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

The Author of Beltraffio first appeared in magazine form in two issues of The English Illustrated Journal, for June—July 1884. It was then reprinted in book form the following year by Macmillan in England and Osgood in Boston (USA).

The Knight Errant – John Everett Millais

The Author of Beltraffio – critical commentary

Structure

The chronological structure and dramatic unity of the story are very strong, because the events of the tale take place in one location within the period of a two day weekend visit to the Ambient home. There is therefore a powerful continuity and sense of dramatic compression to commend the tale.

But this shaping is undermined by what seems like a shifting point of attention on James’s part. Because the story is essentially in three parts, and the problem is that they are essentially different subjects which do not fit well together. The three parts are as follows:

1. the establishment of the narrator’s character
2. the conflicts between Mr and Mrs Ambient
3. the death of their son

1. The first part of the story is quite a witty social comedy in which a naive and over-enthusiastic narrator goes in search of his literary hero. He finds him, and regards everybody in the Ambient household through glasses tinted by Pre-Raphaelite Renaissance romanticism. He wants to regard Ambient as a superhuman being, and does everything to convince himself that he is one.

But in fact Ambient behaves towards him just like an ordinary person. He is polite, welcoming, hospitable, but keep a certain distance. There is every reason to believe that the family are going to find the narrator’s enthusiasm and his presence something of a bore. He is being set up by James as the over-intrusive fan.

2. But then the second strand of the tale begins to change the tone of the narrative. Mrs Ambient is unsympathetic to her husband’s writing; she doesn’t even read what he writes; and she has ideological views about the function of art which are at odds with those of her husband. The naive narrator becomes a spectator at this point – so the focus of attention switches away from him and centres upon the domestic conflict between husband and wife.

3. Then in the latter part of the story, attention is focused entirely on Mrs Ambient’s erratic behaviour towards her son, the doctor’s visits, and eventually the child’s death. This is a long way from the light comedy of the story’s opening, and in no way connected with it.

Literature that corrupts?

We are led to believe that Mrs Ambient disapproves of her husband’s writing because it might even lead to corruption. And of course it is the combination of her reading Ambient’s latest work, shutting out the doctor, and failing to give her son his medicine that leads to the boy’s death.

If only by implication, we are being asked to accept some sort of connection between these elements here. A little information on the background to the story might help throw light on what was being implied.

James wrote in his notebooks that the germ of the story came to him through his friendship with James Addington Symonds and his wife. Symonds was an English art historian, and a poet who was part of the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement at the end of the nineteenth century. This movement, which included writers such as Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, advocated that true Art should be free of all didactic purpose. That is, it should not seek to teach people moral lessons.

Such is the first level of Mrs Ambient’s differences with her husband – because she believes that art should have a moral purpose – and the clear implication from the little we know about Ambient’s writings is that they singularly lack this feature. But there is more to it than that.

The art for art’s sake philosophy was also a very bohemian movement, propounded by and associated with artists who led what were regarded as somewhat dissolute lives compared with the strict and rather puritanical norms advanced in Victorian England. These people read and associated with what were called ‘decadent’ poets and writers. They travelled to places such as France and Italy – which at that time was regarded as what we would now call ‘sexual tourism’. That is the second strand of Mrs Ambient’s differences with her husband and his works. But there is a third strand.

John Addington Symonds was also one of the first English authors to openly defend and even proselytise on behalf of male homosexuality. He was married, with a family, but had been educated at public (that is, private) school and Oxford University, which were the traditional all-male breeding grounds for homosexuality. He wrote in coded form in defence of ‘Greek ethics’ and ‘soldier love’. It is not altogether surprising that his wife took a slightly less-than-enthusiastic view of these matters.

James obviously could not make these issues explicit at the time he was writing, but he was certainly aware of them. So – Mrs Ambient does have some grounds for thinking that her husband’s writing might even corrupt his son – and it is all the more surprising that at the end of the story she has begun to read her husband’s work – even the infamous Beltraffio.

The Author of Beltraffio – 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

The Author of Beltraffio – Kindle edition

The Author of Beltraffio – Paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Author of Beltraffio – eBook versions 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

The Author of Beltraffio – plot summary

Part I. A young American fan of the writer Mark Ambient visits him at his country house in Surrey. He interprets everything he sees there in terms of artistic romanticism. He praises the author to Ambient’s own wife, who he sees as a figure from a painting by Reynols or Lawrence. She responds to him with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, saying that she is not at all artistic and doesn’t even read what her husband writes.

Part II. The narrator interprets Ambient’s sister negatively as a Renaissance figure from a painting by Rossetti, and attributes all sorts of unproven opinions and attributes to the two women. At dinner he encourages Ambient to ‘talk’, which he thinks of as the height of Art. Afterwards, the child is reported to be ill.

Gwendolen Ambient tells the narrator that her sister-in-law disapproves of Ambient’s ideas as an influence on the child. When he talks further with Ambient, he takes the author’s silences as ‘an advance on intimacy’. Mrs Ambient confirms to him that she finds her husband’s writing ‘objectionable’.

Part III. Next day Gwendolen tells the narrator that Mrs Ambient thinks that books should have a moral purpose, and that she and her husband disagree over possible bad influences on the child. The narrator and Ambient walk in the countryside and discuss Ambient’s work as an artist (largely in metaphors). Ambient reveals that differences between him and his wife are of an ideological (religious) nature. Over lunch the narrator cannot understand why Ambient is so tolerant of his wife. Gwendolen reveals that the young boy continues to be ill. Ambient gives the narrator pages from his latest book to read..

Part IV. Whilst Ambient goes to fetch a doctor, the narrator asks Mrs Ambient to read the pages from her husband’s latest book – which she does later. It turns out that the boy has diphtheria. Mrs Ambient has been sitting up with him during the night, meanwhile reading Ambient’s latest pages. She then dismisses the doctor and locks herself in the room with her son. Gwendolen thinks Mrs Ambient is deliberately bringing about the boy’s death, but asks the narrator not to say anything. The child dies; Gwendolen retreats into a convent; then Mr and Mrs Ambient die too – though she has started to read her husband’s work shortly before her death.

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 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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

The Beldonald Holbein first appeared in Harper’s Magazine for October 1901. It was later collected with other tales in The Better Sort published in London by Methuen and in New York by Scribner in 1903.

Holbein – Catherine Howard (1540)

The Beldonald Holbein – critical commentary

This is one of a number of stories Henry James wrote about artists – usually portrait painters. As a young man James had studied art, and the interest stayed with him throughout his long career as a novelist. In fact it is the relationship between visual and literary art which lies at the centre of this tale – and creates its central problem.

James enthusiastically records in his notebooks the original idea for this story – what he often calls the donné of the tale:

… little old ugly, or plain (unappreciated) woman, after dull, small life, in ‘aesthetic’ perceptive ‘European’ ‘air’. Element in it of situation of some other American woman (who has had lots of ‘Europe’ always) —thought so pretty (and so envied by my heroine) when younger&mdsh;and now so ‘gone’.

All these elements are present in the finished tale. Mrs Brash comes from her obscure American life and is specifically employed as an ugly old woman by the vain Lady Beldonald to act as a contrast to her own good looks. But the narrator and his friend Outereau see in Mrs Brash an unappreciated beauty of a kind they liken to a portrait by Holbein.

More than that, Lady Beldonald eventually realises that Mrs Brash is failing to fulfil the role for which she has been employed, and we are led to believe that Mrs Brash is despatched back to America where she sinks once again into plain obscurity.

This presents readers with a problem. How can Mrs Brash be ‘ugly’ when she first appears in the narrative, then miraculously becomes ‘attractive’ in the eyes of the narrator, Outereau, and Mrs Munden? It is obvious that they appreciate something in Mrs Brash’s appearance which has been neglected by her fellow Americans. But we have no way of knowing if these critical assessments are valid or not: all the information at our disposal is mediated via the un-named narrator.

The Beldonald Holbein – 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

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

The Beldonald Holbein – Paperback – Amazon UK

The Beldonald Holbein – Paperback – Amazon US

The Beldonald Holbein – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Beldonald Holbein – story synopsis

Part I   Mrs Munden proposes to the un-named narrator, an artist, that he paint a picture of her sister-in-law, the elderly but beautiful Lady Nina Beldonald. The commission is agreed but delayed because of the death of Nina’s black servant Miss Dadd, who has been hired to throw Nina’s beauty into sharp contrast.

Part II   Miss Dadd is replaced by an American relative Mrs Louisa Brash, who Nina employs because she is old and plain. But the narrator and his friend Paul Outreau feel that she is in fact a specially attractive ‘type’ – like a figure in a Holbein painting. The narrator asks Nina if he can paint Mrs Brash’s portrait, but she finds his suggestion offensive.

Part III   Nina cancels the commission for her own portrait. The narrator reconstructs Mrs Brash as an attractive figure who has not appreciated her own advantages. Having been ‘plain’ all her life, he wonders if she will be able to cope with being seen as attractive.

Part IV   The narrator and Mrs Munden feel responsible for Mrs Brash, who they fear may be turned away if she fails to perform the function for which she has been hired – which is to present a contrast to Lady Beldonald. However, they also feel they owe it to her to celebrate her attractiveness.

Part V   Mrs Brash eventually declines to sit for her portrait. Lady Beldonald then realises that she is an attractive woman, and sends her back to America, where she reverts to her former state of being – an elderly and plain woman. Lady Beldonald hires a new young and pretty servant, and offers to sit for her portrait after all – whereupon the narrator agrees.

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.
Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

© Roy Johnson 2014

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

The Chaperon first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in November—December, 1891 then was later reprinted in The Real Thing and Other Tales published by Macmillan in London and New York, 1893. The other pieces in this collection of tales by Henry James were Nona Vincent, Greville Fane, and Sir Dominick Ferrand.

The Chaperon – critical commentary

The Chaperon [spelled without the normal ‘e’] contains many of the elements that characterise James’s other tales – society ladies jousting for social respectability, ambitious families wishing to marry their offspring for financial advantage, and various niceties of moral judgement being made amidst social infighting concealed beneath a cloak of respectability.

The principal irony encapsulated in the title is that the young daughter Rose Tramore acts as a chaperone to her mother – not the other way round. Rose protects her mother from the dangers and humiliations offered by polite society to a woman who has defied its conventions. Rose’s ambition is to rehabilitate her mother socially, and she refuses to accept invitations which are not offered in the formally correct manner: that is, made to the mother in the first instance, thereby acknowledging her status.

It is there that the main problem with the story lies – for we are given no persuasive reason to account for Rose’s motivation and behaviour. Rose’s loyalty to her mother is the driving force of the narrative – but we are not provided with any explanation for her reasons in being so doggedly loyal.

The other weakness in the story is that Bertram Jay is introduced (quite amusingly) as something of blockhead who a young woman with Rose’s intelligence and spirit would not for one moment consider as a good prospect for marriage. Yet by the end of the tale he has become a charming suitor who Rose is quite happy to accept. No reason for any change in his character is given.

The Chaperon – study resources

The Complete Tales of Henry James – Vol 8 – Digireads – Amazon UK

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

The Chaperon – free eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – 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 Complete Tales (Vol 9) – Paperback edition – Amazon UK

Selected Tales – Penguin Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Chaperon – story synopsis

Part I. Mrs Tramore leaves her husband and children to live on the Mediterranean with another man. Mr Charles Tramore does not re-marry, and the children are brought up by their aunt Julia and their grandmother. When the ‘other man’ dies in a boating accident without having married Mrs Tramore, she returns to London but is shunned by polite society.

The Tramore family act as if Mrs Tramore no longer exists, but when her father dies, Rose Tramore decides to rehabilitate her mother socially. Despite the objections and threats of her aunt and grandmother, Rose decides she will go to live with her mother – as a result of which her grandmother bans her from the house for disobedience.

Rose is visited by her already-rejected admirer Captain Jay, who also pleads with her not to take up with her mother (possibly with an eye on the fact that the family might disinherit her). She rejects his offer of marriage again – more forcefully.

Part II. Rose lives in unoccupied seclusion with her mother, but she turns down invitations to socialize because they are addressed to her personally, not to her mother. She wishes to challenge society’s attitudes towards a woman who has incurred social disgrace. She also repulses the advances of the baby-like Guy Mangler, whose mother Lady Maresfield is trying to marry him off.

Finding no success with her strategies in London, Rose and her mother tour Europe as a relief from the tedium and the strain of not being ‘in society’. There they meet Captain Jay, who is very taken with Mrs Tramore – as a result of which Rose changes her attitude towards him to one of approval.

Whilst in Venice together, they also meet Guy Mangler and Lady Maresfield, and with a little more tolerance on each side, social relations are very delicately restored. When they all return to London, Rose and her mother find themselves accepted into society again almost as curios – examples of people who have miraculously recovered from former disgrace. Rose marries Captain Jay, and all is well.

The Chaperon – principal 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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Other work 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.
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.

© Roy Johnson 2014

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