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

A Tragedy of Error was Henry James’s first published story. It appeared in The Continental Monthly magazine for February 1864 and was never reprinted during James’s lifetime. In fact it was only eventually rediscovered in the 1950s.

A Tragedy of Error – critical commentary

In common with some of James’s very earliest tales, this one is not much more that an elaborated anecdote or a squib – though one with a grimly ironic twist in its dramatic conclusion.

Its principal weakness is the second section where Hortense is in conversation with the boatman who rows her in the harbour. Seeking to create plausibility, James invents a long discussion of the sailor’s poverty in order to provide the motivation for accepting her proposal of a paid crime. The extended nature of this section unbalances the composition of the story.

But the predictable outcome is well plotted, and commendable for the understated manner in which the twenty-one year old James leaves the reader to work out the tragedy that is unfolding. No names are mentioned – but we know that through the well orchestrated sequence of events, it is Hortense’s lover who is murdered, whilst her husband arrives safely home.

Interpretation

It is also worth noting, given what we know of James’s work still to be written, that this is a story of an adulterous woman who is prepared to have her husband murdered. In 1864 this could be accepted as a jeu d’esprit, and the story can still be enjoyed in this way. But taken into the context of James’s work as a whole it demonstrates that his psychologically sceptical attitude to women was present from the outset.

A Tragedy of Error – 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 Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

A Tragedy of Error – plot summary

Part I.   Hortense de Bernier receives the sudden news in France that her husband will be joining her the next day on holiday from America. She discusses this embarrassing situation with her lover the Vicomte Louis de Meyrau, who tells her not to worry. But she does worry, and tries to calm her nerves with glassful of brandy

Part II.   Later that day, she goes down to the seafront, and after witnessing a sailor bullying his nephew, she employs him to row her across the harbour. On the way she questions him about his work; he explains his poverty; and eventually she employs him to murder her husband when his ship arrives the next day. He sets a very high price on the agreement.

Part III.   On reaching home, she receives a note telling her that Louis de Meyrau intends to meet her husband on his ship the next day She is unsure about her lover’s motives, and cannot sleep.

Part IV.   Louis de Meyrau meets the ship next day, is told that M. de Bernier has already gone ashore, and asks a boatman to take him to the de Bernier home. When Hortense goes out into the garden of her seafront home, she is met by her husband.

A Tragedy of Error – principal characters

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.
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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.
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© Roy Johnson 2013

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adina first appeared in Scribner’s Monthly during May—June 1874. This split across two monthly issues may account for the bipartite structure of the tale. Its next appearance in book form was as part of the collection of tales Travelling Companions published in 1919 by Boni and Liveright, New York.

Albano – Giorgione (1477—1510)

Adina – critical commentary

Romance

This tale has many elements of the medieval romance or the fairy tale which James had explored around this time (one thinks of Benvolio written the following year) – the discovered gem, the Italian setting, the young girl’s elopement. In fact James draws attention to this very aspect of the tale during his own narrative:

it ought to be out of a novel – such a thing as love at [first] sight; such a thing as an unspoken dialogue, between a handsome young Italian with a wrong, in a starlit garden, and a fanciful Western maid at a window.

And yet there are elements of structural detailing and thematic unity in the narrative of a kind which James would develop in his later tales which lift it above the ordinary romance. The tales has a deeply embedded narrative logic which lifts it above this plane

Geography

The story starts in Rome, where Scrope and the narrator are based. They ride out into the countryside and encounter Angelo – as it happens, near Albano, which will feature later in the tale. Quite apart from the issue of the topaz, they learn his name, where he lives, and the fact that his uncle is a clergyman. All of these details become important later in the story.

When Mrs Waddington takes fright at the prospect of the famous Roman fever, she decamps with Adina to Albano – which is the region south of Rome which includes the papal retreat – and also L’Arricia, which is where Angelo lives. Even though Scrope has taken advantage of Angelo, they are playing on his home territory.

Angelo thus has ready local access to pay court to Adina, and his own uncle on hand to effect the early morning marriage ceremony. The romance elements are there – but they are backed up by the sort of factual details in the tradition of realistic narrative fiction which was James’s natural milieu. Angelo and Adina even go to live in Rome after the marriage ceremony – which completes the geographic symmetry.

Structure, symbol, and parallels

The most obvious feature in terms of artistic devices is Angelo and his full name – Angelo Beati – ‘blessed angel’ – because he does in the end triumph with the ‘prize’ of Adina, who he says in the end is the more valuable: “she’s worth more than the topaz”.

And when Scrope finally throws the topaz back into its historical origins in the Tiber, he is on the Ponte del Angelo, and we already know that Saint Angelo is the young Italian’s patron saint name.

There is also ironic prefigurement of the story-line in Scrope’s observation:

some knowing person would have got word of the affair, and whispered to the Padre Girolamo that his handsome young nephew had been guided by a miracle to a fortune, and might marry a contessa.

Angelo does exactly that – twice. First he attempts to impress his village girl friend Nietta with the few scudi he has gained – but nothing comes of it, because the reward is not big enough to impress her. But then he succeeds on a much bigger symbolic level by enchanting and marrying Adina.

Psychological reading

This is the story of a pretty, wayward girl who breaks her promise to marry a serious though not good-looking man, and who runs off with a penniless, albeit handsome stranger. She is not dissimilar to the deaf-mute girl in Professor Fargo who suddenly runs off with a complete mountebank and charlatan. Adina is easily swayed – at first attracted to and even engaged to an ‘ugly’ classical scholar. But lured by only smiles, glimpses, and maybe the odd message from her window, she agrees to marry somebody she hardly knows.

Even though James was only just turned thirty at the time of the story’s composition, this is one of many of his works which offers a warning against women in general and marriage in particular. It is a theme which runs through many of the tales and into the ‘late phase’ of his greatest novels.

Adina – 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

Adina – plot summary

Part I
The inner narrator and his friend Scrope are in Rome, riding in the countryside, when they encounter Angelo, a handsome young man who has just found an old gemstone in the roots of a lightning-struck tree. Scrope buys it from him at what is obviously a low price. He rationalises his opportunism, but the narrator has reservations about the transaction.

Scrope cleans and polishes the stone,, which turns out to be a golden topaz, the personal intaglio of the Emperor Tiberius. He swears the narrator to secrecy about the discovery, who in turn advises him not to even reveal the matter to a mistress.

When Scrope’s cousin Mrs Waddington arrives in Rome, he falls in love with her step-daughter Adina. Mrs Waddington and the narrator cannot understand why a pretty young girl should fall for an unattractive man such as Scrope. When they all go to Christmas Mass at St Peter’s Scrope and Adina stay out late alone. Next day Scrope reveals that he and Adina are engaged.

The narrator walks out alone next day and meets Angelo, who is eaten up with anger over the topaz and the money, none of which has done him any good. The narrator offers to help him if he can.

Part II
Scrope agrees to meet Angelo, but when they do he refuses to pay any more for the jewel. Adina says she will not wear the topaz because Tiberius was such a cruel emperor. They all meet Angelo in the Borgese gardens. He is composed, but threatens to ‘hurt’ Scrope at some point as revenge for his unfair treatment.

Mrs Waddington and Adina de-camp to Albano The narrator visits them, and on his way back to Rome meets Angelo, who lives nearby. Later he meets Adina alone, praying in a church. She begins to act strangely, and Scrope confesses to the narrator that he is worried about her. When Adina suddenly breaks off her engagement to Scrope, the narrator suspects that she has somehow fallen under the spell of Angelo. He advises Mrs Waddington to leave Albano the very next day. But the following morning a note reveals that Adina has married Angelo and already left with him.

Some time later the narrator goes to see Adina and Angelo who live in Rome. Angelo is radiantly happy, whilst Adina is ‘pale and grave’. But she says she wishes to remain with Angelo and ‘be forgotten’ by her relatives. When the narrator reveals this state of affairs to Scrope as they stroll in the city centre, Scrope throws the golden topaz into the Tiber.

Principal characters

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

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.

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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.
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Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

tutorial commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

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

An International Episode – critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

The new American woman

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

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

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

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

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

An International Episode – study resources

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 Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

An International Episode – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

An International Episode – story synopsis

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

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

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

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

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

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

An International Episode – characters

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 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

© Roy Johnson 2014

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simplon Pass 1919 – by John Singer Sargeant

At Isella – critical commentary

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

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

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

At Isella – study resources

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 Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

At Isella – plot summary

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

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

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

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

Principal characters

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benvolio – critical commentary

The fairy tale

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

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

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

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

Theme

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

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

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

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

Benvolio – study resources

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

Benvolio – eBook versions at Gutenberg

Benvolio – facsimile of 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

Benvolio – plot summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Principal characters

Henry James travelling with Edith Wharton

Benvolio journeys with the Countess?

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
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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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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

© Roy Johnson 2013

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

tutorial, commentary, and study resources

Collaboration was first published in The English Illustrated Magazine for September 1892. It next appeared in the collection of Henry James tales The Private Life published in London by Osgood McIllvaine in 1893. The other stories included in this volume were The Wheel of Time, Lord Beaupre, The Visits, Owen Wingrave, and The Private Life.

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904)

Collaboration – story synopsis

An un-named American artist living in Paris holds regular soirees for his friends, who are poets, musicians, and critics of various nationalities. There is rivalry and contention on nationalistic and aesthetic questions such as ‘the novel’ and ‘artistic temperament’.

The French poet Vendemer likes the music of the German composer Heidenmauer, who reciprocates by liking the Frenchman’s poems. Heidenmauer sets some of the poems to music, which impresses the author. As a result Heidenmauer then asks Vendemer to collaborate with him on an opera, an offer which he accepts. Vendemer believes that Art knows no patriotism or boundaries.

The narrator is reproached by ultra-patriotic Madame de Brindes for encouraging this collaboration. Having lost husband and relatives during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870—1871, she is inimical to all things German. Unless the collaboration is stopped, she will call off the engagement of her daughter Paula to Vendemer. She appeals to the narrator, asking him to persuade Vendemer to cancel the project – but his attempt fails.

Heidenmauer and Vendemer go to live together in Italy, short of money but fuelled by their creative enthusiasm. The engagement is called off as threatened, and yet Paula plays Heidenmauer’s compositions at the piano. The narrator sees this as the triumph of Art over prejudice.

Principal characters

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

Collaboration – critical commentary

This tale is hardly more than a sketch or an anecdote. James clearly sides with the argument that ‘art knows no boundaries’. Although he was obviously sensitive to national temperaments and schools of art, about which he wrote a great deal – see French Novelists and Poets for example – James was a committed internationalist. He was after all born in the United States, educated largely in Europe, lived in England, France, and Italy for most of his adult life, and eventually took up British nationality as a symbol of solidarity during the First World War – at a time when America was maintaining its isolationist position of non-interference.

He also believed that the practice of the arts was a high and noble calling – though this story is unusual in having a musician as one of its principal characters. More usually, his artist figures are writers or painters. It is also relatively rare for him to create sympathetic characters in his work who are German.

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.

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

Daisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Daisy’s innocence and her audacity challenge social conventions, and she seems to be compromising her reputation by her independent behaviour. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. This novella is a great study in understatement and symbolic power.
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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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© Roy Johnson 2014

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Covering End only ever appeared once as a long story during James’s lifetime – in the publication The Two Magics which was printed in 1898 and also contained The Turn of the Screw. James refers to the work in his notebooks as a comedy – and the work was certainly written to a commission. It had actually been written earlier, in 1895 as a play for Ellen Terry.

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Covering End – critical commentary

James and the theatre

Never was a story so obviously conceived as a theatre piece. James put a great deal of hopes and dreams in his attempts to become a successful dramatist. We now know that he failed miserably, being booed off stage at the opening night of Guy Domville in 1895. But he rather resourcefully converted many of his unused theatrical materials into prose fiction.

Covering End was originally written as a one act play called Summersoft in 1895 for his friend the actress Ellen Terry, but it was never performed. As a matter of fact, after he had converted the play to a story, he later went on to convert it back into a three act play called The High Bid, which was produced briefly in 1907.

Dramatic unity

The origins of this tale are nowhere more evident than in the amazing dramatic unity of the story in terms of time, location, and action. Everything takes place in the old house at Covering End; the drama unfolds in the space of a single afternoon; and the action is more or less continuous, with no temporal breaks.

All the characters are given perfectly plausible reasons for their entrances and their exits, through doors, garden windows, and the usual architectural devices of the proscenium arch theatre. and the drama flows from one character’s conversation with one person to the next in an unbroken flow.

Characters remove themselves from the ‘stage’ of the action on the pretext of taking tea, looking at other rooms, or looking for someone else to whom they wish to speak.

Comedy, melodrama, or farce?

The characters in this tale are stereotypes from boulevard melodrama. Mr Prodmore is a pompous stock villain of supercilious vainglory – although he remains unpunished and does end up with all the money. He dresses in a ridiculously exaggerated fashion; he is motivated entirely by greed and self-promotion; and he mistreats his daughter.

Clement Yule is a young and handsome hero. He is an impoverished aristocratic landowner with radical and humane principles; he never seeks to take advantage; and he is kind towards others.

Mrs Gracedew is a pantomime fairy godmother. She has travelled from Boston to view and appreciate the hous;, she seems to have limitless finances to solve Yule’s problems; she assists Cora in her romantic ambitions, and lingers to the last paragraphs before snapping up her man.

However, the aspects of boulevard comedy which audiences might accept in the theatre do not translate well into a realist prose narrative. We are expected to believe that a young aristocrat could be talked into marrying a woman who he had never met or spoken to in the early part of one afternoon, then an hour or so later after this element of the plot coming unstuck, asks another woman to marry him who had met only a few minutes before.

The conventions of Aristotelian drama are well realised, but they do not sit well with the conventions of the short (or even long) realistic story in this respect. The conversations are suffused with plenty of sub-Wildean repartee and bon mots, but it is not surprising that this story is so little known

Covering End – 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

Covering End – HTML version at Gutenberg

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Covering End – plot summary

Part I.   Handsome young Captain Clement Yule has inherited but never seen a venerable old English country house and estate at Covering End. But the estate is mortgaged and heavily in debts which are currently owned by Mr Prodmore, a rather obnoxious financier. Prodmore arrives at the house, followed by his daughter Cora.

Part II.   When Yule arrives Mr Prodmore proposes a business plan – that if Yule stands for parliament in the local constituency (Gossage) and marries his daughter Cora, he will cancel the estate’s debts. However, Yule is a radical and reformer, whereas the Gossage seat is solidly conservative.

Part III.   Mrs Gracedew appears and charms old retainer Chivers with her enthusiastic appreciation of the house and its age. She meets Clement Yule and proposes to show him round his own home, but a party of local sightseers arrive. She immediately adopts the role of tour guide, extolling the house’s historical and architectural virtues. The guided tour becomes virtually an auction, with Mrs Gracedew valuing the property at £50,000.

Part IV.   Yule reveals his financial predicament to Mrs Gracedew – without mentioning the element of marriage. She speaks warmly on the issue of his duty to preserve Cowering End and its traditions, and she urges him to stand for Gossage as a Tory.

Part V.   Cora speaks to Mrs Gracedew and reveals that marriage to her is also part of Mr Prodmore’s plan. Yule then returns to announce that he has accepted Mr Prodmore’s proposal.

Part VI.   Cora reappears to say that she refuses to marry Yule – because she is actually in love with another man, who happens to be very rich but has the unfortunate name of Hall Pegg. Mrs Gracedew promises to help her by talking round Mr Prodmore.

Part VII.   When Mr Prodmore reappears Mrs Gracedew asks him to give up his plans to marry Cora to Yule, and she offers to buy the house mortgages from him. He asks the price she announced earlier of £50,000, and she admits it was an exaggeration to impress the audience. When he sets off to recover Cora however, she offers to pay his price if he will forgive his daughter and let her marry Pegg. He agrees – but raises the price to £70,000.

Part VIII.   Mts Gracedew explains to Yule that he is now let off his mortgages and can ‘own’ his own home because she has bought off his debts. The house now back into its rightful ownership, she claims her work is done, but she lingers long enough for Yule to propose marriage to her – which she accepts.

Principal characters

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.
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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
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© Roy Johnson 2013

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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