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

The Private Life was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in April 1892. Its next appearance in book form was as part of the collection The Private Life, published in London by Osgood, McIlvaine and in New York by Harper in 1893. It is one of a number of tales of James’s late period in which he explored the relationship between writers, their work, and their personal lives.

The Swiss Alps

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The Private Life – critical commentary

We know that the origins of this tale lie in Henry James having admired then met Robert Browning (1812-1889) only to find that the celebrated poet, famous for his dense, complex, and highly intellectualised works, was something of a washout as a conversationalist. In other words, his talent went into his work – not into his public persona. James responded to this phenomenon by thinking of the public and private personae as two different people:.

This explained to the imagination the mystery: our delightful inconceivable celebrity was double, constructed in two quite distinct and ‘water-tight’ compartments – one of these figured by the gentleman who sat at a table all alone, silent and unseen, and wrote admirably deep and brave and intricate things; while the gentleman who regularly came forth to sit at a quite different table and substantially and promiscuously and multitudinously dine stood for its companion. They had nothing to do, the so dissimilar twins, with each other; the diner could exist but by the cessation of the writer, whose emergence, on his side, depended on his – and our! – ignoring the diner.

The Lord Mellifont character is almost the opposite. He is the public performer – ‘the man whose whole personality goes forth so in representation and aspect and sonority and phraseology and accomplishment and frontage’. He is urbane and controlling; he sets the tone for everyone else and orchestrates their conversations and social interchanges. But he has no individual substance. He is an empty shell – so much so that when left alone he ‘disappears’ – literally, in Blanche Adney’s experience on their excursion.

The weakness of these two similar conceits is that in neither case are the characteristics dramatised – despite James’s urgings to himself in the notebooks “Dramatise it, dramatise it!” We are told (by the narrator) about Clare Vawdrey’s greatness but not shown any evidence of it. We are told in the same way about Lord Mellifont’s urbane and sophisticated public persona – but not given any dramatised evidence of it.

The ghost story

This tale is often classified as one of James’s ghost stories. But its dramatic weakness also contributes to making the ‘two’ Clare Vawdreys and the ‘disappearing’ Mellifont both unconvincing, and actually unnecessary. It would be perfectly reasonable and persuasive to have a talented writer who does not shine socially, and the sort of pompous stuffed shirt we take Mellifont to be who is reduced to nothing when he is alone. James pulled off something of this sort in The Coxon Fund which he completed two years later.

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The Private Life – study resources

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

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

Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Private Life – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

The Private Life – Oxford Classics – 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 Private Life – plot summary

An un-named narrator recounts the annual holiday of a group of socialite London friends in Switzerland. He describes the celebrated novelist (and talker) Clarence (‘Clare’) Vawdrey, who takes a neutral attitude to all conversational topicsLady Mellifont is worried that her husband is missing with the slightly raffish actress Blanche Adney. However, Blanche eventually returns, hinting that something happened on their walk, whilst Lord Mellifont goes to dress for dinner.

Lord Mellifont is a host who sets and controls the tone of dinner and its conversations. Blanche |Adney hopes that Clare Vawdrey will write a play in which she will star as a tragic heroine. Vawdrey claims that he has written a ‘magnificent passage’ and the company clamour for him to read it after dinner. But when the performance is organised he can’t remember a word, and even admits that there is no manuscript.

However, Blanche wants the narrator to search for anything that Vawdrey has written, and she takes the author onto the terrace, leaving the narrator free to search his hotel room. But when the narrator goes into Vawdrey’s room the author is already there, writing in the dark., and he makes no response to the narrator’s interruption.

Next day the narrator goes out walking, but after dinner he tells Blanche about his mysterious experience. She confirms that she was with Vawdrey on the terrace at the time the narrator saw him in his room. The narrator concludes that there are two Vawdreys – an empty public version, and a substantial private one.

Blanche also reveals that Lord Mellifont is the opposite – a man who has no substance when alone, only in his public persona. The narrator and Blanche then compare their theories. Blanche claims she is ‘in love’ with the real Clare Vawdrey, and she recounts how Lord Mellifont ‘disappeared’ when she was not there to create an audience for him on their recent excursion.

They meet Lord Mellifont who is out doing some watercolour painting. He presents a picture to Blanche. The narrator and Blanche plot to ‘find’ Mellifont and Vawdrey alone to test their theories. The narrator takes the painting for Lord Mellifont to sign, but he is intercepted by Lady Mellifont, who says she will arrange the signature for him – which he takes as a sign of her embarrassment on her husband’s behalf.

He then goes off to take Vawdrey an umbrella. They shelter from a thunderstorm, and the narrator is very disappointed by the banal nature of Vawdrey’s conversation. When they return to the hotel Blanche tells the narrator that she has been with the ‘real’ Vawdrey and has told him that she loves him. She also claims to have possession of the great part he has written for her – but when the party returns to London this doesn’t appear to be the case.

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The Private Life – principal characters

I	the un-named narrator, a writer
Lord Mellifont	a charming socialite
Lady Mellifont	his timorous wife
Clarence (‘Clare’) Vawdrey	a celebrated writer
Blanche Adney	a comedy actress
Vincent Adney	her husband, a composer and violinist

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Ghost stories by Henry James

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)

The Ghostly Rental (1876)

Sir Edmund Orme (1891)

The Private Life (1892)

Owen Wingrave (1892)

The Friends of the Friends (1896)

The Turn of the Screw (1898)

The Real Right Thing (1899)

The Third Person (1900)

The Jolly Corner (1908)

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

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 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 Pupil first appeared in Longman’s Magazine for March—April 1891. It next appeared in the collection The Lesson of the Master published in New York and London by Macmillan in 1919.

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

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The Pupil – critical commentary

Towards the end of the nineteenth century (and into the twentieth) Henry James wrote a number of works whose subjects were dysfunctional families and the neglect of children. One thinks of What Masie Knew (1897) and The Awkward Age (1899) but the most obvious dramatic parallel is with The Turn of the Screw (1898). In that tale a governess looking after two young children frightens one of them to death by confronting him with what she thinks is the ghost of a former servant Peter Quint.

In The Pupil Pemberton is presented with the avaricious and socially demanding notion of the Moreens that he is now responsible for their son Morgan’s welfare. We know that Pemberton has sacrificed time, money, and intellectual energy on the boy’s upbringing – but to be confronted with a quasi-formal suggestion that he assume full responsibility for his charge causes him to hesitate. It is that hesitation which causes the boy to lose faith in his protector, and we are led to believe that the emotional strain precipitates his heart failure.

The homo-erotic theme

It is impossible to read the tale without noticing the very strong element of homo-erotic attachment between the teacher and his pupil. And the attraction appears to be mutual. Quite apart from the touching and glances that are exchanged between the pair, Morgan buys Pemberton a tie in Paris, and Pemberton later reveals that he has kept a lock of the boy’s hair as a souvenir.

I don’t think this has any particular bearing upon the meaning of the story as a whole, but it does show that from an early point in his writing career, James was giving expression to emotional relationships between men (as he was to do later between women in texts such as The Bostonians).

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The Pupil – 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

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

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

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

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The Pupil – plot summary

Part I.   Pemberton, a young graduate of Oxford and Yale University, has spent all his inheritance on a European tour and is forced to seek employment as a private tutor to Morgan Moreen, the precocious younger son of a rich American family living in Nice. He is anxious about his salary and the boy in his charge.

Part II.   Pemberton discovers that the family are polyglot bohemians in an unusual manner and that the boy is supernaturally clever in a way that makes them want to keep a distance from their own son.

Part III.   Pemberton forms a very intimate understanding with Morgan which centres on judgements of the boy’s parents (and which also contains homo-erotic undertones).

Part IV.   After a year the family move to live in Paris, where Pemberton begins to notice that the family neglect their son, whose clothes become old and shabby. Pemberton and Morgan become flaneurs and share a degree of poverty. The Moran family fail to pay Pemberton any salary. He threatens to leave, but has no money to return to England. When they do pay him, he realises that he cannot make the break. He begins to see that the Moreens are ‘adventurers who don’t pay their debts. He also perceives that they are toadies and snobs.

Part V.   Pemberton feels that it would be improper to criticise his parents to the boy, but Morgan himself tells Pemberton that he ought to take flight from their negligence. Pemberton threatens that he will reveal their misdeeds to the boy, and Mrs Mooreen gives him fifty Francs and tells him he ought to be grateful to work for nothing.. They argue about responsibility for the boy, and he refuses the money.

Part VI.   Morgan tells him that a former nurse had left the family for similar reasons: they would not pay her. They discuss the idea of running away together. Morgan knows that his parents are lying and cheating, and wonders what resources they have to survive. They agree that Pemberton should leave at the first opportunity of locating alternative employment, and they feel better now that all the facts of the situation have been revealed and shared.

Part VII.   Morgan wonders why his parents are such louche arrivistes and wishes he could feel less shame on their behalf.The family moves to Venice. Morgan is now fifteen and taller. He feels more prepared to meet the world and thinks to attend Pemberton’s old college at Oxford. Mrs Moreen asks Pemberton to lend her money. When an offer of another tutoring post in England comes up, Pemberton leaves the Moreens.

Part VIII.   Pemberton takes up his post tutoring an ‘opulent youth’ and (rather improbably) sends money to Mrs Moreen. She replies telling him that Morgan is desperately ill. But when Pemberton travels to Paris he discovers that Morgan is not ill at all, and that Mrs Moreen has withheld his letters to Morgan and tricked him into returning. She accuses Pemberton of taking their son away from them, and that he now has full responsibility for staying with them. Morgan meanwhile wants to be taken away from his parents, who he regards as frauds.

Pemberton senses that the family fortunes are about to crash, and he resurrects the idea of running away with Morgan. He uses up all his savings, and the Moreens move to a cheap hotel. When the family crash does occur, they ask him to take charge of Morgan. But the emotional stress of the scene is too much for Morgan, and he dies on the spot.

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Principal characters

Pemberton	a young tutor, ex Oxford and Yale
The Moreens	Americans living in Europe
Morgan Moreen	their precociously talented but sickly son
Ulrich Moreen	Morgan’s older brother (20)
Paula Moreen	Morgan’s sister
Amy Moreen	Morgan’s sister

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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

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

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

---

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

---

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

---

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

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

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The Real Right Thing – critical commentary

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

Biography

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

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

Mrs Doyne

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

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

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

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

The ghost story

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

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

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

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

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

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

Structural weakness

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

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

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

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

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

---

The Real Right Thing – study resources

The Ghost Stories of Henry James – Wordsworth edn – Amazon UK

The Ghost Stories of Henry James – Wordsworth edn – Amazon US

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

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

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

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

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

The Real Right Thing – Gutenberg Consortia eBook

---

The Real Right Thing – plot summary

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

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

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

---

Principal characters

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

---

Henry James’s study

---

Ghost stories by Henry James

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)

The Ghostly Rental (1876)

Sir Edmund Orme (1891)

The Private Life (1892)

Owen Wingrave (1892)

The Friends of the Friends (1896)

The Turn of the Screw (1898)

The Real Right Thing (1899)

The Third Person (1900)

The Jolly Corner (1908)

---

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

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

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

---

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

---

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

---

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

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

Victorian illustration

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The Real Thing – critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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The Real Thing – study resources

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

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

Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Real Thing – Classic Reprint edition

The Real Thing – Kindle edition

Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition

The Real Thing – 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 Real Thing – plot summary

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

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

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

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

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Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

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Principal characters

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

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Henry James’s study

---

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 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

---

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

Woman before Mirror – Jakab Marastoni (1804-1860)

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

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The Romance of Certain Old Clothes – commentary

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

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

---

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes – study resources

The 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

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

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

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

---

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes – plot summary

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

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

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

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

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

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The Romance of Certain Old Clothes – characters

Mrs Willoughby	a widow
Bernard Willoughby	her son, who becomes a lawyer
Viola Willoughby	her eldest daughter, tall, attractive
Pedita Willoughby	her younger daughter, small, unattractive
Arthur Lloyd	Bernard’s rich English college friend

---

Ghost stories by Henry James

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)

The Ghostly Rental (1876)

Sir Edmund Orme (1891)

The Private Life (1892)

Owen Wingrave (1892)

The Friends of the Friends (1896)

The Turn of the Screw (1898)

The Real Right Thing (1899)

The Third Person (1900)

The Jolly Corner (1908)

---

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

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

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

---

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

The Solution first appeared in the monthly magazine The New Review in three issues between December 1889 and February 1990. It was specially commissioned for the new publication, which was founded and edited by Archibald Grove. The story itself was based on an anecdote related to James by his friend the actress Fanny Kemble.

Frascati – Paul Flandrin

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The Solution – critical commentary

Social conventions

Contemporary readers might find it difficult to appreciate the social nicety which is at the crux of this tale. During a group excursion to a picnic, Wilmerding quite innocently goes for a walk with Veronica, the eldest daughter of Mrs Goldie. They are missing from the main group for some time.

In the nineteenth century (and earlier) the social conventions for contact between men and women were so tightly controlled that for a single woman to be alone with a single man – out of any supervision by a chaperone, a family friend, or any other third party – was considered to be a potential blot upon her reputation.

The inference is clearly a prurient fear of some sexual connection being made, but alongside or even beneath that in the case of the class James was writing about is a financial fear that social capital would be lost. The woman’s reputation could not be converted into real capital via marriage arranged on

Mrs Goldie’s social ambition is to find husbands for her daughters. This is not an easy task, because she herself has no money (compared with people in the circles where she is mixing) and two of her daughters are not attractive.

Veronica alone has the social capital of good looks; but if her reputation were to be sullied by what was considered an episode of improper behaviour, that capital would be lost. This is a situation he had already explored in his famous novella Daisy Miller more than ten years previously.

This is the crux of the trick played on Wilmerding by Montaut and the narrator: they know that he has such an elevated sense of honour that he will be prepared to marry Veronica if he thinks he has placed her in an untenable position.

The international dimension

Wilmerding is an upright and naive American who has found himself out of his depth amidst European social mores. From his republican background, he doesn’t realise the significance of taking an innocent stroll with a young unmarried woman.

The two Europeans, the narrator and Montaut, realise that Wilmerding has unwittingly placed himself in a socially embarrassing position, and they play on his credulity and his sense of honour – the Frenchman Montaut more unscrupulously than the English narrator. .

Fear of marriage

It is difficult not to see this as yet another variation on the theme of ‘fear of marriage’ which James explored in so many of his stories. We know that James debated with himself the tension between marriage and remaining a bachelor – always coming down on the side of the latter. And this is not even taking into account the homo-erotic impulses to which he eventually gave way later in life.

The story illustrates the danger posed by a pretty face and an unmarried woman. One innocent stroll in the Italian countryside is enough for a man of honour to be entrapped – obliged to proffer marriage when no such gesture was contemplated or intended.

Of course this instance is slightly amusing, because Wilmerding is rescued from his trapped condition by the whiles of a clever woman, Mrs Rushbrook, who simultaneously ‘bags her man’. Nevertheless, he has to pay a price, which Mrs Goldie is happy to seize on.

If you wished to push the ‘fear of women and marriage’ argument even further, you could argue that Mrs Rushbrook not only ‘snares’ Wilmerding, but also relieves him of his money in doing so. So – two women strip him of his independence and his money. Bachelors beware!

The framed narrative

James was very fond of the framed narrative – where there is an account of how the story comes about enclosing another more detailed narrative of the story itself. But the ‘frame’ here is not complete. The inner narrator (the un-named diplomat) is already dead when the story begins, and the main narrative is the outer-narrator’s reconstruction of events with ‘amplification’.

It is rather curious that James should take the trouble to create this double sourcing of the narrative when he makes no further use of it after the introductory paragraph. But it is entirely in keeping with his manner of creating stories, as the even more complex example of The Turn of the Screw proves.

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The Problem – study resources

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

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

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

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

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

The Solution – HTML version at The Ladder

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

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The Solution – plot summary

Part I. An un-named narrator, a former officer from the English diplomatic service, looks back to his posting in Rome in the early part of the nineteenth century when he was twenty-three. He mixes with attachés Wilmerding and Montaut from the United States and French embassies respectively in a social life which centres on an English widow Mrs Blanche Goldie and her three daughters.

They visit Mrs Goldie at an afternoon tea-party near Frascati, Wilmerding is missing for some time with Veronica, the most attractive of Mrs Goldie’s daughters. Montant argues to the narrator that this indiscretion obliges Wilmerding to make an offer of marriage to Veronica, otherwise her reputation will be compromised. They disagree, and make a bet on the outcome.

Part II. After the holiday the diplomats reassemble in Rome. The narrator teases Wilmerding for having returned without having made any formal commitment to Veronica. They discuss the subtle differences between American and European conventions regarding single men and women. As something of a joke, the narrator claims that Wilmerding has ‘gone too far’ with Veronica, at which Wilmerding professes complete innocence regarding his intentions.

Wilmerding consults Montant for advice – then suddenly leaves to go back to Frascati. Montant then claims he has won the bet – because Wilmerding will feel obliged to marry Veronica out of a sense of honour. But the narrator rides after Wilmerding, arriving back at Frascati to find that Wilmerding is already engaged to Veronica – so he rides on to seek advice from Mrs Rushbrook, the widow of an English naval officer who he wishes to marry.

Part III. The narrator feels very remorseful that his ‘joke’ has backfired and implores Mrs Rushbrook to help him quash the engagement. She argues that his best recourse would be to offer to marry Veronica himself. The next day the narrator goes to see Mrs Goldie to explain the misunderstanding. She refutes his arguments on the grounds that nobody knows what Wilmerding’s motives are.

She also challenges the narrator to propose marriage himself to Veronica – since although he has no money, he is very well connected and is expected to rise in the diplomatic service. Immediately afterwards, the narrator meets Wilmerding, Veronica, and Mrs Rushbrook, who are all very friendly. Mrs Rushbrook asks for details of Wilmerding’s social background.

Part IV. Back on duty in Rome, the narrator feels embarrassed and avoids Wilmerding. He visits Mrs Rushbrook, who has done nothing to help his secret plan, and thinks Veronica will blossom once she is married. But Wilmerding suddenly leaves Rome, having been rejected by Veronica. Next day the narrator confronts Mrs Rushbrook, who says she has offered her own money to the Goldies to buy off Wilmerding. Mrs Goldie, having come into money, goes off on a world tour. The narrator then reveals that Mrs Rushbrook in fact persuaded Veronica not to marry Wilmerding in exchange for his money – and that she had married him herself.

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Principal characters

I	the un-named outer narrator who relays the tale
—	an un-named inner narrator – a former member of the English diplomatic service
Mrs Blanche Goldie	a flamboyant English widow with three unmarried daughters
Veronica Goldie	the most attractive daughter
Rosina Goldie	unattractive
Augusta Goldie	unattractive
The General	American foreign officer in Rome – a Carolinian dandy
Henry Wilmerding	his secretary, a rich Quaker gentleman
Guy de Montaut	French attaché in Rome
Mrs Rushbrook	an accomplished English widow of a naval officer

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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.

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Other works by Henry James

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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.

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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