Bayswater and her daughter Lady Pimlico, who arrive at their hotel determined to humiliate the two Yankees, she beats Lambeth’s mother into submission over the invitation to Branches castle.

The constructional uncertainties are epitomised by the inclusion of characters such as Mr Westgate, Willy Woodley, and even Captain Littledale, who are introduced into the narrative as significant players – only to disappear, having made very little contribution to the story. They are cyphers whose only function is to move the story from one point to the next. As a result, the story lacks the structural cohesion and sense of thematic density which characterises his tales at their best.

The new American woman

The strongest feature of the tale is the development of what was to become an original character type – the ‘new American woman’ – similar to Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer. Bessie Alden is a well read intellectual young woman from Boston (a renowned centre of culture and learning). She has absorbed her impressions of England almost entirely from novels, and at first her naive enthusiasm to learn more is a vehicle for some mild satire.

But as soon as she travels to England and begins to question Lord Lambert about the country’s history and its institutions, his complete lack of learning, culture, or historical consciousness reveals him to be an aristocratic blockhead. Moreover, she does not let him off the hook when he tries to counter her probes with flattery. She quizzes him about his role as a ‘hereditary legislator’, and he is forced to admit that he does not speak in the House of Lords because he has ‘nothing to say’.

Even that point is driven further home when she exposes the iniquity of the hierarchical and snobbish English class system, and she disapproves profoundly with the English system of precedence. The same spirit of democratic egalitarianism is expressed by her sister Kitty when she tells Percy Beaumont:

I must say that I don’t like to be patronised. I may be very eccentric and undisciplined and unreasonable; but I confess I never was fond of patronage. I like to associate with people on the same terms as I do in my own country; that’s a particular taste that I have. But here people seem to expect something else.

Finally, she asserts her Yankee independence and free spirit by rejecting the invitation to share a weekend with his uber-snobbish mother the Duchess of Bayswater at his country seat at Branches castle. Marriage to an English aristocrat is sacrificed to her sense of intellectual curiosity and democratic self-respect. Kitty Westgate is worried that people might think they have been scared off by the Duchess, but Bessie ‘seemed to regret nothing’.

An International Episode – study resources

An International Episode The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

An International Episode The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

An International Episode Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon UK

An International Episode Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon US

An International Episode Tales of Henry James – Norton Critical Editions

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

An International Episode An International Episode – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Henry James Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

An International Episode

An International Episode – story synopsis

Part I   Percy Beaumont and his cousin Lord Lambeth arrive in New York on business in the middle of summer. The city is very hot and they feel overwhelmed. When they present a letter of introduction to a lawyer Mr Westgate, he invites them to stay at his house in Newport where it will be cooler.

Part II   The two men sail overnight to Newport where they have breakfast in their hotel. They then visit Mrs Westgate who receives them very hospitably but subjects them to a barrage of contradictory over-generalisations about the differences between European and American society.

Part III   An excursion to the seaside is organised, during which Bessie Alden, Mrs Westgate’s sister, makes a considerable impression on Lord Lambert. She is a Bostonian, is well read on English culture, and wishes to know a lot more. The two men move in to stay at the Westgate house, and Miss Alden makes further enquiries regarding Lord Lambert’s social position, family, and expectations. She is super-enthusiastic about his position as an aristocrat, whereas he is comically self-deprecating. Percy Beaumont meanwhile warns him against Miss Alden’s campaign to ensnare him, and even sends Lambert’s mother a letter of warning. As a result, Lady Lambeth (the Duchess of Bayswater) writes a letter recalling her son on the pretext that his father is ill.

Part IV   The following year Mrs Westgate and Bessie are visiting London on their trip to Europe. They are joined by Willy Woodley, a young American acquaintance doing the same thing. Bessie wants to contact their two English friends, but Mrs Westgate warns her against expecting reciprocated hospitality, and she doesn’t want it thought that Bessie has followed Lambert across the Atlantic in pursuit of a rich husband. The two sisters venture with chaperone Willy Woodley into Hyde Park, where they meet Lord Lambeth again, who invites them to his country estate at Branches castle.

Part V   Social contact is re-established, in which there is a lot of sparring and banter regarding the differences between English and American values. The two Englishmen are snobbish and protective of their class, whereas the two American women are proud of their democratic traditions. Mrs Westgate plans to shock the English aristocrats. When they go on excursions to historical locations such as the Tower of London and Hampton Court, Lord Lambeth is completely ignorant of his own country’s history, which invokes criticism from Bessie. However, he continues his attentions towards her, and she begins to fall in love with him. Nevertheless, she challenges the snobbish and aristocratic traditions which he embodies.

Part VI   Meanwhile Percy Beaumont warns Lambeth that his mother disapproves of the American fortune hunter (as Bessie is seen) and that he should desist with the relationship. Lambert fixes a date for the visit to Branches castle to meet his family. This precipitates a visit from his mother, the Duchess of Bayswater. She arrives at Bessie and Kitty’s hotel with the intention of intimidating them into staying away, and there is a frosty standoff in their exchanges. However, Bessie and her sister stand their ground, and it seems that the weekend party will go ahead. However, shortly afterwards it is implied that Bessie rejects the invitation, and by implication an offer of marriage from Lambeth, so the visit is called off. The two sisters move on to Paris instead.

An International Episode – characters
I the occasional outer narrator
Percy Beaumont an English barrister
Lord Lambert his rich young cousin
Mr Westgate a busy American lawyer
Mrs Kitty Westgate his pretty wife (30)
Captain Littledale his friend, an English diplomat
Miss Bessie Alden Mrs Westgate’s young sister from Boston (20)
Willy Woodley a young American
Duchess of Bayswater Lord Lambeth’s mother
Lady Pimlico Lord Lambeth’s sister

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

 

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Outcast of the Islands

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

An Outcast of the Islands (1896) is Joseph Conrad’s second novel, following closely on his first, Almayer’s Folly which was published the previous year. In fact An Outcast has a close relationship to Almayer, because it deals with some of the same characters and events.

Joseph Conrad - author of An Outcast of the Islands

Joseph Conrad

In fact it is part of what might be called a ‘trilogy in reverse’. An Outcast deals with events that take place in 1872, whereas Almayer’s Folly is set about 1887. An Outcast provides what might in modern media terms be called a ‘back story’ to the first novel. There is also a third volume in the series called The Rescue that deals with events set even earlier in the 1850s – but this was not published until 1920.

Conrad first conceived An Outcast as a short story called Two Vagabonds, but like many of his planned fictions it expanded as soon as he started writing it.

An Outcast of the Islands – plot summary

Peter Willems is a conceited bully who works as a ‘confidential’ clerk for Hudig & Co in Macassar in Malaysia. He has secured the job through the kindness of Tom Lingard, a sea captain who has rescued him as a youth. As the story opens, Willems is embezelling money of Hudig’s to finance a deal he hopes will make him a partner in the company.

An Outcast of the IslandsBut Willems’ illegal doings are revealed, and he is expelled by Hudig, who has only tolerated Willems because he was prepared to marry his daughter. Willems is on the point of complete despair when Lingard sails into port, bails him out financially, and recruits him to work in a commercial outpost at Sambir where he has commercial dominance. However, Willems does not get on with Almayer, the chief at the outpost. He is also unaware of a plot to cause trouble being hatched by Babalatchi, a louche character at the outpost. Willems is sinking back towards despair when he meets a young woman Aissa and is completely overwhelmed by her beauty. He leaves the outpost and goes to live with her and her blind father, Omar.

Five weeks later he returns to Almayer with the warning that plots are being hatched against the trading outpost. He asks Almayer for a loan to set up as an independent trader – a request that Almayer scornfully refuses, correctly surmising that Willems has been expelled from Hudig & Co for embezellement.

Meanwhile Babalatchi conspires with Omar against Willems, plotting to bring in outside help from rich trader Abdulla, who wishes to displace Lingard in the area. Abdulla visits Sambir, and is negatively briefed by Babalatchi Abdulla negotiates with Omar and with Willems (who he knows from Hudig & Co) and leaves with plans to return two days later.

Willems feels trapped and humiliated by his overwhelming desire for Aissa and despairs because he realises they are from completely different cultures. Aissa wish to know what has passed between Willems and Abdulla. She is conscious of her power over him but resents the trouble he brings as an outsider.

Willems has the sole objective of running away with Aissa but she refuses. Whilst they are consoling each other Omar attempts to kill Willems and it seems to Willems as if the daughter might even be helping him.

Almayer gives Captain Lingard a lengthy and somewhat confused account of Abdulla’s attack on the trading post. There is a conflict caused by both Dutch and British flags being raised over the outpost. All Almayer’s gunpowder is thrown into the river and Willems has Almayer sewn into his own hammock, before making off.

Captain Lingard has lost his ship Flash and proposes a new scheme for prospecting upriver for alluvial gold. He has brough Willems’ wife and child to Sambir, still feeling he has a responsibility for them.

Lingard is smarting from the unusually bad state of his affairs (lost ship, lost supremacy on the river). He receives notes of invitation from both Willems and Abdulla. Almayer urges him to act against their rivals.

Lingard arrives in Sambir apparently with the intention of killing Willems. He is met by Babalatchi, who urges him against Willems. Then he is intercepted by Aissa, who is distraught because Willems has become distant from her.

When Lingard confronts Willems, he punches him severely, but thinks he is not worth shooting. Willems wants Lingard to ‘rescue’ him from his plight. But Lingard does the opposite – and condemns him to remain in permanent exile with Aissa. He regards Willems as his ‘mistake’, and his ‘shame’.

Almayer feels a rancorous anxiety at what he sees as Lingard’s tolerant attitude to Willems, and he is apprehensive about his own position. He thinks of killing Willems, but then persuades Mrs Willems to ‘rescue’ her husband. He then sets off with a group of men in a boat, which through his ineptness runs aground.

Willems feels an existential dread at having been abandoned by Lingard. He thinks of himself as deracinated, cut off from all civilized help, and without any human resources to survive the ordeal – even though he has Aissa with him and Lingard is supplying him with food. Eventually his wife Joanna arrives with their son. Willems feels doubly oppressed and thinks of killing both women – but Aissa gets to the gun first and shoots him.

Study resources

An Outcast of the Islands - classics edition An Outcast of the Islands – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

An Outcast of the Islands - classics edition An Outcast of the Islands – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

An Outcast of the Islands - Kindle edition An Outcast of the Islands – Kindle eBook

Red button An Outcast of the Islands – DVD film adaptation at Amazon UK

Red button An Outcast of the Islands – eBook at Project Gutenberg

Red button Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Red button An Outcast of the Islands – DVD film adaptation at MovieMail

Red button An Outcast of the Islands – film details at IMD

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

An Outcast of the Islands

Principal characters
Peter Willems a Dutch confidential clerk at Hudig & Co
Joanna da Souza his wife – a half-caste
Louis Willems his pasty son
Leonard da Souza his brother-in-law
Mr Vinck cashier at Hudig & Co
Tom Lingard an experienced sea captain with a monopolistic knowledge of river navigation
Kaspar Almayer Lingard’s Dutch business partner, married to his adopted daughter
Babalatchi a one-eyed vagabond
Lakamba trader-cultivator and war-lord
Patalolo local leader in Sambir
Omar el Badavi blind Arab chief
Aissa his beautiful daughter
Sambir trading post town in Borneo
Syed Abdulla bin Selim prosperous Muslim trader and distant relative of Omar
Nina Almayer’s child
Ali Almayer’s Malaysian assistant
Biography

Setting

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

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

An Outcast of the Islands

first edition – New York, D. Appleton, 1896

Further reading

Joseph Conrad - critical study Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

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

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

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

Joseph Conrad - identity Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992

Joseph Conrad - narrative Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990

Joseph Conrad - companion Owen Knowles, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990

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

Joseph Conrad - biography Jeffery Myers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Cooper Square Publishers, 2001.

Joseph Conrad - morals George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Mercer University Press, 2005.

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

Joseph Conrad - critical issues Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues), London: Macmillan, 2006.

Joseph Conrad - several lives John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Arrow Books, 2008.

Joseph Conrad - nineteenth century Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980

Joseph Conrad - writing table

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Other works 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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The novels of Joseph Conrad - VictoryVictory (1915) is set in the legendary port of Surabaya and in an outpost of the Malayan archipelago. It is the story of Swedish recluse Axel Heyst, who rescues Lena, a young woman from a touring orchestra and runs off to live in remote seclusion, influenced by the pessimistic philosophy of his father. But he is pursued by two lying and scheming English gamblers, who believe he is concealing ill-gotten wealth. They corner him in his retreat, and despite the efforts of Lena to shield Heyst from their plans, there is a tragic confrontation which brings destruction into their island paradise.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2012

Joseph Conrad links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Outpost of Progress

by

tutorial, synopsis, commentary, and study resources

An Outpost of Progress was written in July 1897 and first appeared in the magazine Cosmopolitan in 1897. Quite amazingly, given the subject of the story, this was a magazine which began as a ‘family magazine’ and eventually became a magazine for women. In the late nineteenth century however, it was a leading outlet for literary fiction, publishing stories by Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and other leading contemporary writers. The first appearance of An Outpost of Progress in book form was as part of the collection Tales of Unrest published in 1898. The other pieces in this collection were Karain: A Memory. The Idiots. The Return. and The Lagoon.

An Outpost of Progress

Cosmopolital Magazine – October 1897

An Outpost of Progress – story synopsis

Part I.   An unsuccessful painter has been established as chief of a trading outpost somewhere in Africa. When he dies of a fever his replacement is Kayerts, with Carlier as assistant. However, the business is actually run by Makola, who is from Sierra Leone. The director of the trading company thinks the two men he has been sent are quite useless. They themselves feel vulnerable, being cut off from civilization, and each hopes the other will not die, because they would not like to be left alone.

Kayerts is there to earn a dowry for his daughter: Carlier has been sent there by his family because he has no money and is completely idle. They make a perfunctory attempt to improve their sparse quarters, then give up, taking no interest at all in the life that surrounds them. Makola conducts all trade with the local population, swapping ivory for cheap rubbishy European goods.

The two men get caught up childishly in their reading of novels by Dumas, Fennimore Cooper, and Balzac that the director has left behind. They are supported by (and dependent upon) produce donated by Gobila, the chief of a nearby village.

One day they are visited by a menacing group of strangers carrying weapons. The two men do not know what to do – so Makola deals with them but does not report the results. That night there is a lot of drumming and gunshots are heard.

Part II.   The station has a staff of native workers who come from a distant tribe. Makola reports that the armed traders (who are from Luanda) wish to sell some ivory. The next night the workers are given palm wine and Makola trades them as slaves for the ivory. One of Gobila’s men is shot in the process. Kayerts and Carlier protest their outrage, but do nothing. Gobila and his villagers cut off relations (and supplies) with the station.

Since the two men are incapable of finding their own provisions, they begin to deteriorate physically. They are hoping for a visit from the company steamship for supplies, but it does not appear. Then they have a dispute over a trivial issue regarding some remaining lumps of sugar. They chase each other around the outside of the house, but Kayerts has a revolver, and ends up shooting Carlier by accident. Makola has witnessed the scene: they agree to report that Carlier died of a fever and he will be buried next day.

Next morning the station is engulfed in mist. Kayerts awakes to find Carlier’s body next to him, and he panics with fright. At the same moment the company steamer arrives on the river, and Kayerts fears that civilization is coming to judge and condemn him. He commits suicide by hanging himself on the cross marking his predecessor’s grave.

An Outpost of Progress – study resources

An Outpost of Progress An Outpost of Progress – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

An Outpost of Progress An Outpost of Progress – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

An Outpost of Progress The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

An Outpost of Progress An Outpost of Progress – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

An Outpost of Progress An Outpost of Progress – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

An Outpost of Progress An Outpost of Progress – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

An Outpost of Progress 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

An Outpost of Progress Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

An Outpost of Progress Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

An Outpost of Progress

An Outpost of Progress – principal characters
Kayerts the new chief of the trading station – fat, small
Carlier his assistant – tall with thin legs
Makola (Henry Price) native clerk, from Sierra Leone
Mrs Price his wife, from Loanda
Gobila neighbouring village chief
An Outpost of Progress – commentary

These are the opening lines of the story. The notes which follow offer a detailed interpretation or close reading.

There were two white men in charge of the trading station. Kayerts the chief, was short and fat. Carlier, the assistant, was tall, with a large head and a very broad trunk perched upon a long pair of thin legs.The third man on the staff was a Sierra Leone nigger, who maintained that his name was Henry Price. However, for some reason or other, the natives down the river had given him the name Makola, and it stuck with him through all his wanderings about the country. He spoke English and French with a warbling accent, wrote a beautiful hand, understood book-keeping, and cherished in his innermost heart the worship of evil spirits. His wife was a negress from Loanda, very large and very noisy. Three children rolled about in sunshine before the door of his low shed-like dwelling. Makola, taciturn and impenetrable, despised the two white men. He had charge of a small clay storehouse with a dried grass roof, and pretended to keep a correct account of beads, cotton cloth, red kerchiefs, brass wire, and other trade goods it contained. Besides the storehouse and Makola’s hut, there was only one large building in the cleared ground of the station. It was built neatly of reeds, with a verandah on all the four sides. There were three rooms in it. The one in the middle was the living-room, and had two rough tables and a few stools in it. The other two were the bedrooms for the white men, Each had a bedstead and a mosquito net for all furniture. The plank floor was littered with the belongings of the white men: open half-empty boxes, torn wearing apparel, old boots; all the things dirty, and all the things broken, that accumulate mysteriously around untidy men. There was also another dwelling-place some distance away from the buildings.

A close reading

1. ‘There were two white men in charge of the trading station.’
This is very typical of Conrad’s use of dramatic irony – because we rapidly learn that the two men are only nominally in charge. It is their assistant Makola who really does all the work and determines what goes on, whilst they are hopelessly incompetent. The term ‘white men’ is significant because the story is set against the political background of the exploitation of black Africa by white Europeans.

2. The two names Kayerts and Carlier suggest that the story is set in the Belgian Congo. Kayerts is a Flemish name, and Carlier is French, these being the two linguistic groups which comprise Belgium. The physical description of the two men emphasises their difference in the manner of comic music-hall double acts (of the Laurel and Hardy, Little and Large variety). And the term perched in ‘a very broad trunk perched upon a long pair of thin legs’ is belittling and quasi-comic.

3. ‘Sierra Leone nigger, who maintained his name was Henry Price’
The use of the term ‘maintained’ suggests just the opposite – that Makola has given himself the name Henry Price because he wants to identify his interests with those of his employers. Conrad’s use of the term ‘nigger’ would not be remarkable in 1897 when the story was written.

4. The natives call him ‘Makola’ – and so does Conrad, which reinforces the reading of the previous sentence. His ‘wanderings’ suggest that he is confident and experienced.

5. Makola speaks two European languages in addition to his own African language and his wife’s (which is very likely to be different). He is also a skilled clerk. Thus he has absorbed European culture, in contrast to the two Europeans who are completely incapable of absorbing his. Yet he still worships evil spirits. In other words, he has a foot in both cultures.

6. His wife is from Loanda, which is on the coast of Angola, close to what was once called the ‘Slave Coast’. This is why she understands what the slave traders are saying later in the story.

7. ‘Rolled about’ suggests that the children are at ease in their natural environment. ‘Shed-like’ tells us the poor state of their accommodation.

8. ‘Impenetrable’ is a typical Conradian term – abstract and quasi-philosophical. It tells us that Makola keeps his feelings and his motivation well hidden. It is a similar type of term to those Conrad uses later to describe the topographical setting of the story – ‘hopeless’, ‘irresistible’, and ‘incomprehensible’. Such details contribute to the reason why Africa in a moral sense defeats the two Europeans in the story. The term ‘despised’ however is a key insight into Makola’s judgement and feelings: this points to the element of racial conflict in the story.

9. The ‘trade goods’ in which the station deals are in fact cheap rubbish, and they are being exchanged for ivory, a highly valued item in Europe. The exchange is therefore unfair, and the Africans are being cheated. But the term ‘pretended’ suggests that Makola might be engaged in a little cooking-of-the-books on his own account.

10. The ‘one large building’ reveals just how undeveloped this trading station is, at the same time as emphasising its isolation. The ‘verandah’ which goes round all four sides will be an important feature in the later part of the story when Kayerts is chasing Carlier round the house.

11. The mosquito nets would be important, because the two men are close to the equator, and therefore a long way away from their European homeland. Moreover, the previous chief of the trading post has died of fever.

12. The two men do not know how to look after themselves. The floor of the building is ‘littered’ with their ‘broken’ and ‘dirty’ goods. We also learn that they have come equipped with ‘town wearing apparel’ which is completely inappropriate for living in the tropics.

13. The other ‘dwelling place’ nearby is another example of Conrad’s scathing irony. For this place is the grave of the first station chief. Africa has already killed off one representative of Europe when the story opens – and it will claim two more before it ends.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

Conrad’s literary style

In his introductory notes to the collection Tales of Unrest in which An Outpost of Progress appeared, Conrad gives a clear indication that he was aware of breaking new ground in his writing:

almost without noticing it, I stepped into the very different atmosphere of An Outpost of Progress. I found there a different moral attitude. I seemed able to capture new reactions, new suggestions, and even new rhythms for my paragraphs.

It is certainly true that from the late years of the nineteenth century onwards, Conrad developed his very idiosyncratic prose style – one which many people find difficult to follow. His sentences become longer and longer; he uses a rich and sometimes abstract vocabulary; he is much given to quasi-philosophic intrusions into his own narrative; and in some of his novels he uses multiple narrators and a radically fractured chronology of events.

What follow are a series of notes on his style, based on a further passage from An Outpost of Progress.

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

Sentence length

Some of the sentences here (particularly the last) are quite long. This is because he is expressing complex ideas or generating a charged atmosphere. These are what some people find difficult to follow. But they are not all long: the first, for instance, dealing with a simple action by characters, is much shorter.

Paragraph length

Conrad’s paragraphs in general are quite long – which was common in the literature of the late nineteenth century. The first part of this paragraph describes what the two characters are doing and what they are feeling; but from the sentence beginning ‘They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals’ the paragraph content switches to quasi-philosophic reflections and generalisations about human behaviour.

Narrative mode

This story is written in what’s called the ‘third person omniscient narrative mode’. That is, Conrad tells us what his characters do, what they think, and how they feel. He is in charge of the entire story, and he also provides an account of the inner lives of his characters.

But from the sentence beginning ‘Few men realise …’ the narrative mode changes. The statements which follow – right up to the end of the paragraph – are generalised observations about life and human behaviour. These opinions are not attributed to the characters (who are fairly stupid people anyway) but are offered as if they were universal truths to which any sane person would agree.

Conrad here is slipping into an unacknowledged or disguised form of first person narrative. The opinions about how human beings react to ‘primitive nature and primitive man’ are Conrad’s own opinions – but he offers them in such a subtle and powerful manner that only a careful and alert reader will notice.

Conrad here is being what is called an ‘intrusive narrator’ – weaving his own philosophy of life into the narrative. And because he is the author, in complete charge of the text, he can make his evidence in the events of the story fit the assertions he is offering. Such is the magic of imaginative literature.

But it is worth noting these shifts in narrative mode – particularly in the case of Conrad, because in many of his longer stories and his novels he manipulates the delivery of narratives in an even more complex fashion – and sometimes gets himself into trouble: (see Freya of the Seven Isles, Nostromo, and Chance for instance).

Language

You will probably have noticed that Conrad uses a number of very charged terms in his evocation of milieu in which his two characters find themselves – terms such as ‘irresistible force’, ‘unmitigated savagery’, and ‘negation of the habitual’. What makes these difficult to grasp at first is that he is switching from the very specific and concrete description of the two men and the trading station to an abstract and very general consideration of their condition. This is almost the language of philosophy – and it is certainly a change of register.

The terms ‘force’, ‘savagery’, ‘habitual’, and ‘intrusion’ are all abstract nouns which draw readers’ attention away from the overt ‘story’ and force them to consider rather large scale social reflections on life.

In fact the combination of a rather unusual and powerful adjective qualifying an abstract noun — ‘unmitigated savagery’ and ‘profound trouble’ — is a sort of trade mark of Conrad’s literary style. You will see many other examples in this story and throughout his work in general.

Prose rhythm

In prose fiction rhythm is easier to feel than to define, but it should be fairly clear that Conrad puts a lot of rhythmic emphasis into his writing by his use of alliteration, repetition, and what are called balanced phrases and parallel constructions.

For instance ‘The courage, the composure, the confidence’ is a fairly obvious use of alliteration, with an insistent stress falling on the initial letter c in each of these words (which are all abstract nouns).

He uses both repetition and parallel construction in ‘To the sentiment of being … to the clear perception … to the negation of the habitual …’ – which helps the reader through a very long sentence.

Syntax

The term ‘syntax’ is used to describe the order of words in a sentence and the logic of their connection. These are normally determined by the long traditions and the historical development of the language itself. But Conrad is often given to unusual constructions — such as ‘The director was a man ruthless and efficient’.

This isn’t wrong or grammatically incorrect, but in conventional English adjectives are usually placed before the nouns that they qualify — as in ‘The director was a ruthless and efficient man’.

But English was Conrad’s third language after Polish and French, and he often uses constructions which are influenced by or echoes of his first and second languages.

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.
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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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© Roy Johnson 2013

Joseph Conrad links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
Joseph Conrad complete tales

An Unwritten Novel

by

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

An Unwritten Novel was mentioned in Virginia Woolf’s diary entry for 26 January 1920. It was first published in the London Mercury in July 1920 and reprinted in Monday or Tuesday (1921). It was also later collected in A Haunted House (1944).

An Unwritten Novel

Virginia Woolf

An Unwritten Novel – critical commentary

This is a short modernist fiction that celebrates the life of the imagination, and points to its shortcomings. As a narrator, Woolf was in the habit of thinking aloud and talking to herself, as well as to her imaginary readers. Here she takes the process one stage further by ‘talking’ to her own fictional creations.

She also shows the process of the artistic imagination at work, raising doubts about its own creations, asking questions, and posing alternative interpretations. She even develops lines of narrative then backtracks on them as improbable or cancels them as invalid, mistaken interpretation, or rejects them as inadequate.

In other words, the very erratic process of ratiocination – all the uncertainties, mistakes, hesitations – are reproduced as part of her narrative. She even addresses her own subject, silently, from within the fictional frame, and reflects on fictional creations which ‘die’ because they are rejected as unacceptable:

Let’s dodge to the Moggridge household, set that in motion. Well, the family boots are mended on Sundays by James himself. He reads Truth. But his passion? Roses — and his wife a retired hospital nurse — interesting — for God’s sake let me have one woman with a name I like! But no; she’s of the unborn children of the mind, illicit, none the less loved … How many die in every novel that’s written — the best, the dearest, while Moggridge lives.

This is also another of her early experimental stories in which it is virtually impossible not to conceptualise the narrator as someone like Woolf herself, travelling between her two homes in central London and Lewes (which is mentioned in the story). In one sense it is Woolf allowing readers a glimpse into the mind of the novelist, shaping fictions out of everyday observations.

And even if the imagined character, in this case, turns out to be (within its own fictional construction) not a true interpretation of the events ‘behind’ the overt narrative – then no matter. Minnie Marsh’s is no less convincing as an imaginary construct of the narrator’s imagination, even if (beyond the frame of the story) she goes off to have a completely happy and fulfilling engagement with her son.

An Unwritten Novel – study resources

An Unwritten Novel The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

An Unwritten Novel The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

An Unwritten Novel The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

An Unwritten Novel The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

An Unwritten Novel Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

An Unwritten Novel Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

An Unwritten Novel Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

An Unwritten Novel The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

An Unwritten Novel The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

An Unwritten Novel The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

An Unwritten Novel An Unwritten Novel – an alternative reading

An Unwritten Novel

An Unwritten Novel – story synopsis

An un-named first-person narrator is travelling on a commuter train between London and the south coast. Whilst reading the Times, the narrator notices a woman opposite with an unhappy expression, and thinks that her character can be interpreted, especially from the expression in her eyes. The woman becomes agitated, and the narrator begins to echo her gestures.

The narrator begins to imagine that this woman (who is given the name Minnie Marsh) is paying a visit to her sister-in-law (Hilda). The family group are imagined at the dinner table, at which the narrator pushes her imagination forward, to avoid the inessential details. Minnie goes upstairs to unpack her meagre belongings, and stares out in a despairing state across the rooftops of an Eastbourne suburb on December afternoon, and thinks of God.

The narrator finds difficulty in fully imagining God, but comes up with the idea that Minnie has committed some sort of crime. The question is, what sort of crime would a woman such as Minnie commit? The narrator settles on a scene where Minnie lingers in a Croydon draper’s shop and arrives home late to discover that her baby brother has died from scalding.

The narrator then checks her construction with the figure in the railway carriage, who is pretending to be asleep. The scene returns to Eastbourne, where the petty constraint of her sister-in-law’s house drive Minnie outdoors.

The narrator wonders if she is capturing the essence of the woman, and likens the effort to that of a hawk flying over the Sussex Downs. The story then loops back to pick up where it left off. Minnie takes a boiled egg and starts eating it in her lap.

The narrator loses grasp of the story and realises that something must be done to maintain its interest. Rhododendrons and commercial travellers are considered, then she invents a salesman James Moggeridge who takes his meals with the Marshes on a particular day when he is in Eastbourne. Moggeridge’s home life is predicated, then rejected as being unsuitable.

The narrator thinks of Minnie looking back over the events of the imaginary scene, then darning a hole in her glove. Imagining that Minnie would be disappointed not to be met at the station, the narrator offers to help her with her luggage.

But it transpires that the woman is being met by her son, and the narrator realises that the invented biography was quite inaccurate. Nevertheless, the narrator goes on observing people and ends on a note of celebration for the life of the imagination.

Monday or Tuesday – first edition

Monday or Tuesday - first edition

Cover design by Vanessa Bell

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon UK
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Woolf - OrlandoOrlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
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Kew GardensKew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon US

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

Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

Analysing characters

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how to study and understand fictional characters

Analysing characters

When studying literature, you will be asked to write about the characters in stories, plays, and novels. Most people find it easy to describe characters – that is, what they look like and what they do in the story. But it is much more difficult to analyse them. That’s because analysing characters in fiction requires not only insight into human behaviour but also the ability to make moral assessments about their psychology, motivations, and the consequences of their behaviour. This skill distinguishes an academic study of literature from casual leisure reading.

You need to know how fictional characters have been constructed by the author. After all, the very nature of a literary character is that it is a fictional construct. It’s an account of somebody who doesn’t exist in real life, but has been created by words written on paper. The character is imaginary, but if the author has been successful, we think of these characters as if they were real people. This attitude is described as a ‘suspension of disbelief’: that is, we are temporarily willing to believe that the character and the story are like real people.

Analysing characters

Eugene Onegin

Character analysis also requires the ability to understand the complex relationship between fiction and real life – a skill which requires a fairly mature reading experience. Fortunately, most people have been exposed to fictional narratives from an early age, and will already be experienced readers by the time they are asked to make such analyses.

What is a fictional character?

A fictional character is somebody in an imaginative literary work created by an author. The character could be Peter Rabbit, David Copperfield, Macbeth, or Madame Bovary. In other media, it could be Luke Skywalker (feature film), Donald Duck (cartoon), Dan Dare (comic), Super Mario (computer game), or someone from The Archers (radio).

What we can know about a character in fiction depends almost entirely on what the author decides to tell us. Authors normally create characters using any number of devices. They might reveal to us –

  • their name
  • their physical appearance
  • how they dress
  • how they behave
  • what they think and feel
  • what they say
The composition of a character

Authors are at liberty to combine these elements in whatever way they choose. They may give different levels of emphasis to any of these options. There are no fixed rules they must follow, but the outcome must be a coherent piece of characterisation.

Charles Dickens for instance went to a lot of trouble to give his characters unusual and memorable names – Uriah Heep, Lady Honoria Deadlock, Josia Tulkinghorn, and Inspector Bucket for instance. At the other extreme, the Czech writer Franz Kafka reduced his most famous protagonist to the single letter K, with no first name or surname at all.

Some characters are memorable because of the way they are depicted visually. For instance, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations has shut herself away in an old house for years and years wearing the wedding dress she wore on the day she was jilted at the altar. She is described as a cross between a waxwork and a skeleton.

The fictional character might have a peculiar way of speaking, or a physical habit that becomes easily recognisable. Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s play The Rivals is memorable because she often uses the wrong word in her statements. She says “promise to forget this fellow – to illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory” when of course she means obliterate. This characteristic is so easily recognisable that her name has been attached to that particular mis-use of language ever since – malapropism.

The good thing about this fictional technique is that it helps to fix the character in the audience’s mind. Its weakness as a technique is that it can reduce the character to no more than a verbal tic.

Some fictional characters are not given any name at all, and we know nothing about their appearance. Fyodor Dostoyevski’s Notes from Underground features a character whose name we don’t know, and whose appearance is never described. All we are told is what the character thinks – which is a torrent of existential rage against the world.

So – there are no fixed rules for the creation of fictional characters. Authors are free to tell us anything they wish about the characters they create. As readers we can merely hope that they are at least convincing or at best memorable. However, you need to be able to explain the mechanisms used to achieve this effect.

How to analyse a character

You can think of character analysis as a three part process. If you are a beginner, it will be safest to write about these parts separately. If you are more experienced, the parts may be combined – though you will still need to give your writing some structure.

  1. First – identify the character
  2. Second – describe the character
  3. Third – explain the character

Identify

In the first part of the process you are merely choosing the character you wish to write about. In many literary studies courses the character will be chosen for you by a question set for an essay or term paper. It is important to choose a character who is genuinely significant and who plays a dramatic part in the story.

Part of identifying a character is knowing their importance in the story. You will probably have no difficulty in distinguishing important characters (the protagonist or most significant character for instance) from lesser or secondary characters.

Describe

In the second part of the process you are ‘locating’ the character within the story and giving an overview of what part they play in its events. The term ‘describe’ implies that you can consider the character in isolation, and give a surface account of their presence in the story. You do not have to look under the surface to discuss any of their psychological motivation at this stage.

Explain

In the third part you will give an account of the character in relation to other people in the story or the play. You should explain what motivates the character, what the significance of their actions might be, and how they relate to other characters in the story or the theme of the work in general. At this stage you might also say something about their role in the story from an artistic point of view. That is, the role of the character in relationship to the events of the narrative.

Studying FictionStudying Fiction is an introduction to the basic concepts and technical terms you need when making a study of stories and novels. It shows you how to understand literary analysis by explaining its elements one at a time, then showing them at work in short stories which are reproduced as part of the book. Topics covered include – setting, characters, story, point of view, symbolism, narrators, theme, construction, metaphors, irony, prose style, tone, and interpretation. The book also contains self-assessment exercises, so you can check your understanding of each topic. Best-selling title, written by the author of these web pages.

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Character analysis – example

Identify

Joe Gargery in Great Expectations is very significant as a character. He acts as a formative influence on Pip; he is unwavering in his support for him throughout the novel; and he is instrumental in rescuing Pip from moral shoddiness in the final parts of the novel.

Describe

Joe is married to Pip’s elder sister and is therefore technically his brother-in-law; but he acts very much as a protective father-figure during Pip’s early life. Joe is naive, sometimes unconsciously comic, hard working and loving.

Explain

Joe represents the simple good nature that Dickens contrasts with Pip’s self-seeking complexity. His role as a constant in Pip’s life throws into sharp relief Pip’s plunge into increasing bad faith. The character of Joe is used as a fixed point by which we can trace Pip’s downfall and finally his moral redemption and recovery. Joe is also a comic foil against Mrs Joe’s violent behaviour as his termagant wife.

There is also a complex element in Joe’s child-like characterisation in relation to his wife Mrs Joe. He tolerates and never challenges his wife’s abusive behaviour towards both himself and her young brother Pip.

Narrative perspective

Thus far we have basic information about a fictional character – which we might call characteristics. But in addition, the author might provide any of the following information as well.

  • what the author thinks about them
  • what other characters think about them
  • what happens to them

This does not obtain so much in plays, where the author normally prescribes the appearance of characters and what they say – but nothing else. The point of view or perspective in this case is provided by the director of the play, in deciding how the play will be presented and how the characters will behave on stage.

In narrative fiction (novels and stories) you are likely to be presented with information about characters from a number of different sources – from the author, from other characters, possibly from a narrator, and of course from the characters themselves. Not all these items of information carry equal weight, and you will need to make careful discriminations in making your judgements.

Stock characters

What is a stock character? It’s a fictional creation that is a recognisable type who occurs in lots of other stories. This is what’s called a stereotype. Here are some examples you will recognise:

  • the miser
  • the mysterious stranger
  • the wicked stepmother
  • the absent-minded professor
  • the whore with a heart of gold
  • the damsel in distress
  • the hard boiled detective
  • the femme fatale
  • the gentleman thief

New stereotypes are being created all the time – and may be generated by new genres of fiction from film, television, and other media, as well as from the traditional literary genres of story, novel, and play.

Two and three-dimensional characters

The term two-dimensional character is used as an expression of negative criticism to label a character who always behaves in the same way, and does not change or grow as a result of the events in the story. They are sometimes referred to as cardboard or flat characters – as being flimsy, undeveloped, and not particularly credible.

It is a term used in contradistinction to a three-dimensional character which is used to describe fictional characters who have the depth and complexities of real human beings, and are therefore deemed more successful creations.

This ‘third’ dimension might be the capacity to change as a result of events in the story; it might be the successful depiction of contradictory beliefs and behaviour; or it might be acting on an irrational impulse – something which human beings are doing all the time.

For instance, in A Tale of Two Cities Sydney Carton is a cynical and alcoholic barrister who acts in a self-indulgent and disreputable manner throughout the majority of the novel. But at the end of story he takes another man’s place at the guillotine – an act of self-sacrifice which atones for all his past wrongdoings. Dickens makes the change of character credible, and Carton’s last words (his thoughts) have become famous: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

Dubious characters

Successfully realised characters are not necessarily likeable or even decent. Authors are at liberty to create characters who are flawed, and they might still be attractive or memorable..

Fagin in Oliver Twist is a grizzly old rogue who runs a children’s criminal gang. He mistreats the members of the gang, tells lies, and is partly responsible for the death of an innocent woman (Nancy). Despite all these negative characteristics, he is so vividly portrayed by Dickens that he remains a standout and very memorable figure in the novel.

Some characters might be likeable even though they commit reprehensible acts. Vladimir Nabokov’s protagonist Humbert Humbert in Lolita is attractively clever and very amusing, even though he abducts and sexually abuses a teenage girl and murders his rival, Claire Quilty. But the first-person account of events Humbert delivers is so full of jokes and witty observations of American life, that we tend to overlook his flaws.

Providing evidence

A detailed character analysis depends on a close reading of the text, coupled with an understanding of the character. It also requires evidence drawn from the text to support any argument about the character.

It is not enough to say that you don’t like a character, or disapprove of something they do in the story. What you are doing is closer to showing that you understand what the author is trying to demonstrate to the reader. This is the reason that it is necessary to understand the literary techniques by which characters are created.

© Roy Johnson 2014

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Ancestors

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tutorial, synopsis, commentary,  and study resources

Ancestors was probably written in 1923 – between the composition of Jacob’s Room (1922) and Mrs Dalloway (1925). It was first published in the magazine The Criterion in April 1923 – edited by fellow Bloomsburyite T.S. Eliot. It is one of a number of short stories Virginia Woolf wrote which feature guests at a party given by Clarissa Dalloway at her home in Westminster.

Ancestors

Virginia Woolf

Ancestors – critical commentary

Biography

This is another of Woolf’s stories in which there is more or less a complete absence of authorial comment to guide the reader’s interpretation. However, it is quite clear that Mrs Valliance is romanticising her ‘ancestors’ and that we are being invited to see her disdain for younger contemporaries in a critical light.

But it is also possible that Virginia Woolf is celebrating the rich cultural life she inherited from her own parents. After all, her mother was a society beauty and model for some of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and her father was a celebrated Victorian intellectual, with colleagues ranging from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Henry James and Thomas Hardy. We note that Mrs Vallance’s father is some sort of public figure who she expects Jack Renshaw to know, and his friends are Sir Duncan Clement and a Greek scholar – just the sort of people with whom Leslie Stephen surrounded himself.

Mrs Vallance also seems to be an even more precocious version of Virginia Woolf herself: ‘She had read all Shelly between the ages of twelve and fifteen’. The connection is once more the biographical link between Woolf and her father, who gave her free access to his library as a child. It might also be borne in mind that Virginia Woolf never went to school in the sense we think of that term today. She was ‘home educated’

We know that Woolf regarded over-attention to dress as rather frivolous, and she was often criticised for her own choice of clothes. But on the other hand, she did write for Vogue, and when young she did play cricket. However, it would seem to be wrong to draw the parallels between Mrs Vallance and Virginia Woolf too closely, for Mrs Vallance at one point thinks ‘She could not bear to walk in London and see the children playing in the streets’ and it is difficult to think of anyone who has celebrated walking in the streets of London more memorably that Virginia Woolf, particularly in the case of her celebrated character, Clarissa Dalloway.

Geography

Mrs Vallance’s memories of her idyllic family life are located in Scotland according to the text- and yet the story creates no sense of such a location. It is not evoked or represented in any way. This is rather like To the Lighthouse which is supposed to be set in the Hebrides, when it is quite clear from what we know of Virginia Woolf’s life and the places she lived that the setting is based on St Ives and the nearby Godrevy lighthouse.

This is odd – because Woolf marvelously evoked the places in which she lived and worked – central London, the Sussex countryside, even the ‘suburbs’ of Richmond. She was also quite well-travelled considering the difficulties of inter-nation travel at the time she lived. But these fictional excursions into locations she didn’t actually know do not work at all.

Ancestors – study resources

Ancestors The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

Ancestors The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

Ancestors The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

Ancestors The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Ancestors Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

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

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

Ancestors The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Ancestors

Ancestors – the text

Mrs Vallance, as Jack Renshaw made that silly, rather conceited remark of his about not liking to watch cricket matches, felt that she must draw his attention somehow, must make him understand, yes, and all the other young people whom she saw, what her father would have said; how different her father and mother, yes and she too were from all this; and how compared to really dignified simple men and women like her father, like her dear mother, all this seemed to her so trivial.

‘Here we all are,’ she said suddenly, ‘cooped up in this stuffy room while in the country at home — in Scotland’ (she owed it to these foolish young men who were after all quite nice, though a little under-sized, to make them understand what her father, what her mother and she herself too, for she was like them at heart, felt).

‘Are you Scotch?’ he asked.

He did not know then, he did not know who her father was; that he was John Ellis Rattray; and her mother was Catherine Macdonald.

He had stopped in Edinburgh for a night once, Mr Renshaw said.

One night in Edinburgh! And she had spent all those wonderful years there — there and at Elliotshaw, on the Northumbrian border. There she had run wild among the currant bushes; there her father’s friends had come, and she only a girl as she was, had heard the most wonderful talk of her time. She could see them still, her father, Sir Duncan Clements, Mr Rogers (old Mr Rogers was her ideal of a Greek sage), sitting under the cedar tree; after dinner in the starlight. They talked about everything in the whole world, it seemed to her now; they were too large minded ever to laugh at other people. They had taught her to revere beauty. What was there beautiful in this stuffy London room?

‘Those poor flowers,’ she exclaimed, for petals of flowers all crumpled and crushed, a carnation or two, were actually trodden under foot, but, she felt, she cared almost too much for flowers. Her mother had loved flowers: even since she was a child she had been brought up to feel that to hurt a flower was to hurt the most exquisite thing in nature. Nature had always been a passion with her; the mountains, the sea. Here in London, one looked out of the window and saw more houses — human beings packed on top of each other in little boxes. It was an atmosphere in which she could not possibly live; herself. She could not bear to walk in London and see the children playing in the streets. She was perhaps too sensitive; life would be impossible if everyone was like her, but when she remembered her own childhood, and her father and mother, and the beauty and care that were lavished on them —

‘What a lovely frock!’ said Jack Renshaw, and that seemed to her altogether wrong — for a young man to be noticing women’s clothes at all.

Her father was full of reverence for women but he never thought of noticing what they wore. And of all these girls, there was not a single one of them one could call beautiful — as she remembered her mother, — her dear stately mother, who never seemed to dress differently in summer or winter, whether they had people or were alone, but always looked herself in lace, and as she grew older, a little cap. When she was a widow, she would sit among her flowers by the hour, and she seemed to be more with ghosts than with them all, dreaming of the past, which is, Mrs Vallance thought, somehow so much more real than the present. But why. It is in the past, with those wonderful men and women, she thought, that I really live: it is they who know me; it is those people only (and she thought of the starlit garden and the trees and old Mr Rogers, and her father, in his white linen coat smoking) who understood me. She felt her eyes soften and deepen as at the approach of tears, standing there in Mrs Dalloway’s drawing-room, looking not at these people, these flowers, this chattering crowd, but at herself, that little girl who was to travel so far, picking Sweet Alice, and then sitting up in bed in the attic which smelt of pine wood reading stories, poetry. She had read all Shelly between the ages of twelve and fifteen, and used to say it to her father, holding her hands behind her back, while he shaved. The tears began, down in the back of her head to rise, as she looked at this picture of herself, and added the suffering of a lifetime (she had suffered abominably) — life had passed over her like a wheel — life was not what it had seemed then — it was like this party — to the child standing there, reciting Shelly; with her dark wild eyes. But what had they not seen later. And it was only those people, dead now, laid away in quiet Scotland, who had known her, who knew what she had it in her to be — and now the tears came closer, as she thought of the little girl in the cotton frock, how large and dark her eyes were; how beautiful she looked repeating the ‘Ode to the West Wind’; how proud her father was of her, of how great he was, and how great her mother was, and how when she was with them she was so pure so good so gifted that she had it in her to be anything. That if they had lived, and she had always been with them in that garden (which now appeared to her the place the place where she had spent her whole childhood, and it was always starlit, and always summer, and they were always sitting out under the cedar tree smoking, except that somehow her mother was dreaming alone, in her widow’s cap among her flowers — and how good and kind and respectful the old servants were, Andrewes the gardener, Jersy the cook; and old Sultan, the Newfoundland dog; and the vine, and the pond, and the pump — and Mrs Vallance looking very fierce and proud and satirical, compared her life with other people’s lives and if that life could have gone on for ever, then Mrs Vallance felt none of this — and she looked at Jack Renshaw and the girl whose clothes he admired — could have had any existence, and she would have been oh perfectly happy, perfectly good, instead of which here she was forced to listen to a young man saying — and she laughed almost scornfully and yet tears were in her eyes — that he could not bear to watch cricket matches!

Ancestors

Virginia Woolf (left) Vanessa Bell (right)

Ancestors – story synopsis

Mrs Vallance is at a party in London at the house of Clarissa Dalloway. She is irritated by the attitudes of a young man Jack Renshaw who says he doesn’t like to watch cricket matches and passes admiring comments on a younger woman’s dress. She soothes her irritation with a series of of reminiscences about her parents, whose cultivation she sees as superior to her current surroundings. She resuscitates nostalgic images of reverential figures in after-dinner conversations on summer nights conducted under big trees in starlight.

She feels that her parents have instilled in her a sense of beauty, and that they understood her in a way that her present company does not. Even the household servants of her childhood are romantically summoned, and she wishes the whole of this idealised past life could have continued unabated, to spare her from the current discomfort.

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
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Woolf - OrlandoOrlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
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Kew GardensKew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
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Virginia Woolf: BiographyVirginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
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Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

Armadale

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Armadale (1864) was the follow-up to two previously successful novels by Wilkie Collins – The Woman in White (1860) and No Name (1862). It didn’t result in quite so many magazine sales, but it certainly helped to cement his position of the master of the ‘sensation novel’ – of which this was his longest. He was paid £5,000 for the complete work – money that went to support the two separate families he maintained in London’s fashionable West End at the same time

Armadale

Armadale – a note on the text

Armadale first appeared as twenty serial episodes in the Cornhill Magazine between November 1864 and June 1865. It then published in two volumes by Smith, Elder in May 1865. There were minor revisions to the text, and Collins added a preface and even an explanatory appendix to cover some of the issues he wished to address in the novel.

An American edition of the novel appeared as a serial in Harper’s Monthly Magazine from December 1864 to July 1865, then a one-volume edition published by Harper in 1866.

Collins also produced a stage dramatisation of the story, though this was never given a live production. He wrote this to protect his copyright, because at that time there was nothing to prevent pirated versions of a story appearing on stage – unless a separate version had been written by its original author.

This phenomenon of publishing in a variety of genres also illustrates the commercial enterprise of writers such as Collins and his friend Charles Dickens. They were keen to exploit all possible versions of their works – as newspaper and magazine serials, in volume form as novels, and as stage productions. This is not unlike contemporary dramas which may appear as television serials, cinema movies, novelizations, and boxed sets of CDs, as well as in downloadable digital formats.

Armadale – critical commentary

The sensation novel

Wilkie Collins, along with his contemporary Mary Elizabeth Braddon, became famous for the sensation novel in the 1860s. He made his name with The Woman in White (1860) and she had a best-seller with Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). These were novels that introduced elements of mystery, suspense, and crime into otherwise ordinary social settings.

They were also designed to titillate and shock readers by including topics that skirted as closely as possible to what was acceptable in popular fiction at the time. These topics included illegitimacy, secret marriages, forged wills, theft, contested inheritance, suicide, and even murder.

Armadale has its fair share of this type of subject matter embedded in the plot, which includes instances of concealed identity, spying, personation, secret marriage, drugs, attempted and real suicide, plus murder.

Names and identities

From its very start the novel is concerned with the relationship between names and personal identity. For instance the principal character is called Lydia Gwilt – a woman who weaves herself and her influence around several of the other characters in the novel.

But Lydia Gwilt is not her real name. Her original or true name is not known, She is a foundling and even she does not know what her name should be (Book the Third, Chapter XV). Her name has been attached to her by others.

As a result of her first marriage she becomes Mrs Waldron, and then through her second marriage Mrs Manuel – though we know that this marriage is illegitimate, because Manuel is still married to someone else at the time.

She then contracts a bigamous marriage with Midwinter – an illegal union because Manuel is still alive. And Ozias Midwinter isn’t his real name either. He is actually called Allan Armadale, a name which Lydia Gwilt wants to acquire so as to pose as the widow of the ‘other’ Allan Armadale after murdering him and claiming his money.

It is not surprising that this potpourri of names, identities, and relationships eventually leads her into states of illegality, then later into psychological breakdown and eventually to her suicide.

The villainous character

Sensation novels often have dubious, devious, villainous, or criminal characters – but Lydia Gwilt pushes the boundaries of credibility. She has a completely irregular provenance – with a past history in which she has manipulated men, and been ill-treated by them in her turn. She uses her sexual allure to work on the elderly and decrepit servant Bashwood, who is so besotted with her that even after discovering he is being manipulated, he ends up in a semi-demented state, imagining that he is about to marry her.

Yet Bashwood might be considered to have a lucky escape, because there is evidence that she murdered her first husband Waldron. She makes two attempts to poison Armadale in pursuit of his wealth; she is a serial bigamist; she is involved in deception and fraud; she is a drug user. addicted to laudanum; she is hostile and vindictive to anybody who stands in the way of her plans; and she both attempts and eventually commits suicide.

The one feature that redeems this stereotyped catalogue of villainy is that towards the end of the novel Wilkie Collins gives her a streak of sympathy and appreciation towards Midwinter, whom she perceives as a fellow outsider. She has married him in order to share his real name (Allan Armadale) but gradually she dimly realises that she loves him for his own sake.

Weaknesses

The enormous length and complexity of the plot makes unusually severe demands on the reader. This is a novel in which there are no fewer than four characters with the same name – Allan Armadale – and the relationship between them requires prodigious feats of memory on the part of the reader, because the connections are briefly adumbrated in the first pages of the novel then hardly mentioned again throughout the eight hundred pages that follow.

There are also several strands in the plot which first appear significant, but are then dropped or disappear without trace. For instance, the relationships of the ‘original’ Allan Armadale and the person who takes up his name (Fergus Ingelby) is lost in obscurity after the Prologue to the main story. The same is true of their marriages and their sons – also called Allan Armadale.

At the other end of the novel, Armadale’s relationship with Eleanor Milroy appears to be woven into the over-dramatic finale when she is transported to the Sanatorium, in a state of mental shock following the (false) news of Armadale’s death. The highly over-wrought sequence of attempted murder and switched rooms involving Armadale, Midwinter, and Lydia Gwilt brings the novel to its climax – but Wilkie Collins appears to forget that the other member of this quartet is also on the premises. Eleanor is simply not mentioned again until she makes a brief reappearance in the Epilogue as Armadale’s wife.

It also has to be said that the latter part of the novel collapses into Grand Guignol melodrama when all four principal characters are locked overnight into a mental asylum. Lydia Gwilt as the arch villain is plotting to murder Allan Armadale with poisonous gas, but Midwinter and Armadale have switched bedrooms. Lydia therefore fails in her quest and ends up (almost) poisoning her own husband – before killing herself.

Wilkie Collins also has the annoying habit of relating some scenes twice. He will deliver a sequence of events as a (very intrusive) third person narrator – but then have his characters go over the same events again, either in discussion or as explanation to each other. This might be a deliberate element of the serial form – reminding readers of ‘the story so far’ – but it is irritating for readers to be told something they already know.

These diffuse strands of plotting might be useful to sustain readers’ interest during their consumption of a serialized fiction – but they do not help to create the tight cohesion and thematic density that we associate with an intellectually satisfying novel. However, it is worth noting that the two cultural forms of the literary and the popular serial novel were coexistent at that time.

Armadale – study resources

Armadale Armadale – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Armadale Armadale – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Armadale Armadale – Independent Publishers – Amazon UK

Armadale Armadale – Independent Publishers – Amazon US

Basil The Complete Works of Wilkie Collins – Kindle eBook

Basil Armadale – eBook formats at Gutenberg

Armadale

1879 edition

Armadale – plot summary

Prologue

I. A Scottish solicitor Alexander Neal and the paralyzed Englishman Allan Armadale arrive in the German spa town of Wildbad.

II. The local doctor asks a reluctant Neal to take English dictation from the dying Armadale, who will not trust the job to his beautiful wife.

III. Neal reads out the start of a long letter Armadale is writing as a confession to his son. His original name is Allan Wrentmore and he has inherited a fortune at the expense of Allan Armadale – whose name he must take. The original Armadale steals his bride-to-be but then is drowned during a storm at sea. Wrentmore reveals that he locked Armadale in his cabin as the ship was sinking.

The Wrentmore Armadale marries in Trinidad then goes to Europe where he is dying, comforted only by his son who is also called Allan Armadale. The confession is rounded off as a warning to his son to avoid any contact with other people in the drama (particularly the original Allan Armadale’s son) and is posted off to solicitors in London.

Part the First

I. Twenty years later the Reverend Brock looks back as tutor to the young Allan Armadale and would-be suitor to Mrs Armadale. When an advert appears in the Times seeking information on Allan Armadale she quashes all interest in it.

When brain-fevered outcast Ozias Midwinter appears, Allan Armadale assumes complete financial responsibility for him. Mrs Armadale is suspicious of the outcast and thinks he might be the ‘real’ Allan Armadale in disguise. She is also visited by her former young maid (Lydia Gwilt) whom she regards as pernicious. Shortly afterwards she falls ill and dies.

Another newspaper advert appears from the London lawyers requesting information on Armadale. Brock and Armadale go to Paris where they learn that as a result of three family deaths, Armadale has inherited his wealthy uncle’s estate in Norfolk.

A mysterious young woman (Lydia Gwilt) attempts suicide but is rescued. Armadale takes Brock and Midwinter on a cruise to the Isle of Man where Midwinter reveals to Brock his true identity as Allan Armadale.

II. Midwinter relates how his mother married Alexander Neal who beat him, and how he escaped with the rogue gypsy who gave him his odd name. He lives as a vagabond, ends up in jail, then spends two years working for a miserly bookseller. He responds to the Times advert and receives a salary from his share of the inheritance. Because of the kindness Armadale has shown to him, he decides to stick to the assumed name of Midwinter and ignore his father’s injunction to avoid Armadale. Midwinter burns his father’s confessional warning letter.

III. Midwinter and Armadale spend a desultory day on the Isle of Man where they meet the local doctor Mr Hawberry and go for a midnight sail in his boat. They end up stranded on the wreck of La Grace de Dieu, the vessel on which the original murder took place.

IV. They find themselves outside the cabin where Midwinter’s father killed Armadale’s father. Armadale is unaware of its history. Midwinter is tempted to reveal the truth, but feels deeply conflicted. Armadale has a dream whilst on the wreck , and later they are rescued by Hawberry. 

V. Armadale’s strange dream is interpreted by Hawberry using rational arguments from the previous day’s events. Midwinter remains convinced that the dream is prophetic.

Book the Second

I. Midwinter is worried about being made steward at Thorpe-Ambrose estate. The procuress Mrs Oldershaw advises Lydia Gwilt to pursue Armadale as revenge for her ill-treatment by his mother. Major Milroy takes up tenancy of the estate cottage with his invalid wife and young daughter. Lydia plans to apply for a job as their governess.

II. Armadale inspects his new estate. He meets Miss Milroy and instantly falls in love with her. He meets her father, who advertises for a governess.

III. Midwinter finds Armadale’s mother’s books in the room featured in Armadale’s dream. Armadale has insulted the old family solicitor and is approached by a new partnership in the town. The local gentry regard him unfavourably.

IV. Midwinter encounters grievance at the Milroy cottage. The locals do not like Armadale’s radical new attitudes. Armadale flirts with Miss Milroy and starts to entertain ideas of marriage.

V. Mrs Oldershaw tries to baffle Reverend Brock. Lydia Gwilt is in hiding, but is determined to marry Allan Armadale as an act of revenge. Mrs Oldershaw changes her name to Manderville and employs a maid to act as a decoy for Lydia.

VI. Armadale and an ebullient Midwinter visit the Milroy cottage. Midwinter creates an embarrassing scene, and Major Milroy exhibits his animated clock.

VII. Allan invites Eleanor to a picnic. Bashwood recounts to Midwinter the story of his disastrous family life. Lydia Gwilt is invited to the picnic when she arrives.

VIII. There is a boating party excursion onto the Norfolk Broads, with courtship and comic interludes. 

IX. The party returns to Thorpe-Ambrose, but Armadale stays behind to meet Midwinter, where he has a re-enactment of his dream when he encounters Lydia Gwilt.

X. Midwinter fears that Armadale is fulfilling his own prophetic dream. Lydia Gwilt’s arrival immediately upsets the Milroys. Midwinter checks on Lydia, but uses a flawed description of her supplied by Brock. Because of this he abandons his superstitious belief in the prophetic dream.

XI. Lydia Gwilt is in danger of being exposed, and she rightly believes that Mrs Milroy suspects her. She reports that Midwinter is in love with her. Mrs Oldershaw deploys her decoy maid to deceive Brock.

XII. Midwinter has banished all his earlier qualms about the dream and installed Armadale in his mother’s old room. Armadale announces to a mortified Midwinter that he is in love with Lydia Gwilt.

XIII. Armadale and Midwinter discuss Lydia. Armadale knows very little about her background. He wants Midwinter’s help, but because he too is in love with Lydia, Midwinter leaves Thorpe-Ambrose.

Book the Third

I. The invalid Mrs Milroy is fuelled by a jealous suspicion towards Lydia. She opens her mail and thinks she is trying to seduce the Major.

II. Mrs Milroy shares her hatred of Lydia with her daughter Eleanor, who reveals to her the connection between Lydia and Armadale.

III. Mrs. Milroy plots to send Armadale to London in search of further information on Lydia and her background which they both want.

IV. Armadale and lawyer Pedgift Junior go to London in search of Mrs Manderville, not realising that her real name is Oldershaw.

V. Armadale and Pedgift Junior trace the connection with Lydia Gwilt to a brothel in Pimlico. Armadale abandons the search but is pestered for evidence from the Milroys. The scandal of a challenge to Lydia Gwilt’s virtue without any evidence is made public in Thorpe-Ambrose.

VI. Pedgift Senior advises Armadale against Lydia Gwilt. She makes two attempts to visit Allan, but Pedgift insists that she is refused. Armadale is very reluctant to pursue further enquiries.

VII. Pedgift then reveals that Lydia has threatened Eleanor Milroy, and Armadale is persuaded to let Pedgift set a spy on tracing Lydia’s movements.

VII. Lydia knows she is being followed and she employs a love-smitten Bashwood as an informer. She meets Midwinter on his return to Thorpe-Ambrose and lies to him that she has been misunderstood.

VIII. Armadale and Midwinter argue about Lydia Gwilt – and in doing so re-enact a scene from the prophetic dream.

IX. Bashwood reports to Lydia on the argument and on Armadale’s refusal to accept Pedgift’s advice. Midwinter vows to leave Thorpe-Ambrose forever – but he writes to Lydia Gwilt and falls into her seductive trap by revealing his true identity.

X. Lydia Gwilt’s diary summarises the plot as she records Midwinter’s confession. She despises Allan but is attracted to Midwinter as a fellow outsider. She eavesdrops on Armadale’s marriage proposal to Eleanor and receives letters from Midwinter. She devises a plan of a secret marriage to Midwinter after which she will claim to be the widow of Allan Armadale following his death.

XI. Armadale and Eleanor discuss the legal requirements for a marriage. He decides to go to London to seek advice.

XII. Armadale and Lydia Gwilt leave for London on the same train – observed by the jealous Bashwood, who vows to seek revenge on Lydia Gwilt.

XIII. Bashwood applies to Pedgift, but gets little help. He then contacts his son, the private detective whom Mrs Oldershaw has also consulted.

XIV. Lydia checks the legalities of marrying Midwinter in her maiden name of Gwilt, then invents a false biography for herself. Major Milroy imposes a six month delay on Eleanor’s marriage to Armadale. Lydia notices she is being followed by spies, and she realises that she is in love with Midwinter.

XV. Bashwood Junior reports to his father on Lydia’s background. She was married to Waldron who died of poison. She was found guilty, then acquitted, then imprisoned for theft. Next she married Manuel, who absconded with all her money. The Bashwoods try to catch up with her but they are too late. Lydia marries Midwinter.

Book the Fourth

I. Two months later in Naples Lydia feels that her marriage has already gone sour. Midwinter is working as a journalist. They are joined by Armadale, who annoys her with his enthusiasm for a new yacht and his concern for Eleanor.

II. Lydia sees her former husband Manuel at the opera. She tries to poison Armadale, but he rejects the drink because she has added brandy, to which he is allergic. Manuel tries to blackmail Lydia, but she fobs him off with a scheme to murder Armadale for his money. Armadale sets out on his yacht, but Midwinter and Lydia do not go with him.

III. A month later Lydia is in London and Midwinter is in Turin. Armadale’s yacht sinks in a storm at sea. Lydia is worried about the handwriting on her marriage certificate.

She turns against Midwinter and seeks help from the abortionist ‘Doctor’ Downward. He agrees to be a fake witness for an exorbitant fee. She is visited by Bashwood Senior whom she sends back to Thorpe-Ambrose as a spy. Bashwood reappears with the news that Armadale is alive. Downward constructs a plan to lure Armadale into the Sanatorium he has bought.

Book the Last

I. Downward tries to persuade Lydia to enter the Sanatorium as a patient. She plays for time. Midwinter arrives in London unexpectedly.

II. Bashwood encounters Midwinter at the railway station and causes him some alarm. Midwinter follows Bashwood to Lydia and confronts her. When she reveals that she is not his legal wife, he collapses.

III. Lydia escapes into the Sanatorium. Downward shows visitors round the establishment and talks to Lydia about poisons. Midwinter meets Armadale at the station. They go to the Sanatorium where Eleanor is recovering from the shock of the news of Armadale’s death. Lydia plans to poison Armadale, who switches rooms with Midwinter. Lydia discovers the switch, saves Midwinter, then kills herself instead.

Epilogue

I. Nobody is found guilty, although Pedgift senior suspects the bogus doctor. Bashwood goes insane, and imagines he is about to be married to Lydia.

II. Midwinter is finally reconciled with Armadale who marries Eleanor. Midwinter also accepts Reverend Brock’s quasi religious views on the question of Destiny and free will.

Armadale – principal characters
Allan Armadale Englishman dying with paralysis (real name Wrentmore)
Allan Armadale his son,
Mrs Armadale his mixed-race beautiful wife
Alexander Neal a dour Scottish solicitor
Fergus Ingelby the original Allan Armadale
Mr Hawberry an Isle of Man doctor
Rev Decimus Brock young Armadale’s tutor
Lydia Gwilt an attractive foundling, governess, and poisoner
Maria Oldershaw Lydia’s confidante, a procuress
Major David Milroy Armadale’s cottage tenant
Anne Milroy his invalid wife
Eleanor Milroy his pretty young daughter
Felix Bashwood an elderly love-struck clerk
Mr Pedgift a clever elderly lawyer
Augustus Pedgift his son, a bon-viveur
Armadale – further reading

William M. Clarke, The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins, London: Ivan R. Dee, 1988.

Tamar Heller, Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Sue Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship, New York: AMS Press, 1982.

Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Walter C. Phillips, Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists, New York: Library of Congress, 1919.

Lynn Pykett, Wilkie Collins: New Casebooks, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1998.

Nicholas Rance, Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists: Walking the Moral Hospital, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1991.

© Roy Johnson 2017

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Arthur Conan Doyle

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a short biography, video presentation & further reading

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in 1859 in Edinburgh and educated at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire – a public school run by Jesuits (alumni include Gerard Manley Hopkins and J.R.R. Tolkien). From there he went back to Edinburgh University to study medicine, meeting in the process Doctor Joseph Bell, a consulting surgeon whose powers of deduction and induction were later used as the basis for the creation of Sherlock Holmes. He also began to develop a youthful enthusiasm for writing around this time. In 1880 he signed on as ship’s surgeon on an Arctic whaling expedition, then after returning several months later, completed his degree and sailed off again, this time to Africa.

Arthur Conan Doyle

He set up his first practice as a doctor in Portsmouth, and in the long periods spent waiting for patients wrote stories which were published anonymously. In 1885 he married the sister of one of his patients and the year after wrote the book in which Sherlock Holmes made his first appearance – A Study in Scarlet. He went on to write historical romances, but when more Sherlock Holmes stories appeared in The Strand Magazine and became increasingly popular, he gave up medicine to become a professional author.

The Sherlock Holmes phenomenon made his fame and fortune, but because he thought of himself as a ‘serious novelist’ he killed off his by now famous detective hero by having the villainous Professor Moriarty pull him to his death over the edge of the Reichenbach falls in the appropriately named story The Final Problem.

Conan Doyle travelled widely in America, Egypt, and South Africa, working for a time as a doctor in the Boer War. In 1902 he was knighted by Edward VII for his enthusiastic contribution to the English war against the Boers.

Meanwhile the success of the Sherlock Holmes stories in America brought a renewed and very profitable demand for more. As a first move he wrote one of his best Holmes pieces – The Hound of the Baskervilles – but set it at a time before the supposed demise of his hero. However, the book was such an huge success that he was forced to resurrect Holmes completely, and he went on to write another series of the stories – though devotees of the cult claim that these are not quite so skilfully crafted as their predecessors.

Conan Doyle became a public figure and gave his name to a number of different causes. He stood for parliament on two occasions – both times unsuccessfully. He took up the cases of people he felt had been unjustly treated by the law. Most controversially, he gave money and time to advance the case of spiritualism.

In 1912 he published his second most successful work that does not include Sherlock Holmes – The Lost World. This was a novel of adventure featuring a prehistoric world of dinosaurs and mammoths discovered in the jungles of South America.

During the period 1914-1918 he occupied himself producing patriotic tracts, wrote a six-volume history of the war, and gradually transferred most of his attention to works of non-fiction. Then during the last fifteen to twenty years of is life he devoted himself almost entirely to the promotion of spiritualism.

At that time the phenomenon was in its heyday of seances in which the dead were summoned back to life at public meetings, psychic mediums extruded ectoplasm from their mouths, and photographs of ghosts and fairies were seriously offered as evidence of a hidden spirit world.



Despite the fact that these events were exposed as frauds by Harry Houdini – the escapologist he met and befriended in 1920 – Conan Doyle continued in his blind belief and damaged his public reputation with publications such as The Coming of the Fairies (1922). In his last years he toured Australia, the United States, and Scandinavia, preaching the spiritualist cause. When he died in 1930 his grave was inscribed:


STEEL TRUE
BLADE STRAIGHT
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
KNIGHT
PATRIOT, PHYSICIAN, MAN OF LETTERS

Arthur Conan Doyle – further reading

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Penguin – Amazon US

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Wordsworth – Amazon UK

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Wordsworth – Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2016

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At Isella

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

At Isella first appeared in The Galaxy Magazine for August 1871. Its first appearance in book for was as part of the collection Travelling Companions published in New York by Boni and Liveright in 1919, three years after James’s death.

At Isella

Simplon Pass 1919 – by John Singer Sargeant

At Isella – critical commentary

This tale is little more than a travelogue and study in landscape word-painting, coupled to an anecdote. The first part of the story is a vivid and romantic account of travelling through the Alps in southern Switzerland, towards the Italian border. The narrator emphasises the rugged grandeur of the Saint Gothard, the Furka, and the Simplon passes; and he keeps before him a romanticised view of everything lush, comfortable, and welcoming that he feels lying in wait for his arrival in Italy.

The second part of the story is his meeting with the mysterious woman going in the opposite direction for roughly similar reasons – to join someone she loves. The only element approaching a story or plot is that the reader is given every reason to believe that the narrator will turn out to be the victim of a confidence trick. The mysterious woman takes his money without offering any evidence to support her story of an irate husband being in hot pursuit to catch her. But in fact the husband turns up the next morning – so our ‘expectations’ in terms of traditional narratives are thwarted.

However, it has to be said that the effect is somewhat bathetic. There is no lesson for the narrator or anyone else to draw from the episode. The Italian inn-keeper lies to assist the woman in flight from her husband – but that is all.

At Isella – study resources

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

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

At Isella Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon UK

At Isella Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon US

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

At Isella

At Isella – plot summary

An un-named narrator gives a rather critical account of Switzerland, which he is leaving to spend some time in northern Italy. He climbs the Saint Gothard Pass road, stays with clergymen in a hospice, then descends into Lombardy via the Simplon Pass.

When he reaches Isella, he meets an Italian woman travelling in the opposite direction. They dine together, and he speculates on her age and social background. She reveals that she has been unhappy in Italy. He delivers a romantic encomium to the country, then reveals that he is en route to meet his fiancée in Florence. She is running away from her husband and going to meet a friend in Geneva.

She tell him her background story – how her brother was killed, then she met and loved his best friend the artist Ernesto. But her father forced her to marry a man three years previously who turned out to be a ‘brute’. She has corresponded with Ernesto, who is now ill in Geneva.

She has run away from her husband, but does not have the money for her fare to Switzerland. The narrator gives her the money, and she departs immediately. Next day her husband turns up looking for her, but the inn-keeper denies she has been there.

Principal characters
I an un-named American narrator
— an un-named Italian woman
Bonifazio the Italian inn-keeper at Isella

At Isella - Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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