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

The Great Condition first appeared in The Anglo-Saxon Review for June 1899. It next appeared in the collection The Soft Side published in London by Methuen in 1900. James wrote the tale whilst staying at Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, the home of Daniel Curtis and his wife Ariana. The Anglo-Saxon Review was owned by Lady Randolph Churchill, the American-born mother of British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.

Transatlantic steamer

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The Great Condition – critical commentary

The crux of this tale is the fact that neither Braddle nor Chilver can ‘place’ Mrs Dammerel socially as they would be able to do if she were European. That is, they do not know anything about her social background, which class she belongs to, who her relatives might be, or the extent of her wealth. These unknowns are also intensified by their fear that something scandalous might be attached to her life history. This notion of social checking is based on the fact that the upper class and aristocracy in Europe acts as a cohesive social group in which a person’s provenance (and income) would be known to members of the group – or would at least be discoverable.

The tale also reveals what to contemporary readers will seem an astonishing lack of intimacy between two people who are preparing to be married. Braddle proposes to marry Mrs Dammerel, but

This issue reflects the fact that particularly amongst the upper classes, marriage in the nineteenth century and earlier was not regarded as a romantic or emotional attachment, so much as a financial arrangement and a class alliance. It had at its core a desire to preserve inherited wealth – which is why there is so much concern expressed about how much people were ‘worth’ or the size of their capital or annual income.

It is significant for instance that it is Braddle who wishes to search out any hidden secret from Mrs Dammerel’s past. He is young and rich: whereas Chilver is not so wealthy, and has less concern and less capital to preserve. After their marriage they live in a modest home in what was then an unfashionable outer-London suburb – Hammersmith. So clearly Mrs Dammerel brought little wealth to the marriage.

A psychological reading of the story will not fail to recognise that the situation of two men being in love with the same woman is a classic case of sublimated homo-eroticism. This is a theme which James treated (consciously or unconsciously) in many of his tales [see The Path of Duty (1884) and The Middle Years (1893) for instance] but it is interesting to note its presence here in the earliest part of his oeuvre.

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The Great Condition – study resources

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

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

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

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

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

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The Great Condition – plot summary

Part I.   During a sea crossing from America, Bertram Braddle has committed himself to helping American widow Mrs Dammerel establish herself in England. But on reaching Liverpool late at night he is impatient to be in London the next morning and leaves her in the hands of his friend, Henry Chilver

Part II.   On the journey back from their visit to America, Chilver has observed with interest the close rapport Braddle struck up with Mrs Dammerel. Braddle has been to America to meet ‘well-connected’ people, and has now taken up with someone ‘unknown’ in society. Chilver also realises that he himself is in love with Mrs Dammerel.

Part III.   Ten days later the two men compare notes. Braddle wonders if Mrs Dammerel is ‘all right’ and admits that he is in love with her. Chilver feels a sense of loyalty to Braddle, and does not reveal his own feelings about Mrs Dammerel. Braddle fears that she might be concealing some episode or unseemly feature from her past. She has lost a husband and child, but Braddle cannot ‘place’ her socially as he would be able to with a European woman. She is a former singer who has given piano lessons. Chilver argues that proposing marriage might force her to reveal ‘the worst’ of her past.

Part IV.   Some weeks pass, and Braddle disappears. Chilver feels that he need no longer conceal his own interest in Mrs Dammerel. However, he receives a letter from Braddle announcing his engagement to her. Chilver wonders what she has revealed to Braddle, but when he visits them in Brighton there is no evidence of any revelation having been made. This only makes Chilver feel that there must be something to conceal. Braddle however tells him that she has revealed nothing – but simply accepted his proposal of marriage.

However, Braddle later reveals that Mrs Dammerel has admitted that there is ‘something’ in her past – but she will only reveal it six months after the marriage, by which time she is confident he will not want to know what it is.

Part V.   Braddle goes off in search of further information about Mrs Dammerel, during which time Chilver deepens his acquaintance with her and feels that he appreciates her without knowing any ‘secrets’ about her past. He almost convinces himself that her secret is the fact that she would prefer him as a husband – and so he proposes to her.

Part VI.   A year later Mrs Dammerel has married Chilver and the two men meet. Braddle has searched as far as the west coast of America and has found nothing about Mrs Dammerel. They try to re-establish their friendship. Braddle is rather nervous about it, and wants to know about ‘the great condition’ she has imposed, and what Chilver discovered after six months. Chilver tells him that he actually extended the period of not knowing up to one year.

Part VII.   When that year has elapsed, Braddle is visiting Chilver and his wife at their home in Hammersmith. He is surprised at how modest it is, and feels uncomfortable, even though the couple accept him as an old friend. Braddle asks Mrs Dammerel (now Mrs Chilver) if Chilver has requested the hidden information. He admits that he has been abroad searching for information about her. Finally she reveals to him on oath of secrecy what he wants to know – but invites him to infer it from his negative results – the fact that she has no secret past.

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Principal characters

Bertram Braddle	a rich young Englishman
Henry Chilver	his older friend, a lawyer
Mrs Dammerel	an American widow

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Interior Venice by John Singer Sargeant

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Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Other works by Henry James

Washington 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.
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The 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.
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The 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.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

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Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

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

The Impressions of a Cousin first appeared in magazine form in The Century Magazine for November—December 1883. It was then reprinted in book form amongst Tales of Three Cities in England and America by Osgood of Boston in 1884.

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The Impressions of a Cousin – critical commentary

The unreliable narrator

The story is fairly obviously one of James’s versions of the unreliable narrator. Catherine Conduit is our only source of information, and James gives the reader every reason to mistrust her reliability.

She conceals her own identity for the first part of the story; she contradicts herself in her account of events, gets dates wrong, breaks her promises, and singularly fails to understand Mr Caliph and his intentions. At one point she even says that what she has written in her own journal to be wrong.

She also fails to register Adrian’s romantic interest in her, and she misunderstands the relationship between Eunice and Mr Caliph.

But the problem is that her lack of reliability does not seem to be linked to any hidden or alternative account of events. That is, nothing is hidden behind her mistakes or ignorance in the way that the governess in The Turn of the Screw reveals her own baleful influence on events whilst protesting her innocence and good intentions.

As readers, we do not have any alternative account of events by which to calibrate the truth.

Anti-Semitism

Mr Caliph is one of the most fully-rounded examples of a Jew in James’s oeuvre – and a figure who is likely to create a sense of discomfort in most contemporary readers. The narrator Catherine describes him in what we now are likely to see as a set of stereotypes:

rather ugly; but with a fine, expressive, pictorial ugliness … I have an intimate conviction that he is a Jew … I see that in his plump, white face … in the very rings on his large pointed fingers … I don’t think he looks like a gentleman

She calls him ‘Haroun-al-Raschid’ – from One Thousand and One Nights (though the historical original was an Arab) and feels humiliated at being corrected by him.

And Mr Caliph lives up to the stereotype: he misappropriates the funds put into his trust and brings financial ruin to the person whose interests he is supposed to be protecting. Moreover we are led to believe that when he miraculously restores the missing money he does so at the expense of his own step-brother, whose personal fortune suddenly disappears at the end of the tale.

The implication is that he has sacrificed it either to protect his step-brother or out of a sense of honour towards Eunice. So Adrian – who has a different non-Jewish father than Mr Caliph – acts honourably in his own inheritance to pay for his Jewish step-brother’s malfeasance.

The account of Mr Caliph is given entirely from Catherine’s point of view, and James provides no correctives to her opinions, except the fact that she clearly misjudges people.

Structure

There is nothing in the theory or practice of the ‘tale’ (or the short story) to suggest that all narratives must be properly concluded with every thread of the drama neatly resolved. But even with these tolerances.taken into account, The Impressions of a Cousin ends in a state of dissipated irresolution.

Two characters, Adrian and Catherine, suddenly change their locations from America to Italy; two potential marriages come to nothing; Eunice is still in contact with Mr Caliph, a man who has abused the role of trustee of her inheritance for his own ends; and nothing in the relationships between the principal characters has been resolved.

These very lose ends mean that the essential subject of the story remains undefined. The story is not fundamentally a study of Eunice, her inheritance, and her possible choice of marriage partner. It is not a tale of Adrian Frank and his preference for a woman who describes herself as ‘poor, plain, unloved and unloveable’. And it is not an account of Mr Caliph and his financial machinations.

This leaves only Catherine Conduit herself as the possible focus for the story, and she seems no wiser or more insightful at the end of the story than she does at the beginning. She has lost the favour of her cousin Eunice and is back drifting around Italy with no object in mind.

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The Impressions of a Cousin – study resources

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

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

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

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

The Impressions of a Cousin – paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Impressions of a Cousin – paperback edition – Amazon US

The Impressions of a Cousin – original text

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

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The Impressions of a Cousin – plot summary

Part I

The narrative takes the form of a diary kept by Catherine Conduit, a woman who ‘sketches’. She has recently returned from Europe to live in New York, where she finds the city too ‘rectangular’ to inspire artistic creation. She is housed by her rich young cousin Eunice.

Catherine is slightly frustrated (yet tolerant) of her cousin’s lack of social enterprise. Eunice is rather restrained and conservative in her behaviour for a girl of twenty-one. She is due to inherit her mother’s property plus money from her father – all of which is looked after by a sole trustee, Mr Caliph.

Catherine is visited by Adrian Frank, Mr Caliph’s step-brother, who asks a lot of questions about Eunice. Catherine teases him and feigns ignorance of his apparently romantic intentions towards Eunice.

Catherine’s socialite friend Mrs Ermine urges Eunice to spend lots of her to-be inherited money on luxuries and to make a public demonstration of her wealth. Eunice refuses to do so.

Catherine and Eunice receive a visit from Mr Caliph, with whom Catherine is very impressed – though she is concerned that he appears to be Jewish. Mr Caliph suggests that Eunice should get married and asks them to be kind to his step-brother Adrian.

Mr Caliph makes further social calls on the two women, but never discusses business. Catherine would like to check on Mr Caliph’s background and reputation, but is held back by fears that this might cast aspersions on his reputation.

Mrs Ermine meets Mr Caliph and finds him wonderfully captivating. Despite his age and appearance, she suggests to Eunice that she should marry him.

Mr Caliph arrives again with an enormous bunch of roses for Catherine and asks to speak to Eunice privately. Mrs Ermine assumes that he is proposing to Eunice, and insults Catherine regarding the gift of the roses. Catherine is increasingly suspicious of Mr Caliph’s delay in dealing with the matter of Eunice’s trust.

Mr Caliph sends roses to Mrs Ermine too.

Adrian dines with Eunice and Catherine, who ‘pities’ him but describes him positively. Adrian talks to Eunice about Catherine, who he thinks is attractive.

Catherine meets Adrian in Central Park. His step-brother Mr Caliph has been encouraging him to pay court to Eunice, with whom he is not in love. Catherine says she cannot help him, and she seems completely oblivious to the financial motivation behind this match-making.

Adrian becomes a daily visitor and pays attention to both Eunice and Catherine.

Part II

Adrian discusses his hesitation about proposing to Eunice with Catherine, who then receives a visit from Mr Caliph who wants her help in urging Adrian’s union with Eunice. Adrian has his own property, and Mr Caliph makes the argument for an ‘arranged’ marriage. Once again, Catherine is suspicious of his motives, even though she appears to be completely blind to the financial implications of his plans. She is also attracted to him.

The two women move to Cornerville on the Hudson, where Catherine starts painting again. Catherine tells Eunice about Mr Caliph’s and Adrian’s plans, but Eunice reveals that she has already refused an offer of marriage from Adrian. Mrs Ermine still believes that Mr Caliph wants to marry Eunice.

Eunice reveals to Catherine that she is worried about money, but will not hold Mr Caliph to account. Catherine writes to Mrs Ermine for help, but Eunice forbids her to send the letter and swears her to secrecy regarding money matters. Catherine believes that Eunice must therefore be in love with Mr Caliph.

Catherine continues worry about the extent of what seem to be Eunice’s financial losses, and thinks that Eunice’s acceptance of what looks like Mr Caliph’s swindling must be an act of love. Meanwhile, Mrs Ermine prepares a lavish garden party which Eunice will hold (and pay for).

Mrs Ermine piles on the expenditure in party preparations. Eunice worries about what she will say to Mr Caliph, who has been invited. Adrian returns to New York for a few days.

At the garden party Catherine advises Mr Caliph to resolve Eunice’s financial affairs. They argue, and Mr Caliph repeats his wish that his step-brother should marry Eunice. Mrs Ermine thinks that Mr Caliph has proposed to Eunice.

Eunice falls seriously ill and wants to be left alone. Adrian returns from New York and proposes to Catherine, who refuses him but is very flattered by the offer. She urges him to marry Eunice, and reveals that Eunice is now ‘poor’ because of his brother’s mismanagement. She promises him her ‘devotion’ if he will rescue Eunice.

Eunice eventually recovers, and it transpires that all her money affairs are now in order. Adrian (who is suddenly ‘poor’) leaves for Europe, and when Catherine hears he is in Rome, she goes there. Catherine writes to Adrian saying that she will marry him if Mr Caliph ever marries Eunice, who cuts off relations with Catherine.

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Principal characters

Catherine Conduit	the narrator, third cousin to Eunice
Eunice	a rich orphan of twenty-one
Mr Caliph	Eunice’s trustee, an old family friend
Adrian Frank	Mr Caliph’s younger step-brother
Mrs Lizzie Ermine	a society busybody and bore

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Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Other works by Henry James

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

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

What 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.
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The 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.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

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Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

---

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

---

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

The Last of the Valerii first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly for January 1874. It was reprinted the following year in James’s first published book, The Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales. It is sometimes included amongst collections of James’s ‘ghost stories’.

The godess Juno

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The Last of the Valerii – critical commentary

This whimsical tale is sometimes included in collections of James’s ‘ghost stories’ – of which he wrote several. He was quite prepared to give qualified consideration to various forms of the supernatural – ranging from the quite demonic intensity of The Turn of the Screw to the light-hearted Sir Edmund Orme and the almost farcical satire of The Third Person

No actual ‘ghost’ inhabits The Last of the Valerii but Marco Valerio explains to the narrator how strongly he feels his Pagan ancestry as a citizen of Rome. And of course Roman history was deeply Pagan for seven centuries before the arrival of Christianity, and it was also part of the Greek empire – something that Marco acknowledges in calling his unearthed godess ‘Greek’.

It is interesting to note that at the outset of the tale, Martha offers to change her religion to Marco’s, but he protests that he is not a ‘good Catholic’. This turns out to be true in that he is far more deeply moved by Paganism. It is a neat turn of irony, given the events of the tale, that she wishes to excavate old Italy, whereas Marco thinks it should be left alone. He knows where his history is – because he feels it inside of himself. This is a story of the pre-Christian Italian past casting its influence into the present.

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The Last of the Valerii – study resources

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

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

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

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

The Last of the Valerii – read the original text

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

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The Last of the Valerii – plot summary

The un-named narrator, an American painter, is in Rome where his god-daughter Martha is engaged to Count Marco Valerio. They offer to make sacrifices by changing religion for each other before the wedding. After the marriage the narrator is a frequent visitor to their antique villa. The couple seem idyllically happy, but the narrator finds the count emotionally empty, if polite.

Martha decides that she wants to excavate the villa’s grounds in search of antiquities, but her husband thinks that old things should be left in their place. However, when a statue of Juno is unearthed he is delighted. He becomes very possessive and secretive about the statue, and it is thought that he has confiscated a detached hand and regards it as a sort of holy relic.

Marco becomes distant from the people around him, including his wife. The narrator fears that some of Marco’s ancestral vices might re-surface, and he challenges him over his moodiness. But Marco insists that he is entirely sane and happy. Martha on the other hand is becoming increasingly unhappy.

Some time later the narrator meets Marco in the Pantheon and finds that he is deeply immersed in a form of neo-Paganism, which he sees as part of his historical birthright as an Italian.

Late one night the narrator comes across the Count prostrate in reverential worship before the statue. The excavation chief tells the narrator that such cases are common – because there are still traces of primitive belief amongst some Italians.

The narrator shares his concerns with Martha, who is sympathetic to her husband if only he will share his beliefs with her. When they go to see the statue, they discover blood on an altar that has been placed before it, and the Count is nowhere to be found.

The next day Martha and the narrator arrange for the statue to be re-buried in the grounds. This breaks the spell, and the count returns to normal, though he retains the detached hand as a memento of his relationship with the ‘Greek’ goddess.

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Principal characters

I	the un-named narrator, an American painter
Martha	his god-daughter, a rich young American girl
Count Marco Valerio	a handsome young Italian

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Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Other works by Henry James

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

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

What 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.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

The 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.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

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Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

---

tutorial commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Lesson of the Master was first published in The Universal Review for July-August 1888. It later appeared in the collection of stories which included The Marriages, The Pupil, Brooksmith, The Solution, and Sir Edmund Orme published in New York and London by Macmillan in 1892.

Lake Geneva

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The Lesson of the Master – critical commentary

This is one of a number of tales which James wrote exploring the competing claims of devotion to the literary life and what would be required for marriage and family life. It should be no surprise to anybody who has read The Path of Duty, Crapy Cornelia, The Wheel of Time and A Landscape Painter that the conclusion inevitably turns out to be to remain single.

Henry St George is a successful novelist – but one who has not written anything of note for quite some time. Paul Overt, as his enthusiastic younger admirer, is hoping to learn something from him of a literary nature – but the lesson turns out to be one in life, not art.

St George warns Overt quite explicitly that marriage and the responsibilities it entails will hamper his efforts to achieve something of great artistic value. He even argues that he himself has fallen foul of the trap of worldly success. ‘I’ve had everything. In other words, I’ve missed everything.’ From a psychological point of view it is worth noting that even though his family life has been ostensibly successful, his wife prevents him from smoking and drinking.

Of course the major irony of the tale is that St George does not follow his own advice. When his wife dies, he rapidly snatches at the chance of marrying attractive and aesthetically inclined Marian Fancourt. But following the logic of his own arguments, he does not return to the altar of high art.

The second irony is that Paul Overt is deeply wounded at losing the woman he loved to the man he most admired. But he is compensated by what appears to be literary success. By choosing to remain single and exiling himself for two years’ productive work (on the shores of Lake Geneva) he thereby triumphs with a creative success.

It would therefore appear that the tale illustrates the validity of St George’s argument that the artist must sacrifice normal human relations for the sake of artistic success – as Henry James was to do himself. The artist must forego the

full, rich, masculine, human, general life, with all its responsibilities and duties and burdens and sorrows and joys – all the domestic and social initiations

At times in the story it is difficult to escape the feeling that James is talking to himself about these conflicts of interest which he explored in so many of his tales. But the weakness in the position St George takes is that his concepts of artistic success are wrapped up in so many abstract and metaphysical notions and expressed in large scale over-generalisations. He complains that he has done everything in life except

The great thing … the sense of having done the best — the sense, which is the real life of the artist and the absence of which is his death, of having drawn from his intellectual instrument the finest music that nature had hidden in it, of having played it as it should be played. He either does that or he doesn’t — and if he doesn’t he isn’t worth speaking of. And precisely those who really know don’t speak of him. He may still hear a great chatter, but what he hears most is the incorruptible silence of Fame.

Now the tale might be offered in a light-hearted spirit of fun (Leon Edel says the subject is ‘treated largely as a joke’) but it isn’t really possible to take entirely seriously an argument which is based on such ethereal suppositions. James is performing the literary equivalent of sleight of hand by appealing to this level of artistic achievement without making any effort to demonstrate its substance.

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The Lesson of the Master – study resources

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

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

Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon US

Tales of Henry James – Norton Critical Editions

The Lesson of the Master – Hesperus Classics

The Lesson of the Master – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

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The Lesson of the Master – story synopsis

Part I   Young author Paul Overt arrives at a country house weekend summer party hoping to meet the celebrated writer Henry St George. He is slightly shocked by his wife Mrs St George, who announces that she once made her husband burn a ‘bad’ book. Overt believes he can recognise literary and artistic ‘types’, and is surprised that St George looks so conventional. St George has also not written anything of merit for quite some time.

Part II   At lunch Overt sits opposite St George, who appears to be flirting with pretty young Marian Fancourt, to whom Overt is afterwards introduced by her father. She tells him how much she admires his books and reveals that St George is critical of his own work and wishes to meet Overt whose writing he has read. They meet St George in the house, where Overt continues to persuade himself of the older man’s virtues, despite the fact that it is clear he has not read Overt’s work. There is then a walk in the park, where Overt accompanies Mrs St George, who he later learns is not in good health.

Part III   After dinner Overt is joined in the smoking room by St George, who praises Overt’s writing, confesses his own declining powers, and recommends not having children. He reveals that his wife forbids him to smoke and drink. St George invites Overt to dinner at his own country house, and then they share their enthusiasm for Marian Fancourt, who St George urges him to pursue.

Part IV   Overt meets Marian Fancourt at an art exhibition in London. They make further arrangements to meet, and are joined by St George, who has invited here there. St George takes her away to drive through Hyde Park, leaving Overt puzzled and a little envious. Nevertheless, next Sunday he visits Marian at home in Manchester Square , where they compare notes on St George, and Overt is so impressed by her artistic and literary appreciation that he falls in love with her. As he is leaving Manchester Square he sees St George arriving at the house. When Overt visits her again the following Sunday she tells him that St George will not be seeing her again.

Part V   Overt eventually goes to dinner at St George’s house in Ennismore Gardens, after which he is invited to stay for conversation in the windowless library and study. St George once again claims that he has prostituted his own talent for financial gain, and that his wife and children are an impediment to his reaching an artistic high point. He claims that material and domestic success has prevented him from achieving his true potential. When the subject of Miss Fancourt crops up, St George argues that Overt must give her up if he wishes to be a successful writer. Overt claims that such is his wish.

Part VI   Fired with enthusiasm, Overt leaves England and goes to stay on Lake Geneva to work on his next book. On receiving news of the death of Mrs St George, he is puzzled by her husband’s appreciative catalogue of her qualities and good offices. Overt thinks of returning, but stays away for two years to finish his novel. When he returns to London however, he learns that Miss Fancourt is due to marry St George. Overt feels he has been duped by both of them, but when he visits a party at Manchester Square St George claims that he has been entirely consistent in his views – and has given up writing. Overt goes home to an uncertain future, but when his book appears in the autumn it is a success.

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The Lesson of the Master – characters

I	the occasional outer narrator
Paul Overt	young author of Ginistrella
Henry St George	celebrated author of Shadowmere
Mrs St George	his wife
General Fancourt	ex India army officer
Marian Fancourt	his intelligent and attractive daughter

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Henry James’s study

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Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Other works by Henry James

The 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.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

The 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.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

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Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

---

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

---

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

The Madonna of the Future first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly for March 1873. It was reprinted two years later as part of James’s first book, The Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales, published by Osgood in Boston, 1875. It became a very popular tale and was frequently reprinted in collections of James’s stories.

Raphael – The Madonna of the Chair (1513-1514)

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The Madonna of the Future – critical commentary

James wrote a number of stories about art, artists, their achievements, and their reputations – both whilst alive and after their death. The Madonna of the Future is about a would be artist. Theobald has an enormous reverence for the world of Art, and Italian Renaissance painters in particular. He is well informed about the history and the technical details of what they have produced.

He takes what we would now call a high romantic view of art – that an appreciation of its values offers entrance into a quasi-religious and transcendental realm which can sustain the individual even whilst they might live in reduced circumstances or even poverty. This is a view of art which John Carey discusses at some length in his study What Good are the Arts?

Theobald has worshipped at this shrine of art for years and years – and he gives a very persuasive account of his enthusiasms in the face of the narrator’s more sceptical, materialist view of art appreciation. But there are two problems with Theobald’s position. The first is that he has no real creative life force, and the second is that he has been living ‘in denial’ with his plan for the ultimate art work.

His idea for the ideal Madonna has been gestating for two decades, but no fruit has been borne. And this is reflected in his relationship to Serafina. She might have been a virgin-like Madonna (with child) when he first met her, but now she is an old woman. She clearly gets by via her association with ‘visiting gentlemen’ – which is perhaps as close as James could come in the 1870s to implying that she was a prostitute.

What makes the story admirable is the well-sustained pathos of Theobald’s characterisation, and his ultimate tragedy in defeat of an unrealised dream. There is no bitterness or schadenfreude in the story. Mrs Coventry is quite right: Theobald has been telling everybody about his grand scheme, but has produced nothing.

Yet the fact that the narrator follows him into his dream and into his poverty lends a sympathetic pathos to this character sketch of a clearly deluded man. James wrote about artists who could not paint, authors who could not write, great thinkers who could only talk – and yet he was enormously productive himself, for the whole of his fifty year creative life span.

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The Madonna of the Future – study resources

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

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

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

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

The Madonna of the Future – eBook formats at Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

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The Madonna of the Future – plot summary

An un-named outer-narrator relays the account of an inner-narrator (H—) in which he describes a youthful visit to Florence. When viewing the sculptures in the Palazzo Vecchio, he is accosted by Mr Theobald, a man who enthuses about the spirit of the place and its general artistic heritage. He is an American and claims to be an artist with standards so fastidious that he has not sold or kept a single picture.

Next day the narrator meets him again in the Uffizi gallery. Theobald continues to rhapsodise about Art, and when they proceed to the Pitti Palace the narrator himself is full of enthusiasm for Raphael’s picture The Madonna of the Chair. Theobald takes an idealist, almost metaphysical view of art criticism, whereas the narrator offers a more materialist interpretation of the picture – that pretty young women were fashionable at the time the portrait was painted. Theobald’s reply to this becomes a prescription for what could be done in the present historical phase. The narrator guesses that he is in fact describing his own aspirations.

The two men meet every day for the next fortnight, and the narrator continues to be astonished by Theobald’s enthusiasm, his knowledge, and his commitment to the world of high Art.

However, Mrs Coventry, a long-time American resident and patronne in Florence informs the narrator that Theobald is a talentless dreamer in whom people have given up believing. He claims to be painting a Madonna which will be a composite of all previous masterpieces of the Italian school.

The narrator invites Theobald to an opera, but he refuses and instead invites the narrator to meet Serafina, the most beautiful woman in Italy, who acts as his model. The narrator is disconcerted to find that she turns out to be an unexceptional and rather stout woman who is no longer young. Theobald reveals that she was an unmarried mother who he rescued and has maintained ever since, following the death of her child. He is also shown Theobald’s portrait sketch of the child, which he admires.

When Theobald asks the narrator his opinion of Serafina, he tells him quite honestly that she is old. This stark honesty shocks Theobald, who realises that he has spent years deceiving himself. The narrator feels slightly guilty for bringing him to this realisation, and encourages him to finish the long-awaited portrait of Serafina as Madonna. Theobald is crestfallen, but vows to finish it in a fortnight.

Theobald then disappears, so the narrator goes back to Serafina’s apartment in order to locate him. She is entertaining another man – who is a vulgar and pretentious artist of trashy objects. Serafina defends Theobald as an honourable friend of twenty years standing, and gives the narrator his address. The other visitor tries to sell the narrator the tasteless statuettes he makes.

When the narrator visits Theobald, he finds him in miserably poor conditions, He is also paralysed with inactivity in front of an empty canvas. He realises that for all his theorising, he has no creative power whatever. The narrator looks after him, but he collapses in a brain fever and dies. After the funeral, the narrator meets Serafina in a church, where she implicitly reveals to him that she is a prostitute.

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Principal characters

I	the un-named outer narrator
H—	the inner-narrator
Mr Theobald	an American art enthusiast
Mrs Coventry	an American patroness of art in Florence
Serafina	Theobald’s ideal woman
—	an ‘artist’ of kitsch rubbish statuettes

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Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

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Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Other works by Henry James

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

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

What 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.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

The 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.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

---

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

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