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Aurora Floyd

August 31, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study resources, plot summary, further reading

Aurora Floyd (1868) was the second of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ‘sensation’ novels. It followed hard on the heels of her first major success, Lady Audley’s Secret (1867) with which it has a lot in common. Braddon became the doyenne of this new genre that combined stories of polite English society with elements of crime, mystery, blackmail, and even murder. Her work was published in newspapers, magazines, and most importantly in the circulating libraries such as Mudie’s. Braddon had been an actress before she took up writing, and her novels are full of dramatic incidents and well-organised, complex plots. She was an astonishingly prolific writer, with a total output of more than eighty novels.

Aurora Floyd


Aurora Floyd – a note on the text

The novel first appeared as a serial in thirteen parts in the monthly magazine Temple Bar from January 1862 to January 1863. The publishers, Tinsley Brothers, paid Braddon £1,000 (almost £100,00 today) for two years exclusive rights. The novel went through five editions in its first year. Its initial appearance as a single volume edition was at the end of 1863. No manuscript of the novel has survived, though Braddon made substantial changes (and deletions) to the original. For a full bibliographic account of the text, see P.D. Edwards’ note in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel.


Aurora Floyd – critical commentary

The sensation novel

It was Wilkie Collins who is credited as the originator of the sensation novel, with the publication of The Woman in White in 1859. But Braddon adopted its features with relish and made them her hallmark. The sensation novel. sometimes described as ‘the novel with a secret’, pushed the limits of anti-social behaviour as far as they were allowed to be expressed in the mid-Victorian age.

The plots of these novels included mysterious identities, crime, blackmail, forged wills, secret marriages, illegitimacy, melodramatic revelations, madness, and incarceration. These were elements inherited from the Gothic romances of the late eighteenth century – but events were taken away from haunted castles in the Apennines and transposed to settings in polite English society.

Mystery

The mystery that drives the first two thirds of the novel is the ‘missing’ twelve moths in Aurora’s life after she leaves the finishing school in Paris. We do not know why she left the school, and she refuses to give an account of what happened to her. There is also a secondary mystery in her father’s distress, which is similarly unexplained. To these ingredients is then added the second major puzzle – how and why does the former jockey James Conyers have any hold over her?

Blackmail

Conyers exhorts a diamond bracelet from Aurora, and then a bribe of two thousand pounds to leave the country – but the secret of their marriage is withheld as long as possible in the narrative. After it is revealed, the element of the two thousand pounds is transposed into yet another staple feature of a sensation novel – the murder.

Murder

The murder in the plot serves two functions. It produces the violence and disruption threatening the peace and security of rather complacent upper class life. Braddon makes quite clear that John Mellish feels existentially threatened by the mere proximity of social disruption to his privileged and well-ordered estate.

He sat down to-night, and looked hopelessly round the pleasant chamber, wondering whether Aurora and he would ever be happy again: wondering if this dark, mysterious, storm-threatening cloud would ever pass from the horizon of of his life, and leave the future bright and clear.

The murder also introduces yet another element of ‘whodunnit’ mystery, since we do not know (at first) who shot the bullet that kills James Conyers. However, readers with ‘Chekhov’s gun’ theory in mind will know the identity of the culprit in advance of its being revealed.

This theory is a dramatic principle established by the Russian dramatist and short story writer Anton Chekhov – that everything in a narrative should be necessary and anything unnecessary should be removed.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.

We know that Stephen Hargraves stole a pistol from Archibald Floyd’s house – so, despite the circumstantial evidence of a connection between Aurora and Conyers at the murder scene that can throw suspicion onto her, we know Hargraves is likely to be the assailant.

Social pedigree

Eliza (and hence Aurora) comes from an indeterminate lower class. Eliza was an actress and her brother Samuel was abandoned as a child to become a cabin boy. This is counterposed with the snobbish Bulstrode who comes from the aristocracy and will not marry the woman he loves because she will not reveal a twelve month gap in her social history. He (rightly) fears that this might be a potentially damaging stain on the reputation of his family. Even though he later regrets that decision and assists her in defending her name, his caution is justified by the scandal that ensues in the narrative.

Bigamy

Until the later part of the twentieth century, bigamy was considered a serious crime. that had originally been punishable by prolonged imprisonment and even execution. Yet strangely enough, female bigamists were treated more leniently, because of their perceived lack of ‘moral agency’.

The issue that provides the plot of Aurora Floyd is the power that Conyers holds over Aurora because they are still married. He exploits this power by blackmailing her – and he nurtures the outside hope that when her wealthy father dies, he will ‘inherit’ all the money left to her. Until the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1882 a woman’s personal property automatically went to her husband – and she ceased to exist as a legal identity.

Aurora believes that her first husband James Conyers has been killed in a riding accident, but in fact he is only injured. Consequently, she becomes guilty of bigamy when she marries John Mellish – and Mellish is not only guilty himself, but he takes on ‘responsibility’ for his wife’s guilt as well.

There is a possibility that the element of bigamy is acting as a surrogate for sexuality in the novel. Adultery or sex out of wedlock would not have been acceptable as a literary subject at that time. But bigamy by ‘accident’ or through mistaken identity would pass the censorship ‘guidelines’ imposed by the circulating libraries, which were notorious for their prudishness.

Aurora as a spirited young girl is seduced by a handsome lower-class groom with dark hair, long eyelashes, and god-like looks. There is no mention of any sexual intimacy between them, but they are united by their interest in horses. Most commentary on the novel and its kind emphasises the fact that ‘horsey’ heroines were equated with ‘fast’ women who enjoyed the spice of danger and overt eroticism in their lives.

Moreover, having married once and believing her husband to be dead, Aurora has very little hesitation in marrying again. The gauche and good-hearted John Mellish is hardly an erotically charged figure at all, but by her early twenties Aurora has had two husbands and (statistically therefore) a considerable amount of sexual experience.

Marriage

Interestingly enough, in a novel whose central mystery and plot device is bigamy, Braddon seems to incorporate a great deal of direct and indirect comment on the subject of conventional ‘love and marriage’.

The aristocratic Bulstrode falls passionately in love with Aurora – almost at first sight. His snobbish notions of family pride prevent him from accepting her as a wife, and so he chooses Lucy instead. She is presented (and behaves) in a far less exciting manner, and yet their union is successful and happy.

Similarly, Mellish is presented as a bumbling and gauche countryman who Aurora accepts as a second-best choice to Bulstrode. Yet they too eventually establish a loving and trustful relationship from which passion seems to have been excluded.

It’s as if Braddon is presenting the case that passionate love is not necessarily a good recipe for a successful marriage, whereas concern, respect, and admiration are more likely to lead to happiness.


Aurora Floyd – study resources

Aurora Floyd Aurora Floyd – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Aurora Floyd Aurora Floyd – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Aurora Floyd Aurora Floyd – Immortal Classics – Amazon UK

Aurora Floyd Aurora Floyd – Immortal Classics – Amazon US

Aurora Floyd Aurora Floyd – Kindle eBook – Amazon UK

Aurora Floyd Aurora Floyd – Kindle eBook – Amazon US

Aurora Floyd The Complete Works of Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Kindle eBook


Aurora Floyd – chapter summaries

I.   Archibald Floyd, a retired city banker, suddenly marries Eliza Prodder, a young and beautiful actress he meets in Lancashire. Polite society regards her as an upstart, but she is proud and devoted to her husband. However, after only one year of marriage she dies.

II.   The widower Floyd devotes all his attention to his daughter Aurora, who grows up to become a spirited and attractive young woman. He sends her to a Parisian finishing school, from which she returns just over a year later in a poor physical condition.

III.   Aurora has bad feelings about her time in Paris. She meets a man to whom she owes money. He father throws a ball to celebrate her nineteenth birthday, where she meets the proud Talbot Bulstrode.

IV.   Bulstrode is conscious of being remote and unloved. He thinks Lucy Floyd would make a suitable wife, but he is intrigued by Aurora, whose mysterious behavior he attributes to horse-racing gambling debts.

V.   Floyd employs the very unsympathetic Mrs Powell as governess to Aurora. They go to stay in Brighton, where Bulstrode has bought himself out of the army. Lucy is anguished because she loves Bulstrode, who is besotted with Aurora. They are joined by Bulstrode’s gauche Yorkshire friend John Mellish.

VI.   Bulstrode proposes to Aurora, but she rejects his offer (as she has just rejected an offer from Mellish). But then she accepts the offer next day – after reading of the death of an English jockey in Germany..

VII.   Preparations are under way for the marriage, but then out on a drive they meet Matthew Harrison, who demands money from Aurora. Bulstrode asks how she comes to know him – but she refuses to divulge the information.

VIII.   John Mellish returns from exile in Paris and accuses Bulstrode of ‘treachery’. He then confides in Lucy, and realises she loves Bulstrode. Constance Trevyllian, Bulstrode’s cousin, returns from the Paris finishing school, much to Aurora’s consternation.

IX.   Next day (Xmas) Bulstrode receives a letter from his mother revealing that Aurora ran away from her Parisian school and was missing for the following year. When Bulstrode asks for an explanation she pleads with him for understanding, but will not reveal where she was for the twelve months. He breaks off their engagement and leaves.

X.   Aurora falls seriously ill with a fever that lasts for four months. Floyd takes his daughter to Leamington for recovery, where they are joined by John Mellish. Floyd gives Mellish his blessing to wait for a possible change in Aurora’s feelings towards him.

XI.   The Floyd party go to northern France. Aurora continues to think about Bulstrode, but Mellish pressures her emotionally and offers to marry her without knowing the secret of her ‘missing year’.

XII.   Aurora becomes engaged to Mellish and is regarded by many as rather fickle. Bulstrode enters parliament, and is angry when he reads of the marriage. Aurora goes to live at Mellish Park where she develops two enemies – Mrs Powell and Stephen Hargraves, the repugnant groom, who is fired for mistreating her dog.

XIII.   John Mellish allows Aurora to dominate him, and Lucy is dismayed that her cousin can forget Bulstrode so easily. The Floyd party visit York races where they meet Bulstrode, who still feels bitter regarding Aurora.

XIV.   Bulstrode is invited to stay at Mellish Park, where he meets Lucy Floyd and realises that she is in love with him. He proposes to her and they are married shortly afterwards.

XV.   Aurora sees Stephen Hargraves lurking in the woods at Mellish Park. A letter arrives recommending the horse trainer James Conyers. Aurora faints at the mention of his name.

XVI.   Mellish questions his wife, who will only reveal that Conyers knows her secret. Mrs Powell is peeved on being excluded. The adventurer Conyers arrives at Mellish Park as trainer. Mrs Powell spies on him opening his letters – one of which is from Aurora.

XVII.   The unscrupulous rogue Conyers hires Stephen Hargraves as his servant. He forces him to deliver a letter to Aurora, who angrily assents to its contents.

XVIII.   Mellish decides to trust his wife, despite her enigmatic behaviour. Aurora goes to see Conyers at night, followed by Mrs Powell, who eavesdrops with Stephen Hargraves whilst Aurora tries to buy off Conyers. On return Mrs Powell locks Aurora out of the house in the rain, which alarms Mellish.

XIX.   Archibald Floyd is lonely without his daughter Aurora. He is entertaining Bulstrode and Lucy when Aurora and Mellish arrive to discuss ‘money matters’. Aurora asks her father for two thousand pounds, refusing to tell him what it is for. He gives her the money, making a record of the banknote numbers.

XX.   Captain Samuel Prodder arrives from Liverpool at Felden Woods where he is warmly welcomed by Mr Floyd. He has come in search of his sister Eliza, but learning of her death would like to see his niece Aurora.

XXI.   Conyers neglects his duties and abuses Hargraves. When Conyers arrives home drunk one night, Hargraves finds a paper in his clothes confirming that the two thousand pounds ‘agreement’ with Aurora is for him to quit England.

XXII.   Hargraves steals Mellish’s pistol at the house. Aurora arranges a meeting with Conyers. Mrs Powell snoops on all concerned.

XXIII.   The Mellishes have boring guests to dinner, but Aurora manages to leave the house to keep her late night appointment with Conyers.

XXIV.   During dinner Captain Prodder arrives at the house, but is turned away. He walks through the grounds and overhears Aurora rebuking Conyers. There is a pistol shot. Prodder reports back to the house that there has been a murder.

XXV.   Mellish and Prodder go out, recover Conyers’ body, and take it back to the Lodge. Hargraves is in bed and pleads innocence. A policeman discovers the message sewn into Conyers’ waistcoat. Prodder suddenly disappears. Mellish realises Aurora might be a suspect, and Mrs Powell refers to her being close to the scene. Aurora reveals that Conyers was formerly in her father’s employment. Mellish feels shattered by the onset of unhappiness and thinks he has not been socially virtuous enough.

XXVI.   The inquest is inconclusive and returns a verdict of ‘murder by person(s) unknown’.

XXVII.   However, Mellish is recalled by the coroner, who produces the blood-stained marriage certificate between Conyers and Aurora.

XXVIII.   Hargraves tells Aurora that the marriage certificate has been found. She feels ashamed of having deceived Mellish, and she runs away – intending to consult Bulstrode.

XXIX.   Mellish returns home, forgiving Aurora for her youthful indiscretion. Discovering that she has left, he prepares to follow her – but first he dismisses Mrs Powell.

XXX.   Aurora visits Bulstrode for his advice. She recounts the history of her youthful marriage to Conyers, his blackmailing, and his recent death. Lucy comforts her.

XXXI.   Next day Bulstrode meets Mellish, who is then reunited with Aurora. Bulstrode advises Mellish to re-marry Aurora as soon as possible.

XXXII.   The Mellishes visit Archibald Floyd, where Aurora confesses the truth to her father, who wonders where his two thousand pounds are. They return to London and are re-married – although they are being followed by two strange men.

XXXIII.   Samuel Prodder buys himself a new suit and returns to Doncaster where he overhears Stephen Hargraves implicating Aurora in the murder via mixture of circumstantial evidence and half truths. Prodder attacks him in outrage, but Hargraves produces Aurora’s note to Conyers to support his claims.

XXXIV.   The Mellishes return home, but Aurora feels the effects of the murder hanging in the air. The servants are suspicious of her sudden unexplained flight. Mellish’s pistol is found in the grounds.

XXXV.   The Bulstrodes arrive and realise that something is wrong. Aurora lies to Lucy, claiming John no longer loves her. Bulstrode badgers Mellish into revealing the truth – that suspicion points to Aurora. They meet detective Joseph Grimstone who reveals the existence of two letters accusing Aurora – both written by Mrs Powell.

XXXVI.   Bulstrode persuades Mellish to reveal what he knows, then relays this information to Grimstone, who has found a brass button at the crime scene.

XXXVII.   Grimstone locates the origin of the brass button on a pawn shop waistcoat, then traces the garment as a gift from the gardener to Hargraves.

XXXVIII.   Grimstone inspects Hargraves’ room in his absence but finds nothing, then he discovers that his assistant Chivers has lost track of Hargraves whilst stalking him.

XXXIX.   Mellish and Bulstrode wait impatiently at the house for news. Bulstrode visits Grimstone in Doncaster but there is nothing new to report. However, on his way back to Mellish Park he spots Hargraves in the Lodge. Hargraves attacks him, but Bulstrode is rescued by the sudden arrival of Prodder. The waistcoat and the money are recovered. Hargraves is hanged at York assizes, Mellish and Aurora travel to the south of France, where a baby is born and they are joined by Bulstrode and Lucy.


Aurora Floyd – principal characters
Archibald Martin Floyd a rich and retired city banker
Falden Woods his estate in Kent
Eliza Prodder a beautiful but poor actress, Aurora’s mother
Aurora Floyd a strong-willed and attractive young woman
Lucy Floyd Aurora’s friend and cousin
Talbot Bulstrode the proud intellectual son of an ancient family
John Mellish a rich, generous, but gauche Yorkshireman
Mrs Walter Powell Aurora’s unsympathetic governess
Steeve Hargraves a repugnant groom at Mellish Park
Joseph Grimstone a Scotland Yard detective
James Conyers a horse trainer, rogue, and adventurer

Aurora Floyd – further reading

Richard D. Altick Victorian Studies in Scarlet, New York: W.W. Norton, 1979.

Jennifer Carnell, The Literary Lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon: A Study of Her Life and Work, UK: Sensation Press, 2000.

Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

P.D. Edwards, Some Mid-Victorian Thrillers: The Sensation Novel, Its Friends and Its Foes, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1971.

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

Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Woman’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing, London: Routledge, 2013.

Anthea Trodd, Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1988.

Robert Lee Wolff, Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, New York: Garland Publishers, 1979.

© Roy Johnson 2016


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Filed Under: Mary Elizabeth Braddon Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The novel

Autres Temps

November 19, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Autres Temps first appeared in the Century Magazine in July— 1911. It was originally published under a different (and more obvious) title of Other Times, Other Manners. The story was subsequently included in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction, Xingu published in 1916.

Autres Temps


Autres Temps – critical commentary

Europe and America

The story has elements of what Edith Wharton’s friend and fellow author Henry James called the ‘International Theme’. Although Autres Temps is not concerned with tensions between Europe and America, it is significant that the geographic axis of the story is Florence in Italy and New York in America.

Mrs Lidcote has retreated to live in Europe following her own social disgrace, which we are led to believe is a marital rupture and elopement with another man. She has been forced into this dis-location because of the social opprobrium her actions have brought upon her in very conservative nineteenth century American upper-class society.

It was very common for people in America and England to retreat to the more tolerant locations of European cities following any sort of scandal or disgrace – or even for reasons of financial hardship. As late as 1897 Oscar Wilde had fled Britain to live in France following his trial and imprisonment following his failed libel case against the Marquis of Queensbury.

Mrs Lidcote is confronted with the manners and morals of the ‘new’ New York after exposure to her daughter and friends, rather than the ‘old’ New York in which she had been raised. Symbolically, she retreats to Florence where she can at least be sure of consistency.

It is worth noting that her retreat is not caused by any shock she feels at their apparently laissez faire attitude to divorce and re-marriage, but because they have embraced their own new freedoms without examining or calling into question examples of censure in the past. As she puts it very pithily – ‘society is much too busy to revise its own judgements’.

What has she done?

Mrs Lidcote has been living in exile in Florence for eighteen years, ostracised by fashionable New York society because of a former indiscretion. So what exactly did she do? The text does not make this entirely explicit – but there are certain clues.

First, she fears that Leila might make the same mistake that she made. Leila has divorced one husband an married another. In Mrs Lidcote’s eyes she has gambled her social reputation for the sake of personal happiness – which is what we take it Mrs Lidcote did.

But Mrs Lidcote still has her married name, from which we can infer that she left her husband for another man – but did not get married to him. Furthermore, she mentions how social ostracism can have very damaging consequences:

She had had what she wanted, but she had had to pay too much for it. She had had to pay the last bitterest price of learning that love has a price: that it is worth so much and no more. She had known the anguish of watching the man she loved discover this first, and of reading the discovery in his eyes.

Since these events were ‘a long time past’ and it appears that she has been living alone in Florence, there is an inference that her lover capitulated to social convention and abandoned their relationship, leaving her doubly isolated.

These were all live issues for Edith Wharton herself. She had begun an affair with Times correspondent W. Morton Fullerton in 1908, moved to live in France in 1911 (the same year at Autres Temps was published) and divorced her husband Edward (Teddy) Wharton the following year.

Sheep’s clothing?

Beset as she is by a selfish and ambitious daughter, dubious relatives (Suzy Suffern, who dresses in dead people’s clothes) and a society which shows no sympathy to her plight, Mrs Lidcote has yet one supporter who offers loyalty and understanding. Franklin Ide has been a friend and admirer for many years, and he reassures her that times and attitudes have changed – “It’s all right”, he repeats, and seems to be correct. He goes out of his way to renew the appeal he wishes to make to her (which is not made explicit).

But when examined more closely, he turns out to be a empty shell. All his appeals to Mrs Lidcote are made in private, outside the society to which they both belong – on holiday in Switzerland and in the New York hotel room where she stays on arrival and departure. And of course when she finally accepts the idea of socialising with some of her contemporaries, he is exposed as a conventionalist, because he is embarrassed and does not want to be seen with her. So at best he is fraud, but at worst he is a snake in the grass who all the time has been proposing an illicit relationship.

So Mrs Lidcote triumphs morally over those who are trying to decieve her – her daughter Leila and her ‘admirer’ Franklin Ide. She reduces them both to a state of acute confusion (they both blush) by forcing them to confront the truth of their hypocrisy and double standards. But she has spent the entire story cooped up in rooms – at the hotel, and in her daughter’s house – and it has to be said that in the end she is going back to a state of confinement in her Florentine apartment. She is ‘in the right’, but there is still a price to pay.


Autre Temps – study resources

Autres Temps The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon UK

Autres Temps The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon US

Autres Temps Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Autres Temps Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Autres Temps - eBook edition Autres Temps – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Autres Temps


Autres Temps – story synopsis

Part I.   Mrs Lidcote is returning to America from Florence, where she has been living for eighteen years. She has received the news that her daughter Leila has divorced her husband Horace Pursh and married Wilbour Barkley. She fears that Leila will be ostracised by New York society as she was herself in the past for a similar social indiscretion. On board the Utopia she is snubbed by ambassador’s wife Mrs Lorrin Boulger, but is reassured by an old friend Franklin Ide, who tells her that everything will be all right.

Part II.   She is met in New York by her cousin Suzy Suffern who reveals that the old social conventions of upper-class society have been replaced by more liberal attitudes. There is no longer any need for her to fear social censure. Mrs Lidcote has some years before received hints of a romantic kind from Franklin Ide, but she has not taken them up because she thought her negative reputation would damage his happiness (as it had done in her previous history). Now that times have changed and Leila doesn’t need her mother’s protection any more, Franklin Ide renews his expressions of interest.

Part III.   Leila has house guests when Mrs Lidcote arrives there, and she keeps her mother at a distance emotionally whilst expressing a exaggerated concern for her welfare. Mrs Lidcote reflects on the sacrifices she had to make for her chance of love and happiness, compared with the ease with which Leila takes everything for granted.

Part IV.   Mrs Lidcote is urged to stay in her guest room and rest – because it becomes apparent that Leila has invited older guests to dinner. They include Mrs Lorrin Boulger, because Leila wants to secure a diplomatic appointment for her new husband in Italy. Mrs Lidcote is offended by this treatment, sees a challenge, at first refuses to stay in her room.

Part V.   Leila arrives in haste, trying to prevent her mother appearing at dinner. Once again she pretends an overwhelming concern for her mother’s comfort – but Mrs Lidcote exposes her deviance and hypocrisy, causing her deep embarrassment. Having triumphed in this way, Mrs Lidcote then declares that she will stay in her room until all the guests have departed after the weekend.

Part VI.   The following Monday she announces that she is returning immediately to Florence. Franklin Ide intercepts her in her New York hotel. She explains to him how shabbily she was treated. He tries to persuade her she is wrong and offers himself to her again, but when she puts him to the concrete test of meeting some mutual friends together, he is deeply embarrassed and unable to face the social challenge.


Principal characters
Mrs Lidcote a middle-aged American divorcee and expatriate
Leila her recently divorced and re-married daughter
Suzy Suffern her cousin, who dresses in mourning
Mrs Lorrin Boulger the wife of an American ambassador
Franklin Ide old friend and suitor to Mrs Lidcote

Video documentary


Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Edith Wharton's writing

Edith Wharton’s writing


Other works by Edith Wharton

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

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon US

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

Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon US


Edith Wharton – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2014


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Basil

December 19, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Basil (1852) was the first major novel by Wilkie Collins and possibly one of the first sensation novels. Because of his friendship with the more famous writer Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins has been unjustly neglected, with the exception of his two best known novels The Woman in White and The Moonstone. But he was an energetic and prolific artist who, like his contemporary Mary Elizabeth Braddon, was amazingly successful in the mid-nineteenth century. Their novels were the cultural equivalents of today’s soap operas and multi-part television dramas.

Basil
Basil contains all the elements of a mystery story and a thriller, and is amazingly in advance of its time in depicting what we would now call existential angst. As a result of a casual sighting of an attractive woman, Basil gradually finds himself enmeshed in a life-threatening struggle with forces he only half understands.


Basil – a note on the text

Basil was first published in three volumes by Richard Bentley, London in 1852. The full title at that times was Basil: A Story of Modern Life. It was then reprinted in 1856 and reset in one volume, published by James Blackwood, London with no alterations.

Wilkie Collins then carefully revised his text (and eliminated the sub-title) for publication in one volume by Sampson Low, Son & Co, London in 1862. The changes he made were largely a reduction in the length of some of the longer scenes and the removal of items from doubled or trebled phrases which were a common feature of his style.


Basil – critical commentary

The sensation novel

The sensation novel came of age in the 1860s with the publication of Collins’ The Woman in White (1860) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1861). The genre has been described as ‘novels with a secret’ – and it is easy to see Basil as a precursor to these well known examples.

Basil certainly has a number of secrets that help to drive the plot and its suspense. The first of these is the enigmatic figure of Margaret Sherwin – a a woman who completely mesmerises Basil, but about whom we know nothing. Unknown to Basil she is conducting a secret relationship with the sinister character Mannion.

The second secret or mystery is Mr Sherwin’s bizarre proposal of a secret marriage for his daughter, followed by a twelve month chaste courtship. Why would anyone propose so unusual an arrangement? This puts Basil’s patience under strain, and it has to be said it the reader’s credulity too.

Mrs Sherwin is a ‘silenced’ woman and a bag of nerves. She is a second level of mystery – but it is obvious to the reader that she is being threatened into silence by her domineering husband. As a character, she seems to be signalling her disquiet to the reader above the heads of the other characters.

Mr Mannion is an additional mystery. He appears at first to have no ‘background’, and is only a clerk, yet acts in a superior manner. His employer Mr Sherwin rates him very highly. His background and the sources of his malevolent motivation are only revealed later in the novel

The double, twinning, and parallels

Underpinning both the structure and the characterisation of the novel is a pattern of twinning or parallels – commonly referred to in literary studies as the double. The most obvious case is that of the two women towards whom Basil is attracted – his sister Clara and his ‘wife’ Margaret Sherwin.

The two women are opposites. Clara is fair-haired and virtuous, loyal, pure, and long suffering. Margaret is dark-haired and scheming, duplicitous, sensual, and cruel. They represent the two sides of Basil’s attitude to sexuality.

He is drawn to Clara in a lofty, spiritual, and almost intellectual sense. She represents everything that is good and untainted in woman – though it has to be said that short of incest, there is no way this relationship can lead towards anything productive. It is interesting nevertheless that at the end of the novel Basil has gone into a very premature retirement, living with his sister.

But he is drawn towards Margaret by libidinous impulses that he simply cannot control. It is worth noting that the moment he recognises the force of these desires, he starts to feel guilty – towards his family and towards Clara in particular.

When Basil dreams, this division is symbolised by his struggle with two women. One is a fair creature in pure white robes trying to lead his towards heaven; the other is a dark-haired seductress who is dragging him into the woods.

I was drawn along in the arms of the dark woman, with my blood beating and my breath failing me, until we entered the secret recesses that lay amid the unfathomable depths of trees. There she encircled me in the folds of her dusky robe

This ‘twinning’ or ‘doubling’ is repeated in the figures of Basil and his arch-rival Robert Mannion. Both of them have been burdened by a negative legacy from their fathers. Basil is cursed by his father’s obsessive ancestor worship and his desire to keep the family‘s name and ‘honour’ free from any lower class contamination.

Basil is the younger, not the elder son – but for the majority of the novel his profligate brother Ralph is absent from the narrative. Mannion’s life has been blighted by the reputational disgrace of his own father, which has pursued him, thwarting his ambition.

Interestingly, Mannion’s father’s disgrace and execution was brought about by Basil’s father. This gives Mannion one powerful motive in his desire to wreak vengeance on Basil.

Both Basil and Mannion are attracted to Margaret Sherwin, and both of them try to ‘educate’ her – without success. Mannion is attracted to her physically but despises her morally. Basil appears to be different, but following the revelation of her duplicity he ends up hating her as well.

Both men have literary aspirations. Basil starts out writing a historical romance, but is side-tracked by his obsession with Margaret. Mannion too seeks fame in writing, but is reduced to hack work for third-class newspapers.

So the two men are locked in an antagonistic union. Basil’s ‘marriage’ to Margaret is destroyed by Mannion’s scheming seduction, and yet Basil’s family has been responsible for the destruction of the confidential clerk’s prospects in life. The two men have every reason to hate each other, and a logical conclusion to the novel might have left Basil in a state of permanent insecurity – but Collins kills off Mannion in a Cornish cliff top scene.

Just in case this ‘doubling’ of characters were not enough, Collins reinforces the effect with dramatic scenes that are significantly paralleled. The very day Basil’s twelve months of celibate waiting are over, his expectations of physical union with Margaret are thwarted by Margaret’s elopement with Mannion. Basil traces them to the seedy ‘hotel’ where he is forced to listen to Mannion and Margaret consummating their illicit relationship in the room next door.

In a similar climactic scene, Basil visits Margaret in the small room where she is dying of Typhus. He forgives her as she expires in a delirium, mocking his attentions and affection. But in another room next door Mannion is a silent witness to this tragic ‘goodbye’. The two men are locked into their conflict right up to the point of Mannion’s death

Literary relativism

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, who was very fond of paradoxes and what might be called the metaphysics of literature, posited the notion that gifted writers could create their own predecessors. What he meant was that a writer in, say, the twentieth century, could express an idea or a feeling that caused readers to newly interpret the work of a writer from a previous age. The contemporary reader looks at the earlier work and sees meanings which were not previously evident to readers at the time the work was created. The words are the same as they have always been, but new meanings are revealed in them

What he was saying is that work created in the present can cause us to see elements of the same feelings, situations, and tensions in work of the past – but which were not previously evident. The idea is offered in a playful and entertaining manner – but it carries with it an important nugget of cultural history.

It is quite common for gifted writers to anticipate moods, feelings, problems, and situations in their work – consciously or unconsciously – which readers at a later date to perceive as prophetic. A classic case in point is Franz Kafka, who was a product of the extremely bureaucratic Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg empire in the early twentieth century. His work anticipated many of the intellectual nightmares of German fascism and Russian Stalinism which engulfed Europe in the 1930s, long after he was dead.

In Basil Wilkie Collins was exploring psychological states and existential crises that were explored later by writers such as Dostoyevski and Kafka. Basil’s narrative is an anguished account of his being trapped in a contradictory and very stressful emotional dilemma that is largely of his own making. And the more he tries to solve the problem he faces, the worse it becomes.

Basil’s state of anguish is very similar to that of Dostoyevski’s first person narrators – from the Underground Man to The Gambler; and Basil’s conflict with his father over his dishonouring of the family name is very reminiscent of the many well-known instances of father-son conflict in Kafka’s work. This is not to claim that Wilkie Collins was somehow being prophetic of later states of being – but it has to be said that he creates a distinctly modern form of existential angst in Basil.

It should also be noted that this particular variety of anxiety, like those of Dostoyevski and Kafka, has a distinctly sexual element in its foundation. Basil sees Margaret Sherwin with her mother on an omnibus ride in London – and falls obsessively in love with her at first sight. He knows nothing about her, except that she is good looking and has dark hair and eyes. And then apart from her social status as the daughter of a linen draper, he learns very little more about her, yet he is prepared to accept the bizarre arrangement of an unconsummated ‘marriage’ followed by twelve months of celibate courtship. Eventually, he is driven to the lengths of attempted murder in pursuit of his obsession.

Problems

This is the first really serious work in what was to become a prodigious output from Collins as a novelist – the ‘King of Inventors’ as his definitive biographer Catherine Peters called him. It is arguably the first ‘sensation novel’ – a genre that combined realistic fiction of English social life with domestic crime, mystery, suspense, and effects which would shock the reader. Nevertheless, it has to be said that there are some problems of narrative logic and credibility in the plot of Basil.

The main problem is that no convincing reason is provided for Sherwin’s strange proposal of a secret marriage followed by a twelve month period of marital abstinence – or Basil’s acceptance of this odd arrangement. Sherwin claims his daughter is too young to be married = she is only seventeen – and it might be thought that he sees Basil as an upper class social catch. But Basil is the younger son of the family and stands to inherit nothing.

The second important weakness is the characterisation of Margaret Sherwin. She hardly exists as a fictional character at all, and is only presented through Basil’s obsession with a love object. She does not act in the narrative; she is not dramatised; she hardly speaks; and we are given no access to her thoughts or motivation.

This is a weakness in the obvious sense of the novel having a character who simply fails to ‘come to life’, but in terms of Wilkie Collins anticipating the psychology of modernism, it is not altogether surprising. The story is intently centred on Basil’s psychology as an individual dealing with threats from all quarters of his life. This is why it is possible to see Collins’ narrative as a precursor of modernist concerns with the existential state.


Basil – study resources

Basil Basil – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Basil Basil – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Basil Basil – Independent Publishers – Amazon UK

Basil Basil – Independent Publishers – Amazon US

Basil The Complete Works of Wilkie Collins – Kindle eBook


Basil – plot synopsis

Part I

Basil is writing his confession at the age of twenty-four in Cornwall. He recalls his rich but austere, ancestor-worshipping father and his elder brother Ralph who is profligate and has no interest in the inheritance of the family estate. His younger sister Clara is a beacon of virtue – selfless and unassuming. Basil is writing a historical romance.

On an omnibus ride he sees Margaret Sherwin and is immediately attracted to her. He follows her home and discovers that she is a shopkeeper’s daughter. He feels burdened by his duty to marry only into his own class, but is tormented by his desire for Margaret. He dreams of a dark-haired woman taking him off into a wood.

Next day he bribes a servant and intercepts Margaret on her way to market, spilling out his love for her. She dismisses his attentions, but it does not deter him. He writes to her but she refuses his entreaties on the grounds of their differences in rank. He then obtains an interview with her father, to whom he proposes a secret marriage which will be revealed at a later date.

Basil immediately feels guilty at concealing the plan from his family. At a second meeting Mr Sherwin proposes an immediate ‘private’ marriage followed by a twelve month supervised courtship, because Margaret is only seventeen. Basil’s father puts him under a code of honour to respect the family tradition before leaving for his estate. Clara wishes to share any of his sorrows or difficulties. Basil and Margaret are married in virtual secrecy, after which he goes home alone.

Part II

Basil is allowed to meet Margaret every day under the nervous supervision of Mrs Sherwin. He decides to educate Margaret in works of literature, but she only wants to hear trivial gossip about his family. They are joined by Sherwin’s confidential clerk Mr Mannion, who is cold, handsome, and mysteriously superior. He knows all about the secret marriage.

Basil goes home with Mannion, who is subserviently friendly and offers to help Basil ‘manage’ Mr Sherwin. Basil has brief glimpses of Margaret’s petulance. Mannion discretely helps him to overcome Mr Sherwin’s strictures.

Basil is summoned to the country by a letter from his sister. His father remains distant and severe. Clara guesses that Basil is involved with a woman. On his return to London, Margaret and Mannion both seem to be ill.

At the end of his year-long probation Basil finds that Margaret has gone to an aunt’s party with Mannion, He follows them and traces them to a seedy hotel of assignation. Realising he has been duped, he waits for Mannion to leave the hotel, then launches an attack to kill him.

Part III

Basil then has a nervous breakdown, during which he thinks back over previous events and how he has been duped. He is cared for by Clara. Mannion is not dead but has lost one eye and is horribly disfigured. He refuses to say anything about himself or what happened.

Basil receives a letter from Sherwin claiming that Margaret is innocent. This is followed by a second letter threatening to expose him. Basil’s father demands to know what secret Basil has been keeping from him. When he learns the truth he turns on Basil savagely and disowns him completely for disgracing the family name. Clara appears and pleads for clemency, but it is refused.

Basil confronts Sherwin, who argues that he must accept Margaret since she is legally his wife. Mrs Sherwin however supports Basil’s claims of duplicity, but then dies shortly afterwards. Basil discovers that Mannion has been sending letters to Margaret.

Basil reads Mannion’s long confessional letter describing his father’s crime of forgery against his employer (who was Basil’s father) and his being hanged as a result. Mannion is dogged by his bad family reputation, but eventually finds work with Sherwin and rises in status. He also covets Margaret, though Mrs Sherwin suspects his intentions.

Mannion has groomed Margaret, whom he secretly despises, and he has plotted revenge on Basil throughout his probationary twelve months ‘courtship’. Now horribly disfigured, Mannion threatens to pursue Basil and discredit his family’s name once he is out of hospital.

Basil’s brother Ralph suddenly arrives and offers to help him by negotiating with Sherwin and buying his silence. He is followed by a visit from Clara who offers shreds of comfort from home. Ralph returns with with the news that Margaret has joined Mannion at the hospital. Ralph has counter-threatened Sherwin, who has agreed to compromise.

Ralph and Basil go to the hospital where they learn that Margaret was followed by Sherwin who is in pursuit of her. Mannion is regarded as a monomaniac, and there is an outbreak of Typhus on one of the wards.

A week later Basil learns that Margaret is dying of Typhus she accidentally contracted during her visit. Dr Bernard invites Basil to visit her, which he does, watching through the night whilst she mocks him in her fever. But he eventually forgives her – shortly before she dies.

At Margaret’s graveside Basil is confronted by Mannion who menaces him again, threatening to blight his life and his family. Ralph advises Basil to leave London so as to protect Clara from Mannion. Basil goes to a remote village in Cornwall.

Journal

Basil lives in isolation, peacefully at first, until the villagers turn against him. He feels that Mannion’s evil influence is pursuing him, so he leaves. Whilst walking along the coastline in a storm he is confronted by Mannion, who then falls to his death into a chasm. Basil cannot get the image of Mannion out of his mind, and he has a nervous breakdown.

Letters

Cornish people check Basil’s papers and send word to his family in London. Ralph, Clara, and Dr Bernard rescue Basil, who is reconciled with his father. Nine years later Basil retires to a country cottage with Clara to live in obscurity. Following their father’s death Ralph becomes a reformed head of the family, and Basil consigns his confession to Dr Berard for publication.


Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins


Basil – principal characters
Basil a young man of 24
— his father, a proud ancestor-worshipper
Ralph Basil’s profligate older brother
Clara Basil’s devoted younger sister
Stephen Sherwin a nouveau-riche London linen draper
Mrs Sherwin his nervous and downtrodden wife
Margaret Sherwin their dark-haired and attractive daughter
Robert Mannion Sherwin’s confidential clerk
Dr John Bernard a friend of Ralph’s

Basil – 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 2016


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Filed Under: Wilkie Collins Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, The novel, Wilkie Collins

Because of the Dollars

August 30, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Because of the Dollars was written in 1914, and first appeared as part of Joseph Conrad’s collection Within the Tides published by J.M. Dent and Sons in 1915. The other stories in the volume were The Partner, The Inn of the Two Witches, and The Planter of Malata.

Because of the Dollars


Because of the Dollars – critical commentary

This story features a very typical Conradian dramatic situation – an honourable protagonist in an isolated and vulnerable position, threatened by ruthless villains, and usually with the added complication of a woman on hand for whom the hero feels a gentlemanly sense of responsibility. It’s a situation he used in novels from Lord Jim (1900) to Victory (1915). In this instance there is the additional consideration of a sick child thrown into the plot.

Fortunately for Davidson, he is at least armed with a revolver, and his prime foe the Frenchman has the disadvantage of having no hands. This however does not stop him killing the innocent woman in question, Laughing Anne, who ironically has tied the seven pound weight to his arm stump with which he kills her.

But even after he survives the attempt to rob him of his dollars, his travails are not over. Honourably taking it on himself to look after Laughing Anne’s son Tony, he runs up against the suspicions and ire of his own wife. She suspects that the child is Davidson’s. This is an interesting point, since Laughing Anne is more or less a prostitute, and she does know Davidson from the past. The connection is not impossible, but does not seem to be substantiated by anything else in the text.

Moreover, Mrs Davidson has been flagged up by Hollis earlier in the story as a less than completely sympathetic character:

What I noticed under the superficial aspect of vapid sweetness was her convex, obstinate forehead, and her small, red pretty, ungenerous mouth.

Davidson himself however is universally regarded as ‘a good man’ – so the tale is a cautionary reminder that even good men may suffer misfortune and injustice in pursuit of doing The Right Thing.


Because of the Dollars – study resources

Because of the Dollars Because of the Dollars – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

Because of the Dollars Because of the Dollars – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

Because of the Dollars The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook –

Because of the Dollars Because of the Dollars – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Because of the Dollars 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

Because of the Dollars Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Because of the Dollars Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Because of the Dollars


Because of the Dollars – plot summary

Part I.   An un-named outer narrator and his friend Hollis see captain Davidson on the harbour front of an Eastern port. Hollis relates the background story of his character and life, explaining why he is known as ‘a good man’ . Davidson is the commander of the Sissie , which is owned by a Chinaman. When a new printing of dollars is issued, Davidson collects packages of the old silver dollars from people in the ports where he calls. His wife thinks that transporting currency might be dangerous, but he believes that nobody else can take his place. He also wishes to call on Bamtz, a loafer who has taken up with fellow drifter, Laughing Anne. When Davidson first called at the remote island of Mirrah he was recognised by Anne as an old friend. She explains that she has settled with Bamtz for the sake of her child Tony.

Part II.   In a quayside bar the blackmailer Fector overhears Davidson’s plans to collect in the old dollars, and he recruits thugs Niclaus and the Frenchman (who has no hands). After collecting dollars, Davidson arrives late at night at the Bamtz house to find the three men with Bamtz, waiting for him. Anne’s son Tony is ill with a fever. Whilst she and Davidson attend to him she warns him about the Frenchman, who that day has asked her to tie a seven pound weight to the stumpt of his right arm.

At night the thugs attack the ship to steal the silver, but Davidson is armed with a revolver and scares them off. The Frenchman realises that Anne has given their plans away, and in the melee that ensues he bludgeons her to death with the weight. Davidson feels that she has somehow died to save him, and he feels guilty. However, he rescues the child.

Davidson buries Anne at sea and gives the child to his wife to look after. However, his wife suspects that the child is actually his, and she turns against both of them. Eventually, even though he tells her the whole story, she leaves him and goes back to her parents. The boy is sent to a church school in Malacca, where he eventually does well and plans to become a missionary. Davidson is left alone with nobody – which is where the story began.


Joseph Conrad – video biography


Because of the Dollars – principal characters
I an un-named outer narrator
Hollis his friend
Davidson commander of the Sissie
Bamtz a loafer with a beard
Laughing Anne a drifter from Saigon – a ‘painted woman’
Fector a blackmailer and ‘journalist’
Niclaus a dead beat
the Frenchman a thug with no hands

Joseph Conrad - manuscript page

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness


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

Joseph Conrad’s writing table


Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad Lord JimLord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
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Joseph Conrad Heart of DarknessHeart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
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© Roy Johnson 2013


Joseph Conrad web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


More on Joseph Conrad
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Joseph Conrad complete tales


Filed Under: Conrad - Tales Tagged With: English literature, Joseph Conrad, Literary studies, The Short Story

Benvolio

May 26, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Benvolio first appeared in magazine form in The Galaxy for August 1875. It was then reprinted in book form amongst The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales in 1879.

Benvolio


Benvolio – critical commentary

The fairy tale

James playfully opens this story with the sentence “Once upon a time (as if he had lived in a fairy tale) there was a very interesting young man”. Thus he simultaneously quotes a traditional fairy tale and pretends to distance himself from it. But what follows piles up one cliché of the genre after another

There is no attempt whatever to locate the character or events within the framework of realistic fiction. No place names or geographic location are specified. The names of the characters are either generic (the Professor, the Countess) or are ‘invented’ (Benvolio – which is not actually his real name).

All the details of the story are from the stock repertoire of the fairy tale: the Countess has a ‘court’ and she takes Benvolio to her country estate where there is ‘bear hunting’; messages arrive on ‘parchment’. None of the interaction of the characters is dramatised: everything is given in generalized summary (‘as the years went by’). The young women are beautiful; the Professor is naturally a wizened old man; and journeys to the other side of the world are accounted for within a single sentence.

The atmosphere of a late Renaissance period is reasonably well summoned up (not unlike Virginia Woolf’s similar efforts in Orlando) – with the exception of minor anachronisms such as mention of bookshops, publishers, and magazines.

Theme

But to what end? It is very difficult to say if James was exploring any serious theme or ideas in this tale or not. The principal issue (which he drags out to inordinate length) is Benvolio’s divided attraction to the worldly glamour offered by the Countess and the somewhat puritanical life of research and editorship symbolised by Scholastica.

The only way of making sense of this is to take a reading (supported by so many other of James’s tales) which sees this as a psychological exploration of what James himself saw as the dangers that women represented to him as a writer.

He knew that the worldly life of dinner parties and invitations from aristocratic ladies to weekends at country estates took him away from his work – though it gave him a great deal of his material in terms of gossip and anecdotes. On the other hand, marriage to a bluestocking or a librarian might lead to the drying up of his inspiration. After all, as soon as Benvolio settles with his scholastic muse, his talent evaporates.

In this reading Benvolio is yet another cautionary tale against the dangers of women and emotional commitment. Whatever sense is made of the story, it is without doubt one of the most laboured, repetitive, and unsuccessful in all of James’s hundred-plus tales.


Benvolio – study resources

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

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

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

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

Benvolio Benvolio – eBook versions at Gutenberg

Benvolio Benvolio – facsimile of original text

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

Benvolio


Benvolio – plot summary

Part I.   Benvolio is a rich, poetic young man who is full of contradictions. He lives in comfort, writes, and reflects philosophically. But he gradually becomes blas&eacute and feels that he needs more purpose in his life. He decides that he will write about great ideas and truths, and begin to engage with the world.

Part II.   He engages with a beautiful and rich widow, the Countess, then falls in love with her – but will not propose marriage. She is much sought after, and cannot understand his reticence. He doesn’t think she has all the qualities required in a wife. She decides to keep him at bay, and he discovers that other women are not nearly as interesting. One romantic night he breaks into her castle to see her – but still does not propose. So she leaves him.

Part III.   Benvolio stays at home during the summer months. He buys a Venetian painting, then becomes enchanted with a girl who sits in his shared back garden. He thinks she might be reading one of his own books. But when rain sets in he pines for the Countess. When he sees the girl in a bookshop he impulsively offers to deliver all the books she has ordered.

Part IV.   He delivers the books and meets the girl and her father, the Professor, an old blind man. They live in an adjacent house owned by the Professor’s brother, who is a miser. Benvolio engages in philosophic discussions with the Professor, and he grows to rate highly the qualities of the girl, Scholastica.

Part V.   However, he also perceives limitations in Scholastica and goes back to the court of the Countess, where he develops his talent for dramatic poetry. He writes a masterpiece in which the Countess is the star. On going back home he returns to his back garden and feels guilty that he has neglected his neighbours. He tells Scholastica all about the Countess.

Part VI.   He also tells the Countess all about Scholastica, and feels personally divided between the studious and social life. His new comedy is a great success. The Countess becomes jealous of his attentions to Scholastica. She proposes a winter holiday on her estate where Benvolio finally declares his complete love for her. But when they return to town they quarrel. He wishes to marry, but she is not sure, and suggests that they travel.

Part VII.   He takes a cold leaving of Scholastica and travels in Italy with the Countess. However, they quarrel over Scholastica again and he returns home alone to discover that the Professor has died. He offers to help Scholastica edit the Professor’s papers. Meanwhile her uncle gives her an allowance but threatens to cut it off if she marries ‘a poet’. Benvolio meets the Countess again and writes new verse dramas.

Then Scholastica’s uncle withdraws her allowance. The Countess arranges for Benvolio to be sent on a diplomatic mission, and engineers a job abroad for Scholastica. However, Benvolio tells the Countess that her main attraction was as a contrast to Scholastica, and after six months he sails off to bring Scholastica back home. But his subsequent literary productions are ‘dull’.


Principal characters
Benvolio a rich and poetic young man (not his real name)
Madam the person to whom the story is addressed
The Countess a beautiful young widow (not her real name)
The Professor a learned and blind old man
Scholastica his pretty young daughter, ‘a learned maiden’ (not her real name)

James and Wharton go Motoring

Henry James travelling with Edith Wharton

Benvolio journeys with the Countess?


Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013


Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


More tales by James
More on literature
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Filed Under: James - Tales Tagged With: English literature, Henry James, Literary studies, The Short Story

Between the Acts

January 29, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Between the Acts was started in April 1938 and the first draft completed in November 1940 just months before Virginia Woolf died in 1941. Her husband Leonard Woolf decided to go ahead with publication in conjunction with his partner John Lehmann, editing the text only for spelling and minor errors. It had originally been called Pointz Hall and Woolf wrote it at the same time as dragging herself through the composition of the biography of her friend Roger Fry.

Virginia Woolf - portrait

Virginia Woolf


Between the Acts – critical commentary

Narrative

For this, her last and posthumously published novel, Virginia Woolf returned to and developed further the narrative technique she had created for herself in Jacob’s Room in 1922. Any conventional notion of a continuous story or plot is abandoned in favour of fragmentary glimpses into the consciousness of various characters. These fragments are held together by the presentation of an aloof and rather witty narrator.

The narrative passes from one point of view to another via loosely associative threads and links, forming a pattern rather than a continuous chain. And into this pattern there are woven what Woolf herself called the ‘orts, scraps, and fragments’ which constitute human life.

The effect of continuity and apparent formlessness is intensified by the fact that Woolf abandons any formal divisions between the parts of her story: there are no chapters or any conventional breaks between the various parts of her story. You might also notice that the narration slips from the objective point of view of an author to the entirely subjective views of various characters and back again – sometimes within the same sentence.

As if to compensate for this apparently formless collection of fragments, there is a rich pattern of echoes and repetition which strengthens the construction as a whole. The characters speak and think in clichés, but the arrangement of their thoughts and utterances is like a densely patterned mosaic. Very often the dialogue echoes the narrative, and vice versa.

History

The large scale historic elements of the staged pageant are amusingly contrasted with the small scale individual drama going on amongst members of the audience. Isa is disenchanted with her husband Giles, and invents a romantic liaison with Rupert Haines the gentleman farmer, even though nothing at all happens between them except a few furtive glances. Meanwhile the angry Giles flirts with Mrs Manresa, the uninvited guest, by going off with her into the greenhouse.

There is also a recurrent theme of failed communication between the characters. People fail to remember the words of poems and songs; the actors forget their lines; other characters mis-hear what is said to them; and all in all there is sense of a failure of things to happen. The two oldest characters (Bart and his sister Cindy) mis-remember the past and fail to understand fragments of culture. Even Miss La Trobe feels that her efforts as a playwright have not been understood or appreciated by the audience.

It is true that members of the audience have entirely different interpretations of what the tableaux mean as a whole – but that is no reason that artistic creation should cease its efforts. As she consoles herself with a drink in the local pub, Miss La Trobe feels the stirrings of her next work take place in her imagination.


Between the Acts – study resources

Red button Between the Acts – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Red button Between the Acts – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Red button Between the Acts – eBook edition

Red button Between the Acts – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Red button Between the Acts – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Red button Between the Acts – Kindle edition

Between the Acts The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Red button Between the Acts – critical essays at Yale Modernism Lab.

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

Between the Acts


Between the Acts – plot summary

On a day in June 1939 just before the outbreak of the second world war, a village historical pageant is held at Poyntz Hall, family home of the Olivers. Members of the family assemble for lunch whilst preparations for the event are made by villagers. The actions of almost all the characters are quite inconsequential, but their inner thoughts, feelings, and memories are sewn together by a narrative which creates links and patterns out of the fragments of mundane life to express a sense of community and continuity.

Virginia Woolf Between the ActsThe pageant, written and directed by Miss La Trobe, is a series of tableaux showing periods of English history from the medieval age to the present, The first part is a prologue, recited by a child; the second is a parody of a restoration comedy; and the third is a series of scenes from Victorian life directed by a traffic policeman. At the conclusion Miss La Trobe presents a finale entitled ‘Ourselves’ by turning mirrors onto the audience.

When the pageant ends, the audience disperses wondering what it all meant. Miss La Trobe initially feels that her work has failed in its effect, but then she retreats to the local pub and has an epiphany of the birth of her next creation.

The Oliver family meanwhile settle back in the house at Poyntz Hall and the day draws to a close.


Principal characters
Bartholemew Oliver a a retired Indian civil servant, owner of Poyntz Hall
Lucinda (‘Cindy’) Swithin Oliver’s eccentric widowed sister (‘old flimsy’)
Giles Oliver his son, a stockbroker with no capital
Isabella (‘Isa’) Oliver Giles’ wife with unfulfilled romantic yearnings
Amy a nurse at Poyntz Hall
Mabel a nurse at Poyntz Hall
George a young boy, Oliver’s grandson
Rupert Haines a gentleman farmer
Mrs Haines his wife, with protruding eyes
Caro a baby
Sohrah an Afghan hound
Mrs Sands (‘Trixie’) cook at Poyntz Hall
Candish a gardener
Mrs Manresa a middle-aged bohemian vamp
Ralph Manresa her husband, a Jew
William Dodge a foppish and probably gay clerk
Miss La Trobe a bossy lesbian author
Bond a cowman
Albert the village idiot
Eliza Clark shopkeeper who plays Elizabeth I
Mabel Hopkins plays ‘Reason’
Mr Page reporter for the local paper

Virginia Woolf podcast

A eulogy to words


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 the novels The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, and the collection of stories Monday or Tuesday 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

Red button Virginia Woolf – a timeline in phtographs
A collection of well and lesser-known photographs documenting Woolf’s life from early childhood, through youth, marriage, and fame – plus some first edition book jackets – to a soundtrack by Philip Glass. They capture her elegant appearance, the big hats, and her obsessive smoking. No captions or dates, but well worth watching.

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.


Between the Acts – first edition

Between the Acts - first edition

Cover design by Vanessa Bell


Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red button Sellers, Susan, The Cambridge Companion to Vit=rginia Woolf, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Red button Showalter, Elaine. ‘Mrs. Dalloway: Introduction’. In Virginia Woolf: Introductions to the Major Works, edited by Julia Briggs. London: Virago Press, 1994.

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

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


Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Jacob's RoomJacob’s Room (1922) was Woolf’s first and most dramatic break with traditional narrative fiction. It was also the first of her novels she published herself, as co-founder of the Hogarth Press. This gave her for the first time the freedom to write exactly as she wished. The story is a thinly disguised portrait of her brother Thoby – as he is perceived by others, and in his dealings with two young women. The novel does not have a conventional plot, and the point of view shifts constantly and without any signals or transitions from one character to another. Woolf was creating a form of story telling in which several things are discussed at the same time, creating an impression of simultaneity, and a flow of continuity in life which was one of her most important contributions to literary modernism.
Virginia Woolf - Jacob's Room Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Jacob's Room Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf Mrs DallowayMrs Dalloway (1925) is probably the most accessible of her great novels. A day in the life of a London society hostess is used as the structure for her experiments in multiple points of view. The themes she explores are the nature of personal identity; memory and consciousness; the passage of time; and the tensions between the forces of Life and Death. The novel abandons conventional notions of plot in favour of a mosaic of events. She gives a very lyrical response to the fundamental question, ‘What is it like to be alive?’ And her answer is a sensuous expression of metropolitan existence. The novel also features her rich expression of ‘interior monologue’ as a narrative technique, and it offers a subtle critique of society recovering in the aftermath of the first world war. This novel is now seen as a central text of English literary modernism.
Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway 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

© Roy Johnson 2013


More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
Virginia Woolf – life and works


Filed Under: Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Between the Acts, English literature, Modernism, The novel, Virginia Woolf

Black Mischief

April 25, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

Black Mischief (1932) is Evelyn Waugh’s follow-up to Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930). It is another sharply satirical novel which features his sceptical view of society between the two world wars. The setting is a fictional African country (Azania), but the main target of his satire is the English upper and ruling class. The novel also introduces the unscrupulous playboy character Basil Seal, who was due to re-appear in some of Waugh’s later work, particularly Put Out More Flags< (1942).

Black Mischief


Black Mischief – commentary

Characters

A great deal of the satire and comic drama of the novel is generated via the characters and their absurdly inappropriate attitudes to the situation in which they find themselves. These characters might have become stock figures in the time that has elapsed since they first appeared in 1932, but they are nonetheless funny and in some cases the hapless victims of black comedy.

The Emperor Seth is a typical example, and might also be considered something of a prophetic figure, given the number of African state rulers who have been educated in the public [that is, private] schools and the universities of Europe. He is a graduate of Oxford, from which he has emerged with a naive desire to import modern ideas and culture into a population that is still living in mud huts and that believes in witchcraft.

His proposals to promote birth control are embraced rapturously by the inhabitants of Azania – but only because they completely misunderstand the message. The official propaganda promotes the advantages of small families, but the natives cling to their traditions of unrestrained fertility. Seth prints new banknotes carrying his image – which are worthless – and he plans to introduce compulsory Esperanto as the lingua franca of his country.

Sir Samson Courteney (the ‘Envoy Extraordinary’) is a wonderful example of everything a English diplomatic panjandrum should not be. He is criminally idle, evades all responsibilities, and at the height of a civil war in the country is reluctant to attend to business because he is playing with a child’s rubber toy in his bath.

His wife is terminally naive: amidst war, bloodshed, and public hangings she is only concerned with planting flowers in the legation gardens. Their daughter Prudence is virtually a simpleton who ‘practises’ romance with the attache William Bland, and then becomes the helpless plaything of Basil Seal. When on return to England her plane is forced into a crash landing, she ends up as the main ingredient in a cannibal’s celebration cooking pot.

Basil Seal is an enduringly wonderful creation, a scabrous rogue, and a quite complex character. He has been successful academically at Oxford, but has squandered his inheritance. He is master of several languages, but he is unscrupulous to a degree. He scrounges money from his married lover, steals from his mother, and following his African adventures goes back unchanged to the trivialities of his life in upper-class London. His story is taken up in more detail in the later novel Put Out More Flags (1942).


Black Mischief – study resources

Black Mischief – Penguin – Amazon UK

Black Mischief – Penguin – Amazon US

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh: Six Novels – Amazon UK

Black Mischief

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb


Black Mischief – plot summary

Ch. One Debra Dowa is the capital city of Azania, an imaginary country in Africa. When the founder dies, rule passes to his grandson Seth, who has studied at Oxford University and is keen to adopt modern European culture into a country that is clearly not ready to accept it.

There is a civil war and people are fleeing the country. Cheating, corruption, and lying are rife, and executions by hanging are everyday events. But the victorious army is loyal to Seth, who is mainly concerned with the arrangements for his coronation.

Ch. Two Members of the British Legation concern themselves with trivia, complain about shortages, and are completely out of touch with their surroundings. There is absurd rivalry between foreign embassies.

Ch. Three Basil Seal has given up his position as an English member of parliament and thinks to go out to Azania, but he has no money, having squandered his inheritance. He cadges money from his lover and steals an emerald bracelet from his mother.

Ch. Four Basil arrives in Azania on the day of Seth’s inauguration, which is a shambles. The French legation regard him as a spy. There is a grand ball, fuelled by ‘Champagne’ supplied by the corrupt Armenian trader Youkoumian that he has made the same day.

Ch. Five Basil is appointed Minister of Modernisation with Youkoumian as financial secretary, who imports boots nobody needs. Basil and Youkoumian appoint themselves on to government concessions. A dispute arises with General Connolly over the supply of boots to troops. The boots are eventually issued, but the troops eat them.

Meanwhile Seth pronounces totalitarian edicts on birth control and compulsory physical exercise. Basil is having an affair with Prudence the British ambassador’s daughter. Youkoumian is a profiteer on all the ‘improvements’. The campaign to promote birth control is completely misunderstood by the natives. Seth prints new currency to enrich himself.

Ch. Six The animal rights campaigner Dame Mildred Porch arrives en route to England. The legation are ‘too busy’ to deal with her. Meanwhile Prince Achon the rightful heir to the throne is rescued from imprisonment in a monastery. Europeans leave the town, fearing trouble. Dame Mildred and her companion Miss Tan witness the birth control parade and a riot from the roof of their hotel. The oppositionists seize control.

Ch. Seven The English residents and travellers shelter at the legation, which irritates Sir Courtney. Prince Achon is crowned the new emperor, but dies during the ceremony. Basil arrives with camels, disguised as a native trader.

Planes arrive from Aden to rescue the English residents. The plane carrying Prudence is forced to crash land. Basil traces Seth, only to find that he has been killed by rival Boaz, who is himself killed by his own troops. Basil delivers a funeral oration for Seth, after which there is a ceremonial feast. It transpires that they have eaten Prudence.

Ch. Eight Basil returns to London where his friends have lost money after the UK has come off the gold standard. They do not want to hear his traveller’s tales. Azania becomes an Anglo-French protectorate and is administered by a new set of incompetents.


Black Mischief – main characters
Emperor Seth Oxford-educated chieftain
Krikor Youkoumian Armenian store owner and racketeer
General Connolly Irish head of Seth’s army
Black Bitch his common law native wife, later ‘Duchess of Ukaka’
Sir Samson Courteney British envoy to Azania
Prudence Courteney his simple and romantic daughter
William Bland honorary attache
Basil Seal amoral ex-Oxford adventurer and playboy
Mrs Angela Lyne Basil’s lover
Dame Mildred Porch animal rights campaigner
Lady Margot Metroland a rich and glamorous society woman

© Roy Johnson 2018


More on Evelyn Waugh
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Filed Under: Evelyn Waugh Tagged With: English literature, Evelyn Waugh, Literary studies, The novel

Bleak House

August 11, 2015 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, characters, and plot

Bleak House was first published in nineteen monthly instalments between March 1852 and September 1853, the final instalment being a double issue, as was common practice. On completion it was then produced as a single volume novel by Bradbury and Evans in the UK, and a two-volume version was issued in the USA by Harper and Brothers. The novel was a great favourite with the reading public immediately on its first appearance.

Bleak House

a monthly instalment

Bleak House – critical commentary

The title

Dickens took great care in choosing the titles for his novels – as well as the names for his characters. He drew up lists of possibilities, and for quite some time during the composition of Bleak House his choice for the title was the much more suitable In Chancery.

This term ‘In Chancery’ sums up the central issue of the legal process that is at the heart of events in the narrative. The Court of Chancery pervades the entire story, and characters caught up in the legal proceedings of Jarndyce and Jarndyce recognise each other as if they were inhabitants of a parallel universe. They even refer to each other as ‘claimants’, ‘parties’, ‘suitors’, ‘creditors’, and ‘wards in Chancery’. [In the early twentieth century the novelist John Galsworthy used the term for In Chancery (1920), the second novel in his Forsyte Saga trilogy.]

The house that gives the novel its title is anything but ‘bleak’. It is in fact an elegant mansion with many of the features of a country house. The building is ‘pretty’ with trellises for ‘roses and honey-suckle’. Its interior is pleasant; there are fires in all the rooms; there’s a library; and the salons look out onto gardens which are ‘delightful’. It is also a place of comfort and refuge for Esther, Ada, and Richard, thanks to the hospitality and generosity of John Jarndyce.

This architectural pleasantness is reinforced when Jarndyce chooses and furnishes a country house for Allan Woodcourt’s medical practice in Yorkshire. He not only reproduces the style and decorative features of his home in St Albans, but he even calls it ‘Bleak House’ .

So the eponymous house might well be called ‘Bleak House’, but it isn’t bleak at all and it does not summarise or symbolise the novel as a whole. The elements of ‘bleakness’ in the novel arise more from the Court of Chancery itself, the poverty of the surrounding districts of London; and the moral bankruptcy of the Dedlock household at Chesney Wold.

All those editions of the novel which are illustrated by jacket covers depicting grim mansions in gothic settings are quite inaccurate and misleading – though it may well be that they summarise the negative and all-pervasive influence of the legal ‘proceedings’ that brought the original family dispute of Jarndyce and Jarndyce to trial in the first place.

The narrative

The events of the novel are recounted in two parts which run parallel to each other — the chapters in which Dickens writes as a third person omniscient narrator, and those designated as ‘Esther’s Narrative’ in which Ester Summerson records her part in the events of the story – in first person narrative mode.

This is a simplified description of the narrative. The actual presentation of the story is much more complex. The chapters narrated by Dickens are a mixture of omniscient third person narrative mode, and Dickens himself as an undeclared first-person commentator on events. He offers long and satirical tirades against the law and the upper class in quite an oblique manner – using sentences with no subject, no verb, and an implied contract of outraged agreement between author and reader, as in the death scene of Jo, the child crossing sweeper:

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts, And dying thus around us, every day.

Now a purist might wish to argue that we cannot assume that the third person narrator is Dickens himself, and that we must therefore designate the narrator as ‘anonymous’. Some would even claim that he is not even omniscient, because he occasionally tells that there are things he does not know. This does not seem a persuasive argument to me, on three grounds.

First, there is no evidence that Dickens was constructing an independent narrator – that is, someone with a personality or a particular point of view which we could regard almost as a participating character in the novel as a whole, as he does in the case of Esther. Second, as already mentioned, the narrative in these chapters is actually cast in a mixture of first and third person modes.

But third, and it seems to me most persuasive reason of all, these chapters are presented to us in exactly the same manner and with the same ‘voice’ as most of Dickens’s other novels. Indeed, that is what makes them so distinctively ‘Dickensian’. He creates narratives that are a mixture of detached observation, scenes alternatively comic, grotesque, and full of pathos, and plots full of tension and mystery. These elements are stitched together with the control of something like a circus ringmaster, commenting on his own creation, and offering satirical and sometimes bitterly ironic analyses of society and its ills.

This is exactly what gives his novels such a powerful appeal to readers of all kinds. It is almost impossible to read Bleak House or most of Dickens’s other works without feeling the enormous presence of his personality as an author present in the works themselves.

Esther’s narrative

Esther’s narrative is cast in a fairly straightforward first person mode which also includes a sometimes naive and unselfconscious point of view. For instance it will be clear to most readers that she is romantically smitten by Allan Woodcourt – which is obvious from the fact that she avoids talking about him, but is flustered in a way she cannot understand whenever she has met him. In this case the reader knows more than she knows herself.

But the inclusion of her narrative chapters raises two problems in terms of the ‘logic’ of story telling. The first of these is that Dickens provides no explanation for the relationship between these two parts of the story. There is certainly no mention of Esther or her account of events in the chapters relayed by the third person narrator. Conversely (and fortunately) Esther makes no reference to the ‘outer narrative’ in which her own account is embedded.

There is simply no reason or justification given in the chapters related by Dickens of how Esther’s narrative comes into being (via the discovery of a diary or letters for instance). In other words, no satisfactory account is provided for the co-existence or the relationship between these two separate parts of the novel. Esther herself gives no convincing reason for the existence of her narrative: she merely claims to be writing for an ‘unknown friend’. This seems distinctly unpersuasive.

First, it is more than slightly improbable that someone like Esther would compile such a comprehensive ‘narrative’ for a reader whose identity she did not know. Why would she write at such length and in such detail if she did not know who would read her account? This is clearly a fictional sleight-of-hand on Dickens’s part. But it is one which most readers will be prepared to accept on the principle of ‘suspension of disbelief”.

The ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ is a term coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817 which suggests that if a writer can provide sufficient reasons for doing so, readers would be prepared to overlook or suspend judgement concerning any implausibilities in the story.

But a more significant weakness is that Esther at some points begins to manipulate the novel’s dramatic suspense in a manner that does not fit logically with someone making a record of events. For instance, when Lady Dedlock reveals that she is Esther’s mother, she gives Esther a letter explaining her origins. But Esther only records part of the letter’s contents, remarking that “What more the letter told me, needs not to be repeated here. It has its own times and places in my story”.

Esther is supposed to be a character in the novel, but here she is behaving as an agent in the manner of its composition. In other words she is acting as an author, manipulating the revelation of information to create dramatic interest and tension. This takes her outside the limitations of a character participating in the events of the novel, to that of a contributing author of events. There is no other reason why she should withhold this information.

When a first person narrator takes up an imaginary pen to record the events of a drama, they are normally already in possession of all the facts in the case – so there can be no excuse for concealing any of them from the reader. The only exception to this convention of fictionality is if the first person account is in the form of a diary – where the reader is prepared to believe that the first person diarist only knows about events up to the point of their being recorded.

Bleak House falls between these two modes of narration. Esther creates for the most part a ‘diary’ of events in which she participates. But when she witholds information she has been given for what is clearly a purpose of creating dramatic suspense – this is Dickens rupturing the pact of ‘suspended disbelief’ between the reader and the author.

For a fictional character to suddenly become conscious of the narrative in which they play a part is not a permissible device on the part of the author. It is breaking the conventions of fictional narratives. However, Bleak House is such a huge novel, packed with characters, dramatic events, and serious topics, that many readers are likely to overlook this weakness. However, it has to be said that ‘Esther’s Narrative’ has given rise to enormous amounts of comment in the critical comment on the novel.

Dickens also seems to get the two modes of narration mixed up at times. At one point there is a scene in Vholes’ office [Ch.51] where only he and Woodcourt are present. Their thoughts and feelings, and even the tone of their voices are accurately presented in typical omniscient third person narrative mode. Yet the scene turns out to be part of Esther’s narrative. She is giving an account of events at which she was not present and could not possibly know in such detail.

The Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov (in his Lectures on Literature) observes that Esther’s literary style starts in a girlish manner, but then gradually incorporates a number of Dickens’s own stylistic mannerisms:

Esther and the author more or less grow accustomed to their different points of view as reflected in their styles. Dickens with all kinds of musical, humorous, metaphorical, oratorical, booming effects and breaks in style on the one hand, and Esther, on the other, starting chapters with flowing conservative phrases. But … when the whole estate is found to have been absorbed by the costs, Dickens at last merges almost completely with Esther. Stylistically the whole book is a gradual sliding into the matrimonial state between the two. And when they insert word pictures or render conversations, there is no difference between them.

Money and Labour

There is a sub theme in the novel of selfishness and gross egotism coupled with either acquisitiveness or living off other people’s labour – in other words a dysfunctional connection with the world of labour and capital. This extends to individuals, to families, to society in general, and even to populations overseas.

The elder Turveydrop, master of ‘Deportment’, is completely idle and sponges off his own son. When the younger ‘Prince’ Turveydrop wishes to marry Caddy Jellyby, his father only reluctantly consents with the sophistry that he will make no claim upon them except to be housed, dressed, and fed for the rest of his life at their expense.

Horace Skimpole elevates idleness and self-interested sponging off others into a solipsistic philosophy. He even claims that the debts he accrues are a positive example of keeping debt-collectors in work. Indeed, it is one of the mysteries of the novel why John Jarndyce should tolerate this social parasite to the extent that he does. For the majority of the novel Jarndyce makes excuses for him, explains away his irresponsibility, and treats him at his own word as a ‘child’.

Even the slightly macabre Smallweeds are motivated by a combination of meanness and acquisition. They are money-lenders who hide behind the pretence that the exorbitant rates they charge are determined by ‘higher powers’ for whom they are acting in the City.

Richard Carstone is also linked to this theme. He is mesmerised by the prospects of an inheritance-to-come from the Jarndyce case. He cannot settle and apply himself to a career, because he imagines he will become very rich ‘any day soon’. So he is lured into moral decline by the promise of unearned wealth. And he not only lives on the kindness of John Jarndyce, but he also runs up debts he cannot pay because of his self-indulgent way of life. Even when he marries Ada, it is her money he squanders shortly before his death at the end of the court case.

John Jarndyce is also related to this theme – but only in the sense that he represents its opposite. He is exceptionally generous to everybody. He takes on the role of guardian to Esther when she is regarded as an orphan; he supports his two cousins, Ada and Richard; and he even provides a house for Allan Woodcourt when he marries Esther. His generosity of spirit is undiminished even when people such as Skimpole and Richard are frittering away the financial support he has provided for them.

But therein lies a problem – because we are not told the source of his lavish income. He is a party to the contested will in the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, though he chooses to disattend to the Chancery proceedings, and he does not appear to be affected by its outcome. He must therefore have a source of income separate from inherited wealth which is at the root of the dispute – but we are not told what this is.


Bleak House – study resources

Bleak House Bleak House – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Bleak House Bleak House – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Bleak House Bleak House – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Bleak House Bleak House – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Bleak House Bleak House – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Bleak House The Complete Works of Charles Dickens – Kindle edition

Bleak House Charles Dickens – biographical notes

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens – Amazon UK


Bleak House – plot summary

Ch. 1 – In Chancery   Late autumn in the Court of Chancery in London: the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce has been going on so long that nobody even understands what it is all about any more.

Ch. 2 – In Fashion   The fashionable Lady Dedlock has become bored on her Lincolnshire estate and is in London prior to her departure to Paris. Mr Tulkinghorn calls to report that Jarndyce versus Jarndyce has been in court. He reads from reports to Sir Leicester Dedlock, but Lady Deadlock feels ill land has to retire.

Ch. 3 – A Progress   Esther’s narrative recounts her being raised by a severe godmother, and her knowing nothing of her parents. On her godmother’s death Kenge arranges for her transfer to Miss Donny’s finishing school. Six years later Jarndyce arranges for her to become a companion to Ada Clare.

Ch. 4 – Telescopic Philanthropy   Esther, Ada, and Richard Carstone go to the ‘philanthropist’ Mrs Jellyby’s house where everything is in a state of dirt and disorder. Esther comforts some of Mrs Jellyby’s neglected children, especially the disaffected elder daughter Caroline (Caddy).

Ch. 5 – A Morning Adventure   On a walk next morning Esther, Ada, and Richard meet the old lady from the Court. She takes them to meet the rag and bone collector Krook, who is her landlord, who recounts the suicide of Tom Jarndyce and writes mysteriously on the wall.

Ch. 6 – Quite at Home   Esther, Ada, and Richard then travel to Bleak House, where they are welcomed by their friendly benefactor John Jarndyce, who quizzes them about the Jellyby family. He then introduces them to the self-deceiving sponger Horace Skimpole, who when he is about to be arrested allows Esther and Richard to pay off his debts.

Ch. 7 – The Ghost’s Walk   The housekeeper Mrs Rouncewell is at Chesney Wold with her grandson Watt when Guppy arrives to look over the house (on behalf of Kenge and Carboy)). He seems to recognise Lady Dedlock in a portrait painting. Mrs Rouncewell tells the story of the Civil War differences in the family and a previous Lady Dedlock who put a curse on the house.

Ch. 8 – Concerning a Multitude of Sins   John Jarndyce confides in Esther, giving her a (rather vague) account of the great court case and putting his trust in her. Esther learns that he is besieged by charitable ladies seeking funds for their enthusiasms. They are visited by the officious Mrs Pardiggle who takes them on an intrusive visit to a brickmaker’s cottage. When Mrs Pardiggle is dismissed, they discover a child is dead.

Ch. 9 – Signs and Tokens   Bleak House is visited by the boisterous Lawrence Boythorn, who relates his boundary dispute with Sir Leicester Dedlock. Mr Guppy arrives as clerk to Kenge and Carboy, and makes a comic proposal to Esther, with whom he has become smitten after a single meeting. She is ambiguously flustered by the event.

Ch. 10 – The Law-Writer   Lawyer Tulkinghorn visits legal stationer Snagsby to identify the copyist of a legal document in the Jarndyce case. Snagsby takes him to meet ‘Nemo’ who is lodging at Krook’s rag and bottle shop. Nemo lives in utter destitution and is an opium addict

Bleak House - Guppy

Mr Guppy proposes

Ch. 11 – Our Dear Brother   When Tulkinghorn enters his room, Nemo turns out to be dead from an opium overdose. Nobody knows anything about him, but it seems he might be from a cultivated background. Tulkinghorn keeps a close eye on events. A coroner’s inquest is held in a local ale house. The evidence of the only person who knew him (Jo, a crossing sweeper) is not admitted as acceptable.

Ch. 12 – On the Watch   The Dedlocks leave Paris, bored. Sir Leicester receives a letter from Tulkinghorn mentioning Nemo’s affidavit – which discomforts Lady Dedlock. At Chesney Wold rivalry springs up between Hortense and Rosa, the pretty new lady’s maid. Tulkinghorn arrives to discuss the boundary dispute with Boythorn, but he also reveals the news regarding Nemo.

Ch. 13 – Esther’s Narrative   Richard is a dilettante who cannot make up his mind about a future profession. He is also living in the hope of inheriting from the great Jarndyce case and his wards go to London, where Esther is again embarrassed by Guppy’s unwanted attentions.. Richard is finally apprenticed to medical man Bayham Badger, whose wife has been married twice before.Ada and Richard make their love known to Esther, then to Jarndyce, who gives them his blessing.

Ch. 14 – Deportment   Richard is still hoping to inherit money. Esther is visited by Caddy Jellyby, who complains that her family is almost bankrupt. She reveals that she is engaged to Prince Turveydrop. They visit the dancing school, run by his vain and idle father. They visit Miss Flite, who believes the money she receives each week is forward payment from the Chancellor himself. Krook arrives and takes an unpleasantly close interest in Jarndyce.

Ch. 15 – Bell Yard   Skimpole arrives with the news that Coavinces has died. Jarndyce and his entourage visit a garret where Coavinces’ three small children are barely surviving. They meet a neighbour Gridley (‘the man from Shropshire’) whose entire legacy has been swallowed up in legal costs. In the face of all this poverty and injustice Skimpole argues that everything is for the best, and that because of his own unpaid debts he has provided employment for a debt collector.

Ch. 16 – Tom-all-alone’s   Crossing sweeper Jo exists in a state of abject poverty and animal-like ignorance in the slum at Tom-all-alone’s. Lady Deadlock visits Tulkinghorn, then asks Jo to show her all the places associated with Nemo, including where he is buried.

Ch. 17 – Esther’s Narrative   Mr and Mrs Badger warn Esther that Richard is not taking his training seriously. When challenged Richard says he wants to take up law. Jarndyce reveals to Esther how he adopted her from her godmother. Allan Woodcourt leaves for India and China.

Ch. 18 – Lady Dedlock   Richard moves to lodgings in London, spending extravagantly. Skimpole has his furniture confiscated, and sends the bill to Jarndyce. There is a visit to Lawrence Boythorn at Chesney Wold. Esther sees Lady Dedlock in church and feels disturbed. She meets her again in the park whilst sheltering from a storm and cannot explain a sense of recognition she feels.

Ch. 19 – Moving on   The Snagsbys put on tea for the pompous Reverend and Mrs Chadband. Whilst there Jo is cautioned by a constable and reveals his contact with Lady Dedlock. Guppy recognises Mrs Chadband, who brought Esther to Kenge and Carboy’s office.

Ch. 20 – A New Lodger   Guppy feels rivalry at having Richard articled at Kenge and Carboy. Guppy and Smallweed take down-and-out Tony Jobling for lunch. Guppy persuades him to become a lodger at Krook’s (in Nemo’s old room) and he finds him a job as a copyist at Snagsby’s.

Ch. 21 – The Smallweed Family   The Smallweeds are an eccentric family of undeveloped mean-minded money lenders. Mr George comes to make a repayment. They try to persuade him to take out further loans, and they pretend to be acting as intermediaries for someone more powerful. Mr George goes back to his unprofitable shooting gallery.

Ch. 22 – Mr Bucket   Snagsby tells Tulkinghorn about Jo’s story, then goes with Inspector Bucket to Tom-all-alone’s where they encounter scenes of squalor and pestilence. When they bring Jo back to Tulkinghorn’s office, Hortense is dressed as her mistress Lady Dedlock, but Jo’s evidence reveals that this was not the woman he took to Nemo’s grave.

Ch. 23 – Esther’s Narrative   Hortense has left Lady Dedlock and wants Esther to take her on as maid, but Esther refuses. Richard has become infatuated with the Jarndyce case, but wants to leave the law and join the Army. He has also amassed debts. Esther helps Caddy Jellyby break the news of her engagement to Mr Turveydrop and Mrs Jellyby.

Ch. 24 – An Appeal Case   When it is time for Richard to join the army, Mr Jarndyce insists that it is his last chance at choosing a profession and that he and Ada must break off their engagement. Mr George thinks he recognises Esther, and he reveals that Gridley is one of his customers – and is hiding in the shooting gallery. Esther visits the Court and is dismayed by its procedures. Mr George comes to the Court for Miss Flite. They all assemble at the shooting gallery, and Bucket arrives (disguised as a doctor) to arrest Gridley. But Gridley dies, worn out by his struggles with the Court.

Ch. 25 – Mrs Snagsby sees it all   Snagsby is worried that something is wrong, but he does not know what it is. Meanwhile, Mrs Snagsby is also suspicious of him, thinking Jo might be his illegitimate son. Jo is brought before ‘Reverend’ Chadband , who delivers a meaningless catechism upon him.

Bleak House - Krook

Krook

Ch. 26 – Sharpshooters   Mr George and Phil Squod are visited by Smallweed who reveals that Richard has been borrowing money. He has come in search of a sample of writing by Captain Hawdon. Mr George is suspicious, but agrees to go to Tulkinghorn’s office for further information.

Ch. 27 – More Old Soldiers than one   Tulkinghorn wants the sample to compare the writing with another document in his possession, but George refuses to co-operate. George goes to seek advice from his old colleague Matthew Bagnet, but the advice (given by his wife) is to steer clear of anything that makes him feel uncomfortable. George returns to Tulkinghorn, who curses him for not producing the evidence.

Ch. 28 – The Ironmaster   Volumina Dedlock and other minor ‘cousins’ are at Chesney Wold. Mrs Rouncewell’s son (the Ironmaster) asks Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock for permission to remove Rosa from Chesney Wold in the event of her marrying his son Matt Rouncewell. Sir Leicester is outraged at the very idea.

Ch. 29 – The Young Man   Guppy arrives at Dedlock’s London house to see Lady Dedlock. He recounts the list of connections he has established – Esther’s similarity to her; Jo’s connection with her; Nemo’s and Esther’s real name being Hawdon. He has some new documents coming, and his objective is to impress Esther. Lady Dedlock reluctantly agrees to see him again

Ch. 30 – Esther’s Narrative   Esther is visited by Mrs Woodcourt who bores everyone about her famous Welsh ancestors and her son Allan, who must not marry beneath his true social station. Esther helps Caddy Jellyby prepare for her wedding, which goes off without incident.

Ch. 31 – Nurse and Patient   Charley reports to Esther that Jo is in the neighbourhood. He is on the run, and has some sort of fever. Esther houses him for the night, but in the morning he has disappeared. Charley develops smallpox which she has caught from Jo. Esther nurses her back to health, then contracts the disease herself.

Ch. 32 – The Appointed Time   Tony Jobling (aka Weevle) is feeling depressed in Nemo’s old room at Krook’s. He is visited first by Snagsby then by Guppy, who is due to receive Nemo’s letters for copying from Krook (who cannot read) – but not until midnight. The room fills with soot and foul vapours. At midnight they go down and find that Krook is no longer there, having died from ‘spontaneous combustion’.

Ch. 33 – Interlopers   There is an inquest at Sol’s Arms. Snagsby appears and wonders if he is guilty of anything, but he is taken away by the ever-suspicious Mrs Snagsby. Old Smallweed appears and reveals that Krook was his wife’s brother. Smallweed has come to ‘secure the property’, with Tulkinghorn as his solicitor. Guppy reports to Lady Dedlock that he no longer has the letters he promised – and he is dismissed out of hand.

Ch. 34 – A Turn of the Screw   Mr George receives a demand from Smallweed on a debt in his friend Bagnet’s name. Mr and Mrs Bagnet arrive at the shooting gallery. She reproaches George, who apologises. George and Bagnet go to see Smallweed, asking for leniency in payment. Smallweed throws them out. They then go to Tulkinghorn, where the reception is hostile. But George trades the letter he has in Hawdon’s handwriting for a letter of exemption on Bagnet for the debt.

Ch. 35 – Esther’s Narrative   Esther gradually recovers from the smallpox but is left badly disfigured. Richard turns against his guardian Jarndyce. Miss Flite visits and reports on a lady in a veil making enquiries about Esther. She recounts how her family were drawn into the Jarndyce case and all perished. She also recounts news of Allan Woodcourt who has distinguished himself in an Eastern shipwreck.

Ch. 36 – Chesney Wold   Esther stays at Chesney Wold at the invitation of Boythorn. She confronts her own disfigurement in the mirror. Walking in the park she meets Lady Dedlock, who reveals that she is her mother. She gives Esther an explanatory letter, only part of which Esther reveals in her narrative.

Ch. 37 – Jarndyce and Jarndyce   Richard visits Chesney Wold with Horace Skimpole to plead his case with Esther. He is now indifferent to the Army and still builds all his hopes on the Court case. He believes that Jarndyce should not be trusted. He is also in debt again. His solicitor Vholes arrives and they immediately set off to drive to the Court next day where the Jarndyce case is being heard.

Ch. 38 – A Struggle   Esther returns to live at Bleak House. She visits Caddy Jellyby who is assisting her husband and his apprentices at the dancing school. She then consults Guppy, asking him not to look into her background. He agrees, but makes a comical retraction in exaggerated legal terms of his previous proposal of marriage to her (because she is now disfigured).

Bleak House - The Smallweeds

The Smallweeds

Ch. 39 – Attorney and Client   Richard complains to his solicitor Mr Vholes about the lack of progress in the Jarndyce case. Vholes replies with sophistical excuses and claims that he is ever-vigilant on his client’s behalf. Guppy accompanies Tony Jobling to the Krook house where he is recovering his effects. There is speculation that Nemo’s papers might have escaped the spontaneous combustion fire.

Ch. 40 – National and Domestic   The long recess is over. Preparations are under way at Chesney Wold for national elections. Lady Dedlock has not been well. Voters are being bribed and bought off. Tulkinghorn arrives with news of political setbacks for Dedlock, and the housekeeper Mrs Rouncewell’s son and grandson are involved. Tulkinghorn then delivers a thinly disguised story of Lady Dedlock and her child by a former captain lover.

Ch. 41 – In Mr Tulkinghorn’s Room   Lady Dedlock immediately visits Tulkinghorn in his room at Chesney World to challenge him regarding his disclosure. She plans to leave Chesney Wold the same night. Tulkinghorn argues that she should consider her husband’s honour and social reputation. He promises to keep her secret for a while longer, and persuades her to stay.

Ch. 42 – In Mr Tulkinghorn’s Chambers   Back at his Lincoln’s Inn chambers, Tulkinghorn is met by Snagsby, who complains about being harassed by Hortense. She then appears to complain that Tulkinghorn has not been fair to her. He threatens to report her to the police if she comes anywhere near him or Snagsby again.

Ch. 43 – Esther’s Narrative   Esther is oppressed by the need to keep her mother’s identity a secret. She quizzes Jarndyce about Herbert Skimpole, but he defends him. They then visit Skimpole’s house where Jarndyce makes a feeble attempt to talk sense to him about money and responsibility. Skimpole introduces his three vacuous daughters, then leaves with Jarndyce to escape someone whose chairs he has borrowed and ruined. At Bleak House they are visited by Sir Leicester Dedlock, who invites everybody to visit Chesney Wold. Esther reveals to Jarndyce that Lady Dedlock is her mother, and he reveals that Boythorn was engaged to Lady Dedlock’s sister.

Ch. 44 – The Letter and the Answer   Next day Jarndyce agrees to support her, then he writes her a letter proposing marriage. Esther feels conflicted by the news. Allan Woodcourt comes back into her thoughts. She plans to write a letter to Jarndyce in reply, but doesn’t. Instead, she tells him that she will marry him.

Ch. 45 – In Trust   Vholes arrives with news of Richard’s unpaid debts. Esther goes to visit Richard in Deal. He has just resigned his commission and continues to nurture hopes for success in Court. He receives a letter from Ada offering him her inheritance to pay off his debts. He says he will refuse it. Whilst there Esther meets Allan Woodcourt, recently back from India, and asks him to befriend and help Richard.

Ch. 46 – Stop him!   Allan Woodcourt meets Jenny the brickmaker’s wife in Tom-all-alone’s in the early morning. He tends her matrimonial wounds, then chases down Jo who suddenly appears. Jo reveals that he was taken away when in Esther’s care by someone [Bucket] and put into hospital, then given money to stay away.

Ch. 47 – Jo’s Will   Woodcourt takes the homeless Jo to Miss Flite, who recommends Mr George as a source of refuge for the boy. Mr George agrees to give him shelter, fuelled by his dislike of Bucket and Tulkinghorn. The penniless Jo asks Snagsby to write his will, and then he dies.

Ch. 48 – Closing in   Lady Deadlock reassures Rosa that she likes her but is dismissing her from service at Chesney Wold (to protect her reputation). Mr Rouncewell is summoned and agreement eventually reached with Sir Leicester on Rosa’s dismissal. Tulkinghorn then claims Lady Dedlock has broken their agreement, and threatens to expose her secret to her husband. Following this, Tulkinghorn is shot through the heart by someone unknown.

Ch. 49 – Dutiful Friendship   Mr Bagnet is celebrating his wife’s birthday with the family. He cooks a dinner which is almost inedible. Mr George arrives in low spirits after the death of Jo. Then Mr Bucket arrives, flatters Mrs Bagnet, and makes a big fuss of the children. But when Bucket and Mr George leave, the detective arrests him as a suspect for the murder of Tulkinghorn.

Ch. 50 – Esther’s Narrative   Caddy Jellyby falls ill and is nursed devotedly by Esther. Jarndyce recommends Woodcourt as a doctor for her. Esther feels that these events cast something of a shadow over her relationship with Ada.

Bleak House - Spontaneous Combustion

Spontaneous combustion

Ch. 51 – Enlightened   Woodcourt goes to see Richard who is still in thrall to Vholes and the Chancery case. He claims he is acting for Ada’s interests in the case, as well as for his own. Esther and Ada go to visit Richard, where Ada reveals the she has been secretly married to him for the last two months. Esther returns to tell Jarndyce, who has already guessed as much.

Ch. 52 – Obstinacy   Woodcourt brings news of Mr George’s arrest to Bleak House. They all visit the jail and try to persuade Mr George to defend himself. But he stubbornly refuses to do so, and is particularly critical of lawyers. Mr Bagnet arrives with his wife, who reproaches Mr George for being so stubborn. Esther feels uncomfortable because of her connection with Lady Dedlock. Afterwards Mrs Bagnet discloses that Mr George has an elderly mother still alive, and she sets off for Lincolnshire to retrieve her.

Ch. 53 – The Track   Mr Bucket attends the funeral of Tulkinghorn, then goes to the Dedlock town house. He is interviewed by Sir Leicester, who offers him financial support in pursuit of the crime. Bucket is meanwhile in receipt of letters pointing suspicion at Lady Dedlock. Bucket also quizzes a footman on Lady Dedlock’s habits and her behaviour on the night of the murder.

Ch. 54 – Springing a Mine   Next morning Bucket confronts Sir Leicester and reveals the secret history of Lady Deadlock’s lover and the fact that Tulkinghorn had been spying on her. Suddenly Grandfather Smallweed and the Chadbands arrive, trying to extort money for their knowledge of the ‘secret’ and in search of Lady Dedlock’s letters, which are in Bucket’s possession. They are dismissed, and Bucket produces the culprit – Hortense – and spells out the case against her, based on what he claims is her hatred of Lady Dedlock.

Ch. 55 – Flight   Mrs Bagnet returns from Lincolnshire with Mrs Rouncewell, who turns out to be Mr George’s mother. They visit him in prison where he begs his mother’s forgiveness for his wayward past and filial neglect. Mrs Rouncewell then goes to Lady Dedlock and asks her to do anything she can to help her son. She also gives her a letter which contains an account of the murder, followed by Lady Dedlock’s name and the charge ‘Murderess’. Guppy calls to warn her about Smallweed and the still-extant letters. Lady Dedlock writes her husband a letter claiming her innocence, then escapes from the house.

Ch. 56 – Pursuit   Sir Leicester has a stroke brought on by the shock of all these revelations. When he recovers he cannot speak, but sets Bucket in pursuit of his wife. Bucket seeks out Esther to accompany him, fearing that Lady Dedlock might be contemplating suicide.

Ch. 57 – Esther’s Narrative   Esther is collected by Bucket, and they go in search of Lady Dedlock. First to Limehouse, then along the river, and then to St Albans and Bleak House. They go to the brickmakers’ cottage where they discover that she has passed through the night before. They press on, but find nothing – so Bucket suddenly decides to backtrack to London.

Bleak House - Mr Turveydrop

Mr Turveydrop

Ch. 58 – A Wintry Day and Night   News of Lady Dedlock’s disappearance spreads through fashionable society. Sir Leicester is still recuperating. He asks Mrs Rouncewell to produce her prodigal son George – and the meeting seems to be beneficial to him, since he knew George as a child. He declares to the household that he has no quarrel at all with Lady Dedlock, who still does not appear, even though the house is being prepared for her return.

Ch. 59 – Esther’s Narrative   Esther and Bucket arrive back in London in the early hours of the morning. They meet Woodcourt and go to Snagsby’s where a letter written by Lady Dedlock is recovered from Gusta, who has had a fit. She recounts how Lady Dedlock has asked for directions to the Burial Ground. When they get there Esther finds her mother dead at the gates, dressed in poor Jenny’s clothes.

Ch. 60 – Perspective   Jarndyce engineers more contact with Woodcourt, who has prospects of a modest position in Yorkshire. Richard is ever more enmeshed with the Court, and is spending Ada’s money. Vholes confirms that Richard is in a bad way. Ada confesses her fears to Esther, and reveals that she is having a baby.

Ch. 61 – A Discovery   Esther pleads with Skimpole to stay away from Richard and Ada, to which he agrees. But he breaks his promise and is cut off by Jarndyce. At this point he disappears from the story and is said to die five years later. Woodcourt gets his job in Yorkshire and declares his undying love to Esther, who does not tell him that she is supposed to be marrying Jarndyce.

Ch. 62 – Another Discovery   Next day Esther renews her promise to marry Jarndyce. Bucket arrives with Smallweed who has found a Jarndyce will amongst Krook’s old papers. They take the will to Kenge, who tells them it gives Jarndyce less money and Richard and Ada more. Jarndyce continues to want nothing to do with the matter.

Ch. 63 – Steel and Iron   Mr George travels north and searches out his brother the successful Ironmaster. He is very well received, but wishes to be written out of his mother’s will because of his previous behaviour. He brother suggests he should not offend their mother, but will the inheritance to someone else – which he does. He turns down the offer of a job, preferring to work as a groom to Sir Leicester Dedlock.

Ch. 64 – Esther’s Narrative   Esther is preparing for her marriage when she is summoned to Yorkshire by Jarndyce. He has organised a cottage home for Woodcourt modelled on Bleak House, and renounces his claim on Esther in favour of the doctor. Back in St Albans, Guppy calls with his mother and renews his proposal of marriage to Esther (now that he thinks she will be rich). Mrs Guppy is vigorously offended when it is refused.

Ch. 65 – Beginning the World   The Jarndyce case finally comes to court. Esther and Woodcourt attend, finding all the lawyers and court attendants laughing at the outcome. It turns out that the whole estate has been swallowed up in costs. Richard is devastated and falls ill, but vows to start a new life. However, he dies amongst his friends.

Ch. 66 – Down in Lincolnshire   At Chesney Wold, Sir Leicester is an invalid who has retreated from life in the care of Mr George. The house is largely closed up, and Lady Dedlock’s ashes are in the family mausoleum in the grounds.

Ch. 67 – The Close of Esther’s Narrative   Ada has a baby boy who is given his father’s name. She is invited to live with Jarndyce. Esther has two children, and Woodcourt is a well-respected local doctor.


Bleak House – characters
Sir Leicester Dedlock a baronet, but not a peer (67)
Lady Honoria Dedlock his very fashionable wife (47)
Tulkinghorn a ruthless and single-minded lawyer
Esther Summerson an ‘orphan’
‘Conversation’ Kenge a Chancery lawyer who likes to hear himself talk
Miss Barbary Esther’s severe godmother (actually her aunt)
John Jarndyce Esther’s guardian, Ada’s cousin
Ada Clare an orphan, cousin to John Jarndyce (17)
Richard Carstone an orphan, Ada’s cousin (19)
Mrs Jellyby a ‘philanthropist’ obsessed with Africa
Mr Jellyby her husband, a nonentity
Mr Quale an acolyte to Mrs Jellyby
Caroline (Caddy) Jellyby their eldest daughter, befriended by Esther
Miss Flite eccentric elderly ‘suitor’ in Jarndyce case
Horace Skimpole a professional layabout and sponger
Krook rag and bottle shop owner, and landlord
Mrs Rouncewell housekeeper to the Dedlocks
Mr George (Rouncewell) her son, an ex-soldier and vagabond, keeper of the shooting gallery
Mrs Pardiggle an imperious charity scrounger
Lawrence Boythorn outspoken school friend of Jarndyce, neighbour of Dedlock
Mr Snagsby a mild law stationer
Mrs Snagsby his wife, a jealous termagant
Augusta (Gusta) their assistant, given to fits
Rosa pretty trainee at the Dedlock house
Hortense acerbic French lady’s maid to Lady Dedlock
Bayham Badger a medical man
Mrs Badger his wife, who lives through her two previous husbands
Mr Turveydrop an idle, pompous model of ‘deportment’
Prince Turveydrop his son, a dancing instructor
Allan Woodcourt a young doctor
Inspector Bucket a detective with a flattering and sardonic manner
Phil Squod Mr George’s disfigured assistant
‘Nemo’ a law copyist and opium addict, (actually Captain Hawdon, Lady Dedlock’s lover and Esther’s father)
William Guppy clerk at Kenge and Carboy, suitor to Esther
Mr Gridley ‘the man from Shropshire’, and suitor in the Jarndyce case who dies

Criticism

Red button Susan Shatto, The Companion to ‘Bleak House’, London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.

Red button George Ford and Sylvere Monod (eds) Bleak House, Norton Critical Editions, 1977.

Red button A.E.Dyson (ed), Bleak House: A Casebook, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1969.

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Interpretations of Bleak House, New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Bleak House, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987.

Red button Grahame Smith, Charles Dickens: Bleak House, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974.

Red button Graham Storey, Bleak House, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Red button Jakob Korg (ed), Twentieth Century Interpretations of Bleak House, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1968.


Mont Blanc pen

Mont Blanc – Charles Dickens special edition


Further reading

Biography

Red button Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, London: Mandarin, 1991.

Red button John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, Forgotten Books, 2009.

Red button Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, Little Brown, 1952.

Red button Fred Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Red button Frederick G. Kitton, The Life of Charles Dickens: His Life, Writings and Personality, Lexden Publishing Limited, 2004.

Red button Michael Slater, Charles Dickens, Yale University Press, 2009.

Criticism

Red button G.H. Ford, Dickens and His Readers, Norton, 1965.

Red button P.A.W. Collins, Dickens and Crime, London: Palgrave, 1995.

Red button Philip Collins (ed), Dickens: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1982.

Red button Jenny Hartley, Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, London: Methuen, 2009.

Red button Andrew Sanders, Authors in Context: Charles Dickens, Oxford University Press, 2009.

Red button Jeremy Tambling, Going Astray: Dickens and London, London: Longman, 2008.

Red button Donald Hawes, Who’s Who in Dickens, London: Routledge, 2001.

 


Other works by Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens Pickwick PapersPickwick Papers (1836-37) was Dickens’ first big success. It was issued in twenty monthly parts and is not so much a novel as a series of loosely linked sketches and changing characters featured in reports to the Pickwick Club. These recount comic excursions to Rochester, Dingley Dell, and Bath; duels and elopements; Christmas festivities; Mr Pickwick inadvertently entering the bedroom of a middle-aged lady at night; and in the end a happy marriage. Much light-hearted fun, and a host of memorable characters.
Charles Dickens Pickwick Papers Buy the book here

 

Charles Dickens Oliver TwistOliver Twist (1837-38) expresses Dickens’ sense of the vulnerability of children. Oliver is a foundling, raised in a workhouse, who escapes suffering by running off to London. There he falls into the hands of a gang of thieves controlled by the infamous Fagin. He is pursued by the sinister figure of Monks who has secret information about him. The plot centres on the twin issues of personal identity and a secret inheritance (which surface again in Great Expectations). Emigration, prison, and violent death punctuate a cascade of dramatic events. This is the early Victorian novel in fine melodramatic form. Recommended for beginners to Dickens.
Charles Dickens Oliver Twist Buy the book here


Charles Dickens – web links

Bleak House Charles Dickens at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews, tutorials and study guides, free eTexts, videos, adaptations for cinema and television, further web links.

Bleak House Charles Dickens at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary techniques, his influence and legacy, extensive bibliography, and further web links.

Bleak House Charles Dickens at Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts of the major works in a variety of formats.

Bleak House Dickens on the Web
Major jumpstation including plots and characters from the novels, illustrations, Dickens on film and in the theatre, maps, bibliographies, and links to other Dickens sites.

Bleak House The Dickens Page
Chronology, eTexts available, maps, filmography, letters, speeches, biographies, criticism, and a hyper-concordance.
Charles Dickens at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of the major novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages

Charles Dickens A Charles Dickens Journal
An old HTML website with detailed year-by-year (and sometimes day-by-day) chronology of events, plus pictures.

Dickens Concordance Hyper-Concordance to Dickens
Locate any word or phrase in the major works – find that quotation or saying, in its original context.

Major Dickens web links Dickens at the Victorian Web
Biography, political and social history, themes, settings, book reviews, articles, essays, bibliographies, and related study resources.

Charles Dickens Charles Dickens – Gad’s Hill Place
Something of an amateur fan site with ‘fun’ items such as quotes, greetings cards, quizzes, and even a crossword puzzle.

© Roy Johnson 2015


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Brideshead Revisited

February 10, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, web links

Brideshead Revisited (1945) was the ninth novel written by Evelyn Waugh. He had established his literary reputation with a series of comic satires in the inter-war years including Decline and Fall (1928), A Handful of Dust (1934), and Scoop (1938). But Brideshead is altogether a more serious work, with only a couple of amusing interludes punctuating a study of aristocratic decline in the 1920s and 1930s. It was written during the Second World War, and along with Waugh’s later trilogy Sword of Honour (1952-1961) represents some of the most successful English fiction of that period.

Brideshead Revisited


Brideshead Revisited – commentary

The framed narrative – I

A framed narrative is one story enclosed within another. The term is used typically when the principal story is preceded or given its context by some sort of introduction. The ‘outer’ story might set the scene or supply the provenance for the ‘inner’ narrative. Then, when the principal story has been related, there may – or may not – be a return to the scene of the first. The outer elements ‘frame’ the main substance of the narrative. (For more on the framed narrative see below.)

Brideshead provides an excellent example of this framing technique. The novel opens towards the end of the Second World War when Charles Ryder’s infantry unit is stationed at Brideshead Castle. The mood and the atmosphere of this Prologue are austere and grim, with an emphasis on wartime food rationing and physical discomfort. But when the protagonist Ryder reaches the country estate and its ancestral house, he recognises it as the background to his earlier life during the previous twenty years.

His recollection of those years form the principal events of the novel – and they are in marked contrast to the prologue. Ryder meets Sebastian Flyte at Oxford University and is introduced to the extravagantly rich and somewhat decadent lifestyle of the English aristocracy. The events of the following years unfold in a privileged, indulgent, and cultivated milieu.

But then in the Epilogue the narrative frame is closed by a return to Ryder’s military existence in the 1940s. The beautiful ancestral home of the Flyte family at Brideshead is being vandalised by the billeted troops. The closing frame of the narrative matches that of the opening , and emphasises the contrast between the cultural values of the old and the new regime.

The first person narrative

Evelyn Waugh handles the delivery of the novel via first person narrative very skilfully. This mode is required to perform two important functions simultaneously– to reveal the character of the principal character, Charles Ryder, and to relate the series of events in which he becomes involved.

Charles is a sensitive and honourable chap who for the most part of the novel is operating outside his social depth. He comes from a lower social stratum than the people he befriends. It becomes immediately obvious to the reader that he is in danger of being led astray by his friendship with the recklessly indulgent Sebastian.

Fortunately, Sebastian is honourable too, even though he is on a self-destructive trajectory. But Charles does not fare so well with Sebastian’s sister Julia. Despite his attraction to her (which is signalled in the early part of the novel) it is obvious to the reader that she is essentially manipulative and cold-hearted, and in the end she rejects Charles in favour of her religious scruples.

Waugh also uses the device of narrative ellipsis: the reporting of important events are missed out of the story in order to create dramatic tension. For instance, Charles recounts his success as an architectural painter and his trip to Latin-America without at first revealing to the reader that he is married. It gradually emerges that he has discovered his wife’s infidelity – and thus has convincing reasons for not foregrounding the information.

He refers to at least one of their offspring as her child, which suggests that he suspects he might not be the father. All the subsequent exchanges between them reveal that Celia has been a cold and manipulative wife – just as Julia will ultimately be as a lover.

The main theme

There are two main themes in the novel – but they are closely linked. The more important theme is the decline of the English aristocracy, and the secondary theme is Charles Ryder’s attraction to all that its culture implies. As Evelyn Waugh remarked of his own design: “When I wrote Brideshead Revisited I was consciously writing an obituary of the doomed English upper class.”

The country estate of Brideshead Castle is the seat of the Flyte family and its head Lord Marchmain. The castle is gorgeously appointed and serviced by a large retinue of servants. But the titular head has decamped from the family home and is living with his mistress at a separate establishment in Venice. He is unable to regularise this situation socially because his wife refuses to give him a divorce, since she is a Catholic (a secondary or even tertiary theme).

But it gradually emerges that Lord Marchmain is running up debts because of this extravagant life style. And his offspring show every sign of accelerating the family’s decline. The family’s eldest son, emotionally constipated Bridey, eventually marries the middle-aged widow of a fellow matchbox collector. The daughter Julia marries arriviste Mottram, who cannot be formally recognised by the family because he is a divorcee. Even when Julia forms a relationship with the unhappy Charles Ryder, she cannot marry him because of a sudden resurgence of her Catholic beliefs.

The two younger members of the family are similarly blighted. Sebastian becomes a hopeless dipsomaniac and ends up destitute, attaching himself to a monastery in Tunisia. His younger sister Cordelia is entirely given up to nun-like behaviour and the pursuit of charitable works in war zones.

Yet Charles Ryder is clearly attracted to the world this family represents. He comes from a lower echelon of society. His father is rich enough to send him to Oxford and give him an allowance, but he limits this support – in a very amusing manner. Charles clings to Sebastian’s coat tails and accepts his generous hospitality and support.

He also falls in love with Sebastian’s sister, with whose good looks hers are frequently compared. There is another tertiary theme to the novel in the quasi-homosexual relationship between the two young men. And Ryder does eventually live at Brideshead with Julia (who inherits the house from her father). But he is denied his ambition to merge with the family because Julia is shocked by her father’s death into a resumption of her Catholic beliefs. Ryder’s outcome is to become “homeless, childless, middle-aged and loveless”.

It is no accident that this nostalgic yearning for an aristocratic heritage (even whilst recognising its decadence) has been the principal mood of two very glamorous and successful film adaptations of the novel. There was an eleven part television series in 1981produced by Granada Television, and an independent feature film in 2008 – both of which put enormous emphasis on this aspect of the narrative.

The novel also seems to have spawned any number of further aristocratic country house television dramas of the Upstairs, Downstairs variety. These depict late Victorian and early Edwardian upper-class life in a manner which simultaneously offers a sympathetic view of toffs with patronising sketches of life ‘below stairs’.

But the main purpose of these television and film dramas is to present comforting images of luxury, wealth, and cultivated living which offer a reassuring depiction of an earlier age to the viewer. Evelyn Waugh is partly responsible for dressing Brideshead Revisited in this nostalgic and escapist presentation of life.

But his view is also modified by having the glamour of Brideshead and transatlantic voyages sandwiched between grim scenes of Britain at war in the 1940s. He hopes the social vandals will not prevail, but he is not sure, and that doubt ultimately gives the novel its cutting edge.

The framed narrative – II

A typical and famous example of the framed narrative is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). His novella begins with an after-dinner conversation between sailors on the Thames. One of the characters (Marlow) relates his experiences sailing up river in the Belgian Congo. When he has finished, the story returns to the group still moored on the Thames. The main story is framed both by the geographic location and the philosophic reflections Marlow offers on historical comparisons between Europe and Africa.

Another famous example demonstrates the incomplete or one-sided frame. Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw (1898) opens with a similar group of people swapping stories after dinner. One of the party relates a horrifying tale which reveals the experiences of a governess looking after two children in an old house that appears to be haunted. But when the fears of the governess reach their dramatic climax, the novella ends, without returning to the opening scene.


Brideshead Revisited – study resources

Brideshead Revisited – Penguin – Amazon UK

Brideshead Revisited – Penguin – Amazon US

Brideshead – Study Guide – Paperback – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Paperback – Amazon UK

Brideshead Revisited – DVD – Amazon UK
The full 1980 Granada television series in 11-parts

Brideshead Revisited – DVD – Amazon UK
The 2008 BBC feature film version.

Brideshead Revisited

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb


Brideshead Revisited – plot summary

Prologue

During the latter years of the Second World War, Captain Charles Rider and his infantry army unit arrive at their temporary headquarters in the requisitioned country house of Lord Marchmain at Brideshead Castle.

Book One

Ch 1 Ryder recalls his early days at Oxford University twenty years previously and his meeting Sebastian Flyte, who takes him to his family’s stately home at Brideshead.

Ch 2 Charles is reproached by his cousin Jasper for mixing with the ‘wrong set’. Then aesthete Anthony Blanche reveals a critical account of Lord and Lady Marchmain’s troubled marriage.

Ch 3 Ryder returns home for the long vacation. He is in debt, but his father ignores his requests for help, and makes his life a misery behind a facade of loving concern. Sebastian tricks Charles into returning to Brideshead, where he meets his sister Julia Flyte.

Ch 4 Charles spends an idyllic summer at Brideshead with Sebastian. They visit Lord Marchmain in Venice, where Marchmain’s mistress Cara gives Charles a vivid account of the Lord’s hatred of his wife, who refuses to divorce him.

Ch 5 During a subdued second year at Oxford, Charles meets Rex Mottram. There is an excursion to a party in London where Charles, Sebastian, and Boy Mulcaster get drunk and spend time in jail. Christmas at Brideshead finds the Oxford don Samgrass being pious and boring. Sebastian feels oppressed by his family and starts drinking heavily. Lady Marchmain puts emotional pressure on Charles, and Sebastian is eventually sent down for a term. Charles decides to quit Oxford and take up painting.

Book Two

Ch 1 As a punishment, Sebastian is sent on a tour of Levantine monasteries with Samgrass, and on return to Brideshead is forbidden drink. He reveals to Charles that whilst on holiday he gave Samgrass the slip and is still drinking.

Charles is reproached by Lady Marchmain and he leaves Brideshead. He sets up as a painter in Paris, where he is visited by Rex Mottram, who reveals that the Flyte family are losing money through profligate over-indulgence. Mottram marries Julia later in the year in a very quiet wedding.

Ch 2 Charles recalls Julia’s ambitions to marry and its arriviste connotations. She becomes secretly engaged to Rex Mottram only because she is jealous of his affair with a married woman. Rex tries (unsuccessfully) to become a Catholic. It is then revealed that he is divorced after a former youthful marriage in Canada. The family object, and the marriage is low key and disastrous for everyone..

Ch 3 Charles returns from Paris to join National Service during the General Strike of 1926. Lady Marchmain dispatches Charles to bring back Sebastian from Morocco, where he finds him in hospital. Lady Marchmain dies. Charles makes paintings of the Flyte’s house in London, which is being sold off to developers to pay Lord Marchmain’s debts.

Book Three

Ch 1 Charles eventually becomes a successful architectural painter. He travels alone in Mexico and Central America for nearly two years, then joins his wife Celia in New York. Sailing back to England they meet Julia Flyte with whom Charles is in love. There is desultory socialising on board and a heavy storm. Charles and Julia exchange accounts of their failed marriages, sleep together, and arrange to meet in London.

Ch 2 Charles has an exhibition in London, and he evades going home. Anthony Blanche reappears, reports that Charles’ affair with Julia is public knowledge, and criticises his paintings. Charles and Julia travel to Brideshead, where her husband Rex is living.

Ch 3 Two years later Charles and Julia are living at Brideshead. Bridey announces that he is going to be married but cannot present his fiancee because Charles and Julia are ‘living in sin’. He plans to move his new family into the house, with his father’s consent.

Ch 4 Divorce proceedings are set in motion by Charles and Celia, then Rex and Julia. Cordelia returns from nursing the wounded in the Spanish Civil War with news of Sebastian. He has continued drinking, has become derelict, and attached himself to a monastery in Tunis.

Ch 5 Suddenly Lord Marchmain returns from Italy in a severely enfeebled condition to die in his ancestral home. There is discussion about who will inherit Brideshead. Lord Marchmain disapproves of Bridey’s middle-class fiancee Beryl, and leaves the stately home to Julia in his will. Marchmain on his death bed reverts to his original religious belief. Julia then tells Charles that she cannot marry him and they must separate for ever.

Epilogue

Ryder and his men are occupying the ground floor of Brideshead, where troops have been vandalising the building and the grounds. He learns that Julia and Cordelia have gone out to Palestine to help in the war effort.


Brideshead Revisited – principal characters
Charles Ryder the narrator, a young man who becomes a painter then a soldier
Lord Marchmain head of the Flyte family, living in Venetian exile
Lady Teresa Marchmain his wife, a devout Roman Catholic
Earl Brideshead ’Bridey’ the elder son, emotionally bankrupt
Sebastian Flyte the charming, troubled younger son who becomes a derelict and alcoholic
Julia Flyte the attractive but remote elder daughter
Cordelia Flyte the younger daughter who is a selfless and devout Catholic
Celia Ryder Charles’ vivacious but unfaithful wife
’Boy’ Mulcaster Celia’s brother, a ‘Hooray Henry’ at Oxford
Rex Mottram a Canadian arriviste who marries Julia then tolerates her affair with Charles
Anthony Blanche an aesthete and homosexual friend of Charles and Sebastian

© Roy Johnson 2018


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Filed Under: Evelyn Waugh Tagged With: English literature, Evelyn Waugh, Literary studies, The novel

Broken Wings

May 30, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Broken Wings first appeared in Century Magazine in December 1900 – which was a remarkably productive period for Henry James in terms of short stories. It was a year which saw the publication of Maud-Evelyn, Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie, The Abasement of the Northmores, The Third Person, The Tone of Time, The Tree of Knowledge, The Great Good Place, and the story which is widely regarded as his finest – The Beast in the Jungle. He produced all of these (and more) in addition to working on his next major novel, The Sacred Fount (1901).

Broken Wings


Broken Wings – critical commentary

The story is quite unusual for James. It is almost romantic, certainly elegiac, and as delicate in tone as anything outside the most poignant scenes in his major novels.

It’s also a very tightly controlled and very touching study in two people coming to terms with their lack of success – and all the more so for the fact that they were once lionized by society. But with a well orchestrated structure in such a short piece, as they progressively reveal their vulnerability, they rediscover the original attraction they felt for each other.

In one sense it’s a very sceptical study of the relationship between commerce, fashionability, and art. Both Straith and Mrs Harvey cannot quite understand why they have been invited to a society weekend at Mundham. The truth is that they have been invited because they were once successful – but both of them realise that they no longer what they once were. They can keep up a pretence, but it is emotionally and practically demanding.

Both have been successful artists in the past, but now she writes articles for three and nine pence whilst he is reduced to producing dress design sketches for four and sixpence, and he hasn’t sold a painting for three years. They have lost their fashionability, or as Straith puts it “We are simply the case of being had enough of”.

Mrs Harvey warns Lady Claude that she will make ‘nothing’ from writing, even though she herself is the author of eight or ten novels that previously had brought her five thousand pounds a year. This is James showing the other side of the tapestry of artistic endeavour and social success. In a gesture of solidarity with his two characters he calls them ‘these two worn and baffled workers’.

Structure

It is a beautifully structured piece of work – five short separate scenes in which the truth of their state of affairs is revealed to the reader as they uncover the truth to each other. The forward movement of the narrative is also delicately balanced by movements in the opposite direction.

They start off as socially successful artists, but their apparent worldly success is gradually stripped away and they end up reconciled to their lack of prestige. But at the same time they rediscover the love they once had for each other – at a time before the temporal frame of the story.


Broken Wings – study resources

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

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

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

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

Broken Wings Broken Wings – Digireads reprint edition – Amazon UK

Broken Wings Broken Wings – eBook formats at Gutenberg Consortia

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

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

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

Broken Wings


Broken Wings – plot summary

Part I. Stuart Straith, an artist, is a guest at a weekend party in an English country house. He circulates cautiously amongst fellow guests, warily conscious of another guest Mrs Harvey, who is mixing with celebrities.

Part II. Later the same evening Mrs Harvey, a literary woman, exchanges confidences with Lady Claude. She reveals to Lady Claude that she is not wealthy, that she finds Straith attractive, and that Lady Claude’s ambition to write novels will not make her any money.

Part III. Straith and Mrs Harvey meet at the theatre where they both agree to re-open what is obviously an old relationship. She claims to be unsuccessful, and senses that he is unhappy. He claims to be ‘beyond’ unhappiness.She offers to help him by promoting his work in her regular journalism.

Part IV. She visits him at his studio where it emerges that their previous relationship foundered on misconceptions on both their parts. They had both enjoyed a certain amount of artistic success, yet thought themselves unworthy of the other. However, when they compare notes on their current status, it is obvious that both of them are struggling.

Part V. Straith visits her new smaller flat where they lay bare their unsuccessful situations, and agree not to pretend any longer. They have been keeping up appearances in a way that kept them apart from each other, and they have also been trading on reputations which no longer reflect their true artistic status. They feel a bitter-sweet relief at having the courage not to pretend any longer to be ‘successful’ and having to circulate in society, and this gesture of solidarity re-unites them emotionally.


Principal characters
Mundham an English country house and estate
Stuart Straith an artist
Mrs Harvey a widow and lady novelist
Lady Claude a would-be novelist

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

Henry James Daisy MillerDaisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Daisy’s innocence and her audacity challenge social conventions, and she seems to be compromising her reputation by her independent behaviour. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. This novella is a great study in understatement and symbolic power.
Daisy Miller Buy the book from Amazon UK
Daisy Miller Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2012


Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


More tales by James
More on literature
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Filed Under: James - Tales Tagged With: Broken Wings, English literature, Henry James, Literary studies, The Short Story

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