Henry James Archives - Page 9 of 15

The Complete Tales of Henry James

March 24, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorials, critical commentaries, and study guides

This is a series of tutorials and guidance notes on the complete tales of Henry James. He gave the stories the name ‘tales’ because hardly any of them are now what would be considered traditional short stories. Indeed, several of them are now regularly regarded as novellas. There are over one hundred tales in the complete collection. The series is shown here in alphabetical order.

A Bundle of Letters — (1879)
A Day of Days — (1866)
A Landscape Painter — (1866)
A Light Man — (1869)
A London Life — (1888)
A Most Extraordinary Case — (1868)
A New England Winter — (1884)
A Passionate Pilgrim — (1871)
A Problem — (1868)
A Round of Visits — (1910)
A Tragedy of Error — (1864)
Adina — (1874)
An International Episode — (1874)
At Isella — (1871)
Benvolio — (1875)
Broken Wings — (1900)
Brooksmith — (1891)
Collaboration — (1892)
Covering End — (1895)
Crapy Cornelia — (1909)
Crawford’s Consistency — (1876)
Daisy Miller — (1878)
De Grey: A Romance — (1868)
Eugene Pickering — (1874)
Europe — (1899)
Flickerbridge — (1902)
Fordham Castle — (1904)
Four Meetings — (1877)
Gabrielle de Bergerac — (1869)
Georgina’s Reasons — (1884)
Glasses — (1896)
Greville Fane — (1892)
Guest’s Confession — (1872)
In the Cage — (1898)
Jersey Villas — (1892)
John Delavoy — (1898)
Julia Bride — (1908)
Lady Barbarina — (1884)
Longstaff’s Marriage — (1878)
Lord Beaupre — (1892)
Louisa Pallant — (1888)
Madame de Mauves — (1874)
Master Eustace — (1871)
Maud-Evelyn — (1900)
Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie — (1900)
Mora Montravers — (1909)
Mrs Medwin — (1901)
Mrs Temperly — (1887)
My Friend Bingham — (1867)
Nona Vincent — (1892)
Osborne’s Revenge — (1868)
Owen Wingrave — (1892)
Pandora — (1884)
Paste — (1899)
Poor Richard — (1867)
Professor Fargo — (1874)
Sir Edmund Orme — (1891)
The Abasement of the Northmores — (1900)
The Altar of the Dead — (1895)
The Aspern Papers — (1888)
The Author of Beltraffio — (1884)
The Beast in the Jungle — (1903)
The Beldonald Holbein — (1901)
The Bench of Desolation — (1909)
The Birthplace — (1903)
The Chaperon — (1891)
The Coxon Fund — (1894)
The Death of the Lion — (1894)
The Diary of a Man of Fifty — (1879)
The Figure in the Carpet — (1896)
The Friends of the Friends — (1896)
The Ghostly Rental — (1876)
The Given Case — (1899)
The Great Condition — (1899)
The Great Good Place — (1900)
The Impressions of a Cousin — (1883)
The Jolly Corner — (1908)
The Last of the Valerii — (1874)
The Lesson of the Master — (1888)
The Liar — (1888)
The Madonna of the Future — (1873)
The Marriages — (1891)
The Middle Years — (1893)
The Next Time — (1895)
The Papers — (1903)
The Patagonia — (1888)
The Path of Duty — (1884)
The Pension Beaurepas — (1879)
The Point of View — (1882)
The Private Life — (1892)
The Pupil — (1891)
The Real Right Thing — (1899)
The Real Thing — (1892)
The Romance of Certain Old Clothes — (1868)
The Siege of London — (1883)
The Solution — (1889)
The Special Type — (1900)
The Story in It — (1902)
The Story of a Masterpiece — (1868)
The Story of a Year — (1865)
The Sweetheart of M. Briseux — (1873)
The Third Person — (1900)
The Tone of Time — (1900)
The Tree of Knowledge — (1900)
The Turn of the Screw — (1898)
The Two Faces — (1900)
The Velvet Glove — (1909)
The Visits — (1892)
The Wheel of Time — (1892)
Theodolinde — (1878)
Travelling Companions — (1870)
Two Countries — (1888)

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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More on Henry James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Coxon Fund

January 28, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Coxon Fund (1894) was inspired by James’s reading a biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was renowned in his day both as a powerful intellectual and a great talker. It is worth noting that whilst today Coleridge is thought of more or less exclusively as a poet (and not much known beyond Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) he was in his own time highly regarded as a poet, a social critic, and a philosopher. He produced an oeuvre which runs to dozens of volumes, including such works as Hints Towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life and Aids to Reflection, in the Formation of a Manly Character, on the Several Grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion. He was also separated from his wife, gave public lectures, and was an opium addict.

The Coxon Fund

The Coxon Fund – critical commentary

The Narrative

Reading this tale is not easy. The story is delivered almost entirely through the narrator’s reflections on events and other characters. There is very little dramatisation, and much of the story is recounted very indirectly, using metaphor and allusive figures of speech:

I won’t pretend to have taken his vast measure on that first occasion, but I think I had achieved a glimpse of what the privilege of his acquaintance might mean for many persons in the way of charges accepted. He had been a great experience, and it was this perhaps that had put me into the frame of foreseeing how we should all, sooner or later, have the honour of dealing with him as a whole. Whatever impression I then received of the amount of this total, I had a full enough vision of the patience of the Mulvilles.

This was quite deliberate on James’s part. He records in his notebooks for the tale that he wishes to establish total control of the narrative. It’s interesting to note in the light of all his un-named first person narrators that in these notes James describes himself as the narrator. That is, he makes no attempt to establish any distinction between himself as author and as a character in the fiction.

I must do it from my own point of view—that of an imagined observer, participator, chronicler. I must picture it, summarize it, impressionize it, in a word—compress and confine it by making it the picture of what I see.

In addition to this difficulty, there are two problems with the story. The first is that we are never presented with any evidence of Frank Saltram’s intellect or his inspiring loquacity. These are not dramatised but reported to us by the narrator, and described as gushing accolades to his talents. In other words we have to take them on trust.

The narrator’s account of Saltram is offered in abstract, metaphorical (and rather hyperbolic) terms. He is described as ‘a big man’ with ‘extraordinary speculative breadth’. The narrator describes his effect to Miss Anvoy (at a lecture which Saltram fails to deliver) as being like ‘The sight of a great suspended swinging crystal—huge lucid lustrous, a block of light—flasing back every impression of life every possibility of thought’. But no concrete examples of his writing or his inspirational conversation are provided against which we can judge the veracity of this claim.

Convincing motivation

The second problem is that the narrator presents a negative and critical account of Saltram in the first three quarters of the story, and then at the end reverses his attitude and supports the decision to grant the Coxon Fund to Saltram – but we are given no justification for this change of attitude. Having established Saltram’s shabby behaviour in the first three quarters of the story, the narrator comes across Saltram on Wimbledon Common and sees him in a newly sympathetic manner:

I felt on the instant as if we had been overspanned and conjoined by the great arch of a bridge or the great dome of a temple.

Saltram’s eccentric behaviour is not in doubt. He wears purple carpet slippers, doesn’t dress for dinner, fails to turn up when delivering public lectures, and is often drunk. He takes advantage of his patrons and discards them when new enthusiasts come along. He has fathered a total of eight children – three of them out of wedlock. When he is eventually awarded the Coxon Fund he immediately stops writing and never publishes another word. But we have no way of knowing if he is a talented charlatan or a fraud who has established a social reputation solely on the strength of his after-dinner conversation.

In his notes for the story James makes it clear that he wishes to dramatise a sympathetic acceptance of an artist’s human flaws

the pivot and the climax of the action is the girl’s decision, in circumstances of the highest import for her, that Saltram’s ‘morality’, ie, his conduct, don’t in such an exceptional case matter.

The narrator too makes the decision to support her choice. He keeps the compromising letter from the Pudneys and does not destroy it (unread) until Saltram has died. But no convincing reason is given why they should support Saltram, other than the notion that in certain cases one should tolerate bad behaviour in great thinkers.

A secondary theme

The narrator’s young friend George Gravener rises to become a member of parliament for Cockleborough, and on the death of his father Lord Maddock he is elevated to the House of Lords. He becomes engaged to Ruth Anvoy, who when he meets her is heiress to the enormous fortune of her Boston father. There is therefore an Anglo-American link here which James features in many of his works. It also raises the link between money and marriage which features largely as a concern in nineteenth century literature in general and James’s work in particular.

However, when her father loses his fortune in the Wall Street panic of 1893, she in turn loses value in the marriage market, and it is at this point that the engagement between the two characters falters. She has ‘only’ four hundred pounds a year, and she rejects out of principle the opportunity to profit from the Coxon Fund. It is significant that the engagement is dissolved and she does not marry.

The Coxon Fund – study resources

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

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

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

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

The Complete Tales (Vol 9) – Paperback edition – Amazon UK

Selected Tales – Penguin Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Coxon Fund – Kindle eBook edition

The Coxon Fund – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Coxon Fund – audio book at LibriVox

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Coxon Fund – plot summary

Frank Saltram is a charismatic writer and philosopher who is supported by wealthy patrons despite his unpredictable behaviour, largely because he offers inspirational conversation. He is estranged from his wife and family, and at the outset of the tale he is living with the Mulvilles, who sacrifice their own wellbeing in order to pay off his debts.

The tale’s narrator believes that Saltram has ‘an incomparable gift’, but his childhood friend George Gravener believes that he is a fraud. At a public lecture which Saltram fails to deliver, the narrator meets Ruth Anvoy, an American heiress. Saltram continues to issue prospectuses for lectures and literary projects which he does not complete.

When Saltram insults the Mulvilles and transfers his ‘allegiance’ to the Pudneys, the narrator begins to feel exasperated by his bad behaviour and goes abroad, during which time George Gravener is elected as MP for Clockborough and becomes engaged to Ruth Anvoy.

Saltram is subsequently reunited with the Mulvilles, and Miss Anvoy loses her inheritance when her father’s business collapses during the Wall Street panic of 1893. Gravener reveals to the narrator that the late Lord Coxon has left an endowment fund for research into some morally worthy cause. Lady Coxon may divert the funds if they are not spent, and has proposed to make them over to the now-impoverished Ruth Anvoy on the occasion of her marriage.

Miss Anvoy however will only accept the money if it remains in trust. She returns from America following the death of her father, and finds that Lady Coxon has also died. Her engagement to Gravener appears to be at a standstill, and she meets Saltram at the Mulvilles where he ‘speaks’ at length after dinner where he appears to be drunk.

Miss Anvoy is inclined to award the trust to Mr Saltram, but she first wishes to check if there is anything worse about his behaviour about which she has not been told. At this juncture the narrator receives a letter for Miss Anvoy from the Pudneys containing details of their complaints against him.

The narrator has become sympathetic towards Saltram, and withholds the letter. He confers with George Gravener, who stands to profit if Miss Anvoy does not award the trust money. The narrator offers to show Miss Anvoy the letter, but she refuses to see it. Saltram receives the trust money, and never writes another word.

Principal characters

I	the un-named narrator
Kent Mulville	a patron of Frank Saltram
Adelaide Mulville	his wife
George Gravener	the narrator’s friend, who becomes engaged to Ruth Anvoy
Frank Saltram	an eccentric writer, philosopher, and speaker
Mrs Saltram	his wife, from whom he is estranged
Miss Ruth Anvoy	a beautiful young American heiress from Boston
Sir Gregory Coxon	the former mayor of Clockborough
Lady Coxon	widow of ex-mayor, Ruth Anvoy’s aunt, friend of Mrs Saltram
Lady Maddock	George Gravener’s sister
Mr & Mrs Pudney	patrons of Saltram from Birmingham

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

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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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.

&copy Roy Johnson 2012

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

The Death of the Lion

February 1, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Death of the Lion (1894) is a short story featuring a variation on the theme of the disparity between a writer and his work, and the manner in which he is percived by the public and his admirers. It was written at the same time as The Coxon Fund and anticipates The Figure in the Carpet by only two years. It takes a very satirical view of the lack of aesthetic appreciation in fashionable society, and possibly for that reason has always been a popular and much-anthologised work.

The Death of the Lion

The Death of the Lion – critical commentary

The most interesting thing about this story is that it has all the ingredients of a minor tragedy – but doesn’t seem to be one. After all, in the first part of the narrative Paraday is given public recognition as a novelist of distinction and has the beginnings of what appears to be a great new work. Yet he is distracted from his vocation, sucked into a mindless fashionable society, and he dies with his work unappreciated and mistreated. James certainly had this critical perspective in mind in his notebook entries when planning the story:

the ravenous autograph-hunters, lion-hunters, exploiters of publicity, in whose number one gets the impression that a person knowing and loving the thing itself, the work, is simply never to be found…they kill him with the very fury of their selfish exploitation, and then not really have an idea of what they have killed him for

Yet this serious senario is at odds with the light-hearted satire of journalists, editors, and literary enthusiasts which pervades the rest of the story. Mr Morrow is a shallow opportunist who thinks a writer’s innermost philosophy can be guaged by looking at his writing table; the popular novelist Guy Walshingham turns out to be a young girl called Miss Collop; and another literary celebrity using the pen name Dora Forbes is ‘florid and bald; he had a big red moustache and wore showy knickerbockers’. The centre of the country house party which is celebrating Paraday is dominated by the Princess, who ‘had been told everything in the world and has never perceived anything’.

Moreover, Paraday is complicit in his own decline. He enters willingly into Mrs Wimbush’s social milieu, and actually hands over the sole manuscript of his yet-unfinished novel for others to pass round – and eventually lose. The great artist who the public in general do not appreciate or understand is a common enough figure in James’s work, but The Death of the Lion is ambiguous in its attitude to the topic.

We take it at the end of the story that the narrator will wait in vain for the recovery of any lost manuscript, but the story ends on a positive note since he has been united in marriage with Miss Hurter, his fellow Paraday suporter. Thus the narrative seems to be pointing in two different directions at one and the same time.

The Death of the Lion – study resources

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

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

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

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

The Death of the Lion – Oxford Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Death of the Lion – Oxford Classics edition – Amazon US

The Death of the Lion – Kindle eBook edition

The Death of the Lion – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Death of the Lion – audio book at LibriVox

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 Death of the Lion – plot summary

An un-named narrator is working as a journalist on a weekly magazine. He proposes to the editor that he should write an article on Neil Paraday, a distinguished novelist. Despite the editor’s reservations, he visits the novelist, writes the article, and is invited to stay at the author’s home. Paraday lets him see the manuscript of an unfinished novel. The editor rejects the article, the narrator re-writes it, and it is published elsewhere but ignored.

Meanwhile, another London newspaper, The Empire publishes a leading article praising Paraday. This brings an opportunist journalist, Mr Morrow, to visit Paraday in the hope of writing a personal profile. The narrator protects the novelist from this intrusion, but Morrow writes an article anyway, and Paraday becomes increasingly famous in society.

A young American woman Miss Hurter is a Paraday enthusiast and autograph hunter. When she turns up in the hope of meeting him, the narrator persuades her that the greatest homage she can render him is not to meet him, but to leave him alone to get on with his work.

Despite the narrator’s protective efforts, Paraday is embraced by fashionable society and is distracted from his work by its demands on his time. At a country house gathering, the guests read his latest novel as if it were a magazine, and the manuscript of his unfinished novel is lost.

Paraday becomes seriously ill whilst he is staying there, and fashionable novelists arrive as replacements to read their less worthy work for the entertainment of guests. Eventually the guests are sent home, and Paraday dies, leaving the narrator to keep alive reverence for his critical reputation, which he does with Miss Hurter, who he has meanwhile married.

Principal characters

I	the un-named narrator – a journalist
Mr Pinhorn	weekly journal editor
Mr Deedy	the journal’s previous editor and owner
Neil Paraday	a distinguished novelist, separated from his wife
Mr Morrow	an opportunistic journalist
Mrs Weeks Wimbush	society lady, wife of a brewer
Miss Fanny Hurter	a young American Paraday enthusiast and autograph hunter
Mrs Milsom	her sister, who lives in Paris
Guy Walsingham	novelist, author of Obsessions – real name Miss Collop
Dora Forbes	novelist, author of The Other Way Round – a man
Miss Braby	socialite
Mrs Bounder	socialite
Prestidge	Mrs Winbush’s country house
The Princess	polyglot European socialite
Lady Augusta Minch	socialite who lends Paraday’s manuscript
Lord Dorimont	socialite who loses Paraday’s manuscript

Henry James’s study

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.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
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Henry James – web links

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

The 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.

&copy Roy Johnson 2012

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

The Diary of a Man of Fifty

June 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, web links, and study resources

The Diary of a Man of Fifty first appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Macmillan’s Magazine for July 1879. The first English book version appeared later the same year in the collection The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales published by Macmillan.

The setting – Florence

The Diary of a Man of Fifty – critical commentary

This tale is one of James’ least-known stories, and he didn’t even include it in the twenty-four volume New York Edition of his Novels and Tales (1907-09). It’s also rather unusual, because it’s written in the form of a journal. James normally liked to keep the narrative and the point of view tightly under his own control in the form of a first person or omniscient third person narrator. The only other instances of his using the diary and journal forms in his tales were A Landscape Painter (1866), A Light Man (1869), and The Impressions of a Cousin (1883).

The General is very forcibly struck by the parallels between his own situation and Stanmer’s. The General was in love with the beautiful Countess twenty-five years previously, and now he meets young Stanmer who is enchanted by her equally alluring daughter, and who bears the same name – Bianca. The General felt betrayed by the Countess when she married his rival, Count Camerino, and he feels that Stanmer is likely to be ill-treated by Bianca in the same way – though he has no evidence to support this notion.

Stanmer feels that the General is pursuing the ‘analogy’ too far, and resists the attempts to persuade him of any danger. And in the end, Stanmer does marry Bianca, and he is happy according to his own report. So for once in these cautionary tales about the dangers of marriage, the protagonist’s fears seem to be overturned. The General is left wondering what might have been, and the reader is left wondering if he is another candidate for James’s collection of unreliable narrators – a man who is so blinded by his own past experience and lack of real perception that he is unable to correctly interpret the world he inhabits.

It is difficult to form a clear judgement on this issue – because we do not have sufficient independent evidence. But it is worth noting (in the balance of its being a ‘cautionary tale’) that both the Countess and her daughter Bianca ‘lose’ three husbands between them – all of whom die in duels brought about because of rivalry and jealousy. So no matter what we think in the choice between Stanmer and the General, the state of matrimony is depicted as a zone of conflict and potential death.

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 Diary of a Man of Fifty – Classic Reprint edition

The Diary of a Man of Fifty – Kindle edition

Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition

The Diary of a Man of Fifty – eBook formats at Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Diary of a Man of Fifty – plot summary

An English army general of fifty-two returns to Florence twenty-five years after a romance with Countess Falvi, a woman who has died ten years previously. He revisits the places they used to frequent together.

He then meets Edmund Stanmer, a young English traveller of twenty-five who is acquainted with the Countess’s daughter Bianca. The General takes a liking to him, feeling that he is a reminder of his younger self.

Stanmer arranges a meeting between Bianca and the General, who is at first reluctant to follow it through, because his memories of her mother are that she was a dangerous woman.

However, when he goes to see Bianca the next day she is charming and attractive. They reminisce about her mother. Bianca lost her own father when she was young; her mother re-married, and she also lost her own husband three years previously.

The following day the General warns Stanmer that Bianca is an actress and a coquette, just like her mother. Stanmer resents the comparison and wants to know what the mother did to hurt the general – but he initially passes up on the opportunity to hear what it was.

Next evening at the Casa Salvi the General learns that Bianca’s stepfather was killed in a duel. They discuss Stanmer together , and Bianca asks the general to ‘explain’ her to his young friend.

The General continues to warn Stanmer about Bianca, but admits that he finds her fascinating. He then stays away from the Casa Salvi for a while, uncertain about his intentions regarding Stanmer.

But then Stanmer demands to know what happened between the General and the countess. The General reveals that he was jealous of Count Camerino, who was a suitor to the Countess, and who killed her husband in a duel caused by jealous rivalry – though another man (acting as his second) was deemed responsible. The General was horrified when the Countess married the man who had killed her own husband, and he left Florence, never to see her again.

The General takes his leave of Bianca, who reproaches him for having deserted her mother at a time when she needed a protector.

The general later hears that Stanmer married Bianca. The two men meet again in London some time later, where Stanmer tells the General that he was wrong about his account of the Countess, and that maybe she really did need his protection. This causes the general to doubt his own judgement, and he thinks it might be possible that he has made a mistake.

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Principal characters

General —	an un-named former soldier from the English army in India (52)
Edmund Stanmer	a young Englishman (25)
Countess Salvi-Scarabelli	the General’s former amorata
Bianca Scarabelli	her beautiful daughter
Count Salvi	the Countess’s former jealous husband
Count Camerino	the general’s rival, and second husband to the Countess

Henry James’s study

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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.

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

The Europeans

February 6, 2015 by Roy Johnson

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

The Europeans was first published as a serial of four parts in the Atlantic Monthly July-October 1878, then in book form later the same year in London (Macmillan) and Boston (Houghton, Osgood). It carries the sub-title ‘A Sketch’, and James did not include the novel in the New York edition of his collected works in 1913. Nevertheless, it marks an important point in the early phase of his development as a novelist.

The Europeans – critical commentary

The international theme

This is an early example of a subject which Henry James was to make into his signature theme in later works – the clash between the Old World and the New – more specifically between traditional nineteenth century Europe and the democratic and republican states of north America. More specifically still, in The Europeans it is between the self-denying and rather strict puritanism of New England and the raffish Bohemian ‘sophistication’ of European adventurers who have mixed motives.

The tensions and misunderstandings between one culture and another were to be an important feature of his works, and in the very same year of its publication he also published Daisy Miller, one of his most famous tales, which explores the same issues from the opposite geographic perspective – the unfortunate result of a free-spirited young American woman challenging European social conventions. In The Europeans the results of these cultural differences have a happier outcome in two successful relationships, though it has to be said that James himself did not generally favour happy endings to his works, and many critics have found the conclusion of two youthful, optimistically portrayed marriages less than convincing.

Money

Baroness Eugenia and her brother Felix arrive in New England with the trappings of European sophistication, but they have no money. She is a commoner who is under threat of being dispossessed by her husband and his family. Felix has been a musician and an actor, and is under contract to produce sketches for a magazine: in other words he is a Bohemian drifter. Both of them have pecuniary reasons for seeking out their rich relatives in the New World.

James does not make clear the source of William Wentworth’s wealth. He owns the big house in which he and his family live, plus a smaller house on the estate. He ‘puts his hand in his pocket’ for any of his family’s needs – but we are not told where the cash he withdraws has its source, except that he has an office he goes to three times a week where he conducts ‘highly confidential trust business’. Similarly, Robert Acton is also very wealthy, but we do not know the source of his wealth either – except that he has tripled an original sum.

The morganatic marriage

In the context of European royalty, a morganatic marriage was one where a male of ‘high’ birth married a woman of much lower rank. Traditionally, royal or noble families were categorised or ‘graded’ according to a snobbish notion of genealogical, biographical, and titular attributes. The main purpose of this system was to keep power and property concentrated in the hands of the ruling class. A morganatic union prevented the lower class wife or any of her children inheriting the husband’s titles, privileges, or property – and thereby diluting any of this concentrated power by distributing it amongst the lower orders.

The pseudo-systematic rationale of this categorisation was printed with characteristic Teutonic thoroughness in the Almanach de Gotha until 1944, when the publisher’s archives were destroyed by invading Soviet troops. Baroness Eugenia (a commoner) is married to the Prince Adolf of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein, whose family would like him to marry someone more suitable, which he is perfectly able to do under such an arrangement.

Structure

The first half of the novel seems poised and successful – with the slightly louche ‘adventurers’ Eugenia and Felix confronted by the stern orthodoxy of puritan New England. James obviously admires the upright and decent values of his fellow Americans, but he has no difficulty making light fun of their extreme piety and their inability to ‘have fun’.

Also successfully contrasted are Eugenia’s ambiguous motives with the Wentworths’ principled offer of Christian comfort to their European cousins. Eugenia is ostensibly visiting America to meet her relatives, but she is also ‘seeking her fortune’. Her husband’s family is in the process of getting rid of her, and she is looking for an alternative social position (and source of income)- but she doesn’t want to broadcast the fact.

These two social forces are kept evenly balanced for the first six chapters of the novel. Unfortunately, the narrative then suffers a severe fracture in terms of credibility at its half way point. The ultra-conservative and puritanical Mr Wentworth, having even refused to have his portrait painted by Felix, suddenly co-operates with this idea without any justification for this change of mind. He then reveals to Felix the truth about his son Clifford, who has been sent down from Harvard for drunkenness. It is simply not conceivable that this ascetic and formidably private man would change his mind on such a matter, and even less reveal such embarrassing information to a dubious outsider whom he had only recently met.

If that is not stretching credibility far enough, Mr Wentworth then accepts Felix’s suggestions of luring his son away from the temptations of drink by dangling the allures of an attractive (and married!) woman before the boy – namely Felix’s sister, the Baroness Eugenia. No stern New England patriarch would condone this sort of behaviour. These are creaking plot devices which damage the delicate picture of conflicting cultures that has been built up to this point. Even though Clifford Wentworth does fall under the spell of Eugenia, then survives to marry Bostonian Lizzie Acton, this is part of the ‘tying up of lose ends’ that injures the latter part of the narrative.

The Europeans is often compared with James’s later novel The Bostonians (1885-6), with which it has much in common. There is a similar lightweight satire of puritan New England values and constrained behaviour- plus a far deeper inspection of early feminism in the later novel; but more importantly, there are no easy solutions offered to the personal dilemmas of the characters. The hero Basil Ransom makes a spirited attempt to ‘rescue’ Verena Tarrant from the influence of the feminist Olive Chancellor, but when he does so, she leaves with ‘tears in her eyes’. The neat pairings and marriages that conclude The Europeans do not seem nearly so satisfactory.

The Europeans – study resources

The Europeans – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Europeans – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Europeans – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Europeans – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Europeans – Kindle edition

The Europeans – eBooks at Project Gutenberg

The Essential Henry James Collection – Kindle edition (40 works)

The Europeans – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Europeans – 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

The Europeans – plot summary

Chapter I. Baroness Eugenia Munster and her brother Felix Young have travelled from Europe to visit their cousins in Boston, USA. Eugenia has the additional purpose of seeking her fortune, since she knows her German husband wishes to divorce her. In New York she is vexed by what she perceives as the plainness of the New World, whilst her brother is cheerfully enthusiastic about what he finds there.

Chapter II. At her family home in Boston, Gertrude Wentworth feels ‘restless’ and does not wish to go to church, despite the urging of her elder sister Charlotte. The minister Mr Brand calls and wishes to speak to Gertrude in private, but she puts him off. When Felix arrives to present himself she becomes immediately fascinated by his European background and complex family history- particularly that of his sister the Baroness.

Chapter III. Next day Felix describes the visit to his sister Eugenia, who is mainly interested in the wealth and the social caché of the Wentworths and their circle. Eugenia meets and charms the entire family, and wastes no time in asking to be ‘taken care of’.

Chapter IV. There is a great deal of discussion amongst the extended Wentworth family regarding the potential dangers of being exposed to European influences. However, the austere Mr Wentworth finally invites Eugenia and Felix to stay in a separate house on his estate. Eugenia adds decorations to the puritan ‘chalet’ and Felix finds delight in everything, especially the freedom to socialise with young unmarried ladies. Eugenia holds herself aloof, but pretends to feel neglected. Mr Brand and Robert Acton begin to pay her social visits.

Chapter V. Mr Wentworth does not know how to understand Eugenia, and he refuses to have his portrait painted by Felix. Gertrude however falls under the romantic spell of Felix. Mr Brand eventually declares his love for Gertrude, who repudiates him without hesitation.

Chapter VI. Robert Acton is intrigued by Eugenia and her exotic character, but he tries to conceal his interest behind a facade of nonchalance. Eugenia explains to him the complex history of her marriage and its present state. She has a prepared document rejecting the Prince her husband which she only needs to sign to gain her freedom – which she flirtatiously suggests to him that she might do.

Chapter VII. Felix eventually persuades Mr Wentworth to sit for his portrait. Felix has fallen for Gertrude, but as a penniless artist with no prospects he does not wish to take advantage of his hosts by openly paying court to her. Mr Wentworth reveals to Felix that his son Clifford has been sent down from Harvard for drunkenness. Felix suggests that Clifford should pay court to Eugenia – but Mr Wentworth refuses to accept the idea. However, Clifford does visit Eugenia and suggests that Charlotte should marry Mr Brand.

Chapter VIII. Mr Brand oppresses Gertrude with further courtship, which she flatly rejects. She asks her sister Charlotte to marry him instead. Meanwhile, Clifford is given lessons in emotional and social life skills from Eugenia, who suggests that he visit her in Germany when she returns to Europe.

Chapter IX. Robert Acton is not sure if he is in love with Eugenia or not, but cannot stop thinking about her. After returning from Newport he visits her late at night, and asks about her ‘renunciation’ document, about which she refuses to comment. Clifford suddenly appears, at which she becomes difficult and argumentative. Next day Acton challenges Clifford about Eugenia – but they lie to each other about their intentions.

Chapter X. The weather gets worse and Eugenia is bored. She reproaches Felix for his relentless cheerfulness. He hopes to marry Gertrude, and he urges her to accept Acton as a potential husband. Felix reveals to Mr Brand that Charlotte is hopelessly in love with him, which leaves Brand rather perplexed.

Chapter XI. Eugenia visits old Mrs Acton to say a goodbye. Mrs Acton implores her to stay – for her son’s sake. Eugenia meets Robert Acton in the garden as she is leaving. He is in love with her, but suspects her of lying. Meanwhile Felix appeals to Charlotte for assistance in his quest for Gertrude. He wishes to overcome Mr Wentworth’s objections to his Bohemianism.

Chapter XII. Felix pleads his case for marrying Gertrude to her father. The family are united in their plea that Mr Wentworth give his consent. In the middle of this discussion, Mr Brand appears and requests permission to marry the couple. Mr Wentworth finally consents. That same evening it is announced that Clifford and Lizzie Acton will marry at the same time. Eugenia equivocates with Robert Acton one last time, reveals to Felix that she has not signed her release document, and goes back to Europe.

The Europeans – principal characters

Baroness Eugenia Munster	morganatic wife to Prince Adolf
Felix Young	her brother, an adventurer, painter, and amateur
Mr William Wentworth	a rich Bostonian puritan
Gertrude Wentworth	his spirited younger daughter (23)
Carlotte Wentworth	her serious elder sister
Clifford Wentworth	younger brother, rusticated from Harvard
Mr Brand	a serious Unitarian minister
Robert Acton	a rich Bostonian ex-Harvard
Lizzie Acton	his pretty younger sister
Mrs Acton	his elderly mother who is dying

Other work by Henry James

Henry James – web links

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

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

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 on Henry James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Figure in the Carpet

January 10, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Figure in the Carpet (1896) is one of a number of stories James wrote in his later years which deal with issues of authorship, writing, and literary reputation. The tale has baffled critics ever since it first appeared. Some commentators claim that it’s a satire of literary criticism, others that it’s no more than a literary joke, and just a few readers claim that it is a profound exploration of literary hermeneutics – which is ‘the study of the interpretation of written texts’.

The Figure in the Carpet

The Figure in the Carpet – critical commentary

The question of interpretation

It is generally agreed that The Figure in the Carpet is one of James’s more baffling stories. We naturally would like to know exactly what ‘secrets’ Vereker has embedded in his work, just as the narrator would. But he is thwarted in that hope, and so are we.

It’s possible to see the tale as a critique of literary criticism – since that is the narrator’s occupation. He sees Vereker’s work as a means of advancing his own reputation as a critic, and he views his friend Corvick and the latecomer Drayton Deane as threatening rivals.

In this approach to reading the story, James is taking revenge on lazy literary critics who are not prepared to study an author’s work in sufficient depth, but are only interested in advancing their own celebrity and careers. The narrator spends most of his efforts trying to extract the ‘secret’ from other people, instead of doing the work himself. At the end of the story he is no wiser, and the implication of this reading is that the literary joke is on him. This view can be supported by the initial ideas James recorded for the tale in his notebooks:

the lively impulse, at the root of it, to reinstate analytic appreciation, by some ironic or fantastic stroke, so far as possible, in its virtually forfeited rights and dignities.

In fact the ‘literary hoax’ interpretation could be taken even further if we posit the notion that Vereker, as an intelligent novelist, actually invents the idea of a hidden meaning in his work in order to tease the narrator.

The literary joke

Vereker makes an eloquent claim for the hidden meaning in his work, but he refuses to say what it is. The remainder of the story is focused on the narrator’s fruitless search for an answer to the mystery. This reading of the story sees the narrator as a gullible dupe.

First we might observe that Vereker’s claim is itself a fictional construct. There is no way a reader can know if it is true or not – because we have no examples of Vereker’s work with which to form a judgement. Covington’s subsequent claim to have discovered the secret is also part of the fiction. His word too is something whose veracity cannot be checked – even though the events of the text include Vereker’s apparent endorsement of Covington’s claim. The fact that two fictional characters might agree on the existence of a ‘secret meaning’ does not mean that such a meaning exists.

Those who wish to see the story as a literary joke might also observe that having apparently established the discovery of the hidden secret, the narrator is then tantalised, to an almost ridiculous extent, by his failure to drag the secret from the hands of those claiming to have grasped it.

In fact the very three people who claim to know the answer to the mystery (Vereker, Covington, and Gwendolen) all die in rapid succession, just as the narrator thinks he might learn the secret from them. He is left at the end of the story staring into the void, having also infected the hapless Drayton Deane with his belief in the mystery..

The face value interpretation

It is also possible to take the fictional claims made in the story at face value. Vereker claims his work has an ‘exquisite scheme’, but refuses to reveal it; and Covington claims to have discovered the secret, but dies before explaining what it is.

If we take this to be true, the story becomes a psychological study in the Narrator’s self-regard and egotism, which blinds him to the nature of events and the people with whom he is concerned.

Vereker warns him not to go off in pursuit of the ‘buried treasure’ in his work – “Give it up, give it up!” – to which the narrator responds by accusing him of being ‘a man of unstable moods’. If we follow the narrator’s comments closely, he reveals himself as a dubious judge who is also full of self-congratulation.

When Covington at first fails to uncover the ‘figure in the carpet’ the narrator observes ‘I considered I showed magnanimity in not reproaching him’. And when Covington goes to visit Vereker, he comments ‘We pictured the whole scene at Rapollo, where he would have written , mentioning my name, for permission to call’.

After spending more time with Gwendolen both before and after Covington’s death, he finds her much improved, ‘showing, I thought the better company she had kept’ (which can only be a reference to himself). Finally, he quite cynically contemplates the idea of marrying her just in the hope of gaining access to the mystery, which he thinks might be transmitted naturally enough from husband to wife. But he is so far detached from the emotional sphere of human relations, he speculates on Covington revealing the literary mystery to Gwendolen, and wonders ‘For what else but that ceremony had the nuptials taken place?’.

The narrator is left at the end of the story with no resolution to the mystery, and more importantly no further insight into himself and the limitations of his sensibility. This is a satirical version of the outcome of stories such as The Beast in the Jungle in which a narrator blinded by egoism realises that his life has been futile.

Story or tale?

Very few of James’s stories are short by modern standards, and the fact is that he called them tales, not stories. But as short fictions, they are usually judged by the same criteria as most stories – from Edgar Allen Poe to Maupassant, Checkhov, Joyce, and Woolf.

Poe suggested that a short story is something that can be read at one sitting, and that all its interest is focused onto a single issue. To these unities there have since been added unity of theme, time, imagery, place, character. In other words, short stories are at their best when they are as concentrated and unified as possible.

It could be argued that The Figure in the Carpet certainly focuses attention on one issue – the pursuit of a mystery – and has one principal character – the narrator. But these features are overwhelmed by something of a superfluity of incident. The story contains two marriages and no less than four deaths, on all of which the narrative depends – which is too much for even a short tale to bear.

It also has a singular lack of geographic unity. The story moves from London to Bombay, then on to Munich, Rapallo, and Meran before returning to London. It is certainly something of a mystery, but not a carefully unified whole.

The Figure in the Carpet – study resources

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

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

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

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

The Figure in the Carpet – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Figure in the Carpet – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Figure in the Carpet – Penguin Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Figure in the Carpet – Penguin Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle eBook edition

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

The Figure in the Carpet – audio book

The Figure in the Carpet – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Figure in the Carpet – plot summary

An un-named literary critic feels he has successfully reviewed the latest work of Hugh Vereker, a distinguished novelist. But when he meets the author in person at a social event, Vereker tells him that whilst the review is intelligent, he has missed the hidden underlying issue which informs all of his writing. The narrator presses him to reveal the nature of this mystery, but Vereker refuses, claiming that it will be self-evident in any close reading of his work.

The narrator enlists the support of his friend, the writer George Corvick, in the search for this hidden key. The hunt also entails novelist Gwendolen Erme, to whom Corvick is engaged but whose mother is opposed to the match. None of them succeeds in uncovering the secret pattern, but when Corvick goes to India with a commission for journalistic work, he writes back to announce that he has discovered the secret.

When pressed for information, he says he will only reveal the secret after he has married Gwendolen. He then visits Vereker in Italy on his way back to London, and we are given every reason to believe that Vereker confirms Corvick’s solution to the mystery. Corvick then begins to write the definitive interpretation of Vereker’s works.

Gwendolen’s mother dies, and Corvick’s wedding takes place, but he is killed in an accident on his honeymoon. When the narrator appeals to his widow for the key to the mystery, she refuses to divulge anything. It transpires that Corvick’s study of Vereker’s work is no more than a few introductory pages which reveal nothing.

The narrator is so sure that Corvick will have revealed the secret to Gwendolen that he contemplates marrying her to get at the information, but she meanwhile publishes another book and marries fellow novelist Drayton Deane, who the narrator perceives as a literary and social rival. But Gwendolen then dies in childbirth, leaving the narrator to appeal to Drayton Deane, asking if she has passed on to him the key to the mystery. She has not, and they are both left to contemplate the fact that they will never find it.

Principal characters

I	the un-named narrator, who is a literary critic
George Corvick	his friend, an author
Gwendolen Erme	a novelist, ‘engaged’ to Corvick
Lady Jane	a society hostess
Bridges	her country house
Hugh Vereker	a distinguished author
*The Middle*	a literary magazine
Drayton Deane	a novelist who marries Gwendolen

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

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

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

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.

&copy Roy Johnson 2012

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

The Friends of the Friends

January 3, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Friends of the Friends (1896) is one of the many variations of ‘a ghost story’ that James wrote in his late period. It was originally entitled The Way it Came for its first appearance in the May issue of Chapman’s Magazine of Fiction then renamed when published in the New York Edition of James’s novels and tales which appeared in 1907-1909. Neither title seems to really summarise or capture the story in a satisfactory manner.

The Friends of the Friends – critical commentary

The ghostly reading

Those with a penchant for supernatural interpretations have sufficient evidence here to provide a coherent reading of the tale. This rests on the notion that some people have the capacity to conjure up an apparition of a person who is in fact dying in a different location. It happens to the man in the story, who was ‘visited’ by his mother in Oxford around the same time that she is dying in Wales.

If we take that as a credible possibility, then the idea that he ‘sees’ his fellow clairvoyant late at night when she appears in his rooms is merely another example of the same phenomenon. After all, she appears, then disappears. They do not speak to each other.

The female inner-narrator guesses – it would seem correctly – that he has been deeply touched by the experience, and bases her subsequent rejection of him on this curiously supernatural infidelity, especially as he subsequently admits to its continuing.

But this interpretation rests on believing the inner-narrator’s interpretation of events. She believes that the woman was dead at that time. But the man does not. He claims it was a visit from the woman herself, fully alive. He is even able to describer her appearance (the three feathers in her hat).

It’s also possible to see the supernatural events from another perspective – that of the ghosts’ point of view. The female inner-narrator sees the man’s mother and her woman friend as sharing a capacity to make appearances before the man: “a strange gift shared by her with his mother and on her side likewise hereditary”. This interpretation puts the supernatural capacity onto the dying figure, rather than the person to whom they appear.

The unreliable narrator

Interpretation of the story may come down to which account of events seems more plausible – that of the man or the female inner-narrator. It is quite feasible that the woman called to see him whilst she was still alive – though it seems rather unlikely that two people would meet under such circumstances without speaking to each other.

On the other hand, if we accept that the two ‘visitations’ by the dying parents are credible, then the inner-narrator’s claim that the man had seen and communed seriously with the woman’s ghost at the same time as she was dying has the force of logic to it. If he can see one ghost, why not another? Or as the inner-narrator sees it, her woman friend shares a hereditary capacity for ghostliness with the man’s mother.

But another element which should be taken into account is that the inner-narrator can be seen as one of James’s many emotionally unstable and possibly unreliable narrators who he created around this time. She can certainly be seen as a precursor of the governess in The Turn of the Screw. She is predisposed to jealousy even before her two friends meet each other; she manipulates and deceives both of them; she accuses her fiancé of a very peculiar form of infidelity, and of course she does not name either of them or herself in her written account of events.

The narrative frame

The one-sided frame of the narrative is cast in the form of a letter or memo, written by the outer narrator to a publisher, who has asked him to look through the papers of a woman who has died. This is another example of a James tale which begins with the death of its protagonist. The story is in fact a retrospective, and we tend to forget whilst reading that the principal character no longer exists in the fictional time frame.

In fact the term ‘framed narrative’ is slightly misleading in such cases. In its original sense it was used to describe stories which were given some sort of introduction and conclusion. The story itself was therefore a fiction within a fiction.

For example, Joseph Conrad’s famous novella Heart of Darkness begins and ends with a group of sailors talking on board a ship, waiting for the tide to turn. One of them, Marlow, recounts his experiences which constitute the main events of story. But the introductory passages set the scene, and the conclusion returns to the same point, on board the ship, thereby completing the frame. It is worth noting that Conrad, like James, uses an un-named outer-narrator to introduce Marlow as the inner-narrator.

One remarkable feature of this story is that none of the characters in it is given a name. It’s true that there are only three principal characters – the inner narrator, plus her woman and man friend, but as the outer-narrator comments, they are given ‘neither name nor initials’.

The Friend of the Friends – study resources

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

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

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

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

The Friends of the Friends – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Friends of the Friends – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Friends of the Friends – Vintage Classics edition

The Ghost Stories of Henry James – Wordsworth edition

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

The Friends of the Friends – read the book on line

The Friends of the Friends – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Friends of the Friends – plot summary

A woman has two friends (a man and a woman) who both have the same supernatural experience of witnessing the appearance of a parent who at the very same moment is dying in another location. The woman thinks that they would like to meet each other so as to compare their experiences. However, both of them prevaricate over making the necessary arrangements.

The initial woman eventually becomes engaged to the man, and sets up a rendezvous between her two friends. But when she learns that the other woman’s husband has suddenly died she has a jealous fear that their common experience might draw them close to each other. She sends a message delaying the meeting with her fiancé until dinner later the same day.

The second woman visits the first in the afternoon as planned, and predicts that she will never meet the man, even at the forthcoming wedding. When she has gone, the man visits for dinner and the woman guiltily confesses her deception, then promises to do the same for her friend.

Next day she goes to Richmond, only to discover that her friend is dead. She goes back to report this to the man, who reveals that the woman visited him after he got back from dinner the night before. He claims that they never spoke, but he was very struck by her presence.

He cannot produce any concrete evidence that this visit took place, so the woman tries to convince him that he has seen a ghost – as he did when he witnessed the apparition of his mother. He tries to reassure her, but she feels jealous of the affect her friend has had on him.

The other woman is buried, but as the date of the marriage approaches the first woman feels that the friend has come between them, and eventually accuses her fiancé of ‘seeing’ her privately every evening, something he is unable to deny. So she calls off the marriage and they separate. Six years later he dies, and because his demise is sudden and inexplicable, she feels that he has gone in a ‘response to an irresistible call’.

Principal characters

I	an un-named outer narrator who presents the written story
I	an un-named inner female narrator who has written the story
—	her pretty un-named woman friend, whose husband dies
—	her un-named male friend, to whom she becomes engaged

Henry James’s study

Ghost stories by Henry James

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)

The Ghostly Rental (1876)

Sir Edmund Orme (1891)

The Private Life (1892)

Owen Wingrave (1892)

The Friends of the Friends (1896)

The Turn of the Screw (1898)

The Real Right Thing (1899)

The Third Person (1900)

The Jolly Corner (1908)

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

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

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

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.

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

The Ghostly Rental

May 20, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Ghostly Rental first appeared in magazine form in Scribner’s Monthly for September 1876. It appeared alongside The Lass O’Lowrie’s by popular Anglo-American novelist Frances Hodgson Burnett, who was born in Manchester (UK) and was most famous for her novel Little Lord Fauntleroy. It is one of a number of ghost stories that James wrote throughout his career – from the early tale The Romance of Certain Old Clothes to the late masterpiece The Turn of the Screw.

Arthur Rackham – The Old Man

The Ghostly Rental – critical commentary

The folk tale

Very unusually for Henry James, this story is closer to the form and content of a folk story than a tale in the realistic mode which was the usual genre of his choice. In this sense it is not unlike the tale Benvolio which he composed around the same time.

Many of the elements of a folk tale are present: an unspecified location and date; a mysterious old house hidden away down an unfrequented country lane; a wizened old man exhibiting bizarre behaviour; neighbours who shun the location in apparent fear; a setting in a cemetary; a back story of violence resulting in death and a ghost – all revealed by an old crone; and a conclusion of death, fire, and destruction.

There is no reason why James shouldn’t indulge himself in this literary form – and there are distinct echoes of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville in his treatment of the subject. But it can hardly be held up as a success in his repertoire of tale telling.

The ghost story

In terms of the traditional ghost story, the most interesting feature of this tale is that whilst it combines all the elements of ‘mystery and imagination’ listed above – it doesn’t actually contain a ghost at all.

Captain Diamond has been hoodwinked by his daughter. She has been renting the house from him by impersonating a ghost – whose existence in his mind is a reflection of the guilt he feels for having (as he believes) killed his own daughter.

No justification or explanation is offered for her actions. She says that her father has forgiven her so long as he thought she was dead, and admits that her stratagem in tricking him has been ‘folly’. She also sees an apparition of her father shortly before he dies. But none of these elements contribute to any dramatic coherence in the tale.

The Ghostly Rental – 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

The Ghostly Rental – read the original publication

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Ghostly Rental – plot summary

An un-named narrator recalls his earlier years as a student of theology. Waling in the countryside one late winter afternoon he takes a shhort cut on his way back home at sunset and comes across a large colonial house in a neglected spot. He is so impressed with its mysterious appearance and its gloomy ambiance that he decides it must be haunted.

Further on his journey back home he enquires at another house about who owns the ‘haunted’ house. A woman tells him that nobody every comes into or goes out of the house. A week later he goes back and sees a little old man in a voluminous military cloak let himself into the property, making ceremonious bows as he does so..The narrator looks in through a window to see the old man inside. The old man exits from the house in a similarly curious manner.

Later in the spring the narrator meets the old man in a cemetary. The old man’s face is a charicature of fierceness, yet his manner is gentle and mild. They discuss the existence of ghosts, and the old soldier reveals that he has seen one.

An old woman tells the narrator the back history of the little old soldier, whose name is ‘Captain Diamond’. He killed his own daughter by cursing her for the crime of receiving a young man into her home. And having revealed his secret to a woman admirer, she too died upon telling someone else.

The full story is then revealed. On his cursing her, the daughter dies, but then returns from the dead as ghost that rents the house from the Captain. When the narrator next meets him, the Captain confesses his crime. The narrator wishes to enter the house – and does so alone. There he encounters the ghost at the head of a staircase.

Some months later an elderly negress visits the narrator to say that her master the Captain is very ill. The Captain asks the narrator to collect the rent on his behalf. When the narrator visits the house, the ghost is revealed as a beautiful young woman – the Captain’s daughter, who is still alive. She has been deceiving her father – and at that precise moment she sees his ghost.

When the narrator returns to the Captain’s house, he has died. That night the old house catches fire, and by the morning is a ruin.

Principal characters

I	the un-named narrator, a former student of theology
Captain Diamond	an old soldier
Miss Deborah	a deformed old woman, the narrator’s housemaster’s sister
—	Captain Diamond’s daughter
Belinda	Captain Diamond’s negro housekeeper

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Ghost stories by Henry James

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)

The Ghostly Rental (1876)

Sir Edmund Orme (1891)

The Private Life (1892)

Owen Wingrave (1892)

The Friends of the Friends (1896)

The Turn of the Screw (1898)

The Real Right Thing (1899)

The Third Person (1900)

The Jolly Corner (1908)

Other works by Henry James

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 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.

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

The Given Case

April 28, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Given Case first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine in June 1899, and later the following year in the collection of stories The Soft Side (1900) published by Methuen.

The Given Case – critical commentary

Structural symmetry

The story is beautifully structured using a number of exactly symmetrical elements, with subtle differences between them. Two women have been engaged in relationships with two single men. Both women are formally committed to other men. Mrs Despard is married, but her husband is absent and estranged. Miss Hamer is engaged to Mr Grove-Steward, who is also absent, serving abroad.

It must be taken on trust that these two women have ‘encouraged’ the two single men – which is a Victorian euphemism for ‘flirting’. The two men now wish to marry them – which is at least a way of legitimising their relationships. As an additional feature of symmetry, each of the men appeals to the other’s lover for help in assisting their causes.

Colonel Despard returns to maintain the appearance of his marriage (it would seem) but not its substance. Mr Grove-Steward returns because he is alarmed by rumours of Miss Hamer’s behaviour which reach him in India. He wishes to preserve the contract he has made to marry her.

The story presents two essentially different responses to a similar social dilemma. To what extent does ‘flirting’ oblige participants to what now might be called ‘put up or shut up’? Mrs Despard dislikes her husband more than ever, but she sacrifices her lover for the security of an empty marriage to a man she does not love.

Miss Hamer on the other hand pities the distress she sees in her fiancé Grove-Steward, but sacrifices him for the sake of her new lover. This is certainly what James intended from his Notebook entry on this story:

I have the suggestion found in the Frenchman’s article in the Fortnightly Review about the opposition of the view of the Française and the Anglaise as to the responsibility incurred by a flirtation: one thinking of the compensation owed (where the man is really touched), the other taking the exact line of backing out. ‘It’s serious’ – they both see – but the opposed conclusion from that premise. This seems to me exactly treatable in my small compass.

The given evidence?

Despite the strengthening effect of this complex structure, the story has a central weakness – in that none of the ‘encouragement’ the two women have given their admirers has been dramatised. Thus we as readers have no way of knowing if the claims made by the two men claims are justified or not. We are being asked to take on trust that flirtation of some kind has gone on.

But even in a drama as small scale as this, the important social issues of breaking off an engagement or sacrificing oneself to a dead marriage can only be properly comprehended and appreciated if we know more details of the feelings and circumstances which have led up to them. It could be said that this is one of James’s tales which ought to have been longer in order to fulfil its own ambitions.

The Given Case – 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 Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

The Given Case – HTML version at The Ladder

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Given Case – plot summary

Part I. Barton Reeve is in love with a married woman, Mrs Kate Despard, who is estranged from her husband. He complains to a friend Margaret Hamer that Mrs Despard has encouraged his attentions, but not enough to divorce her husband. He appeals to Miss Hamer to help him.

Part II. At a country house weekend party Philip Mackern makes an appeal to Mrs Despard regarding his passion for Miss Hamer, who is engaged to Mr Grove-Steward, a government officer serving in India. She reproaches him for his rash conduct, they argue, and she refuses to help him.

Part III. Reeve meets Miss Hamer and her sister Mrs Gorton in Hyde Park, Miss Hamer reports that Mrs Despard does indeed like Reeve. He once again chafes at her not being prepared to leave her husband. He accuses her of being ‘afraid’.

Part IV. Mrs Despard summons Mackern to reveal to him that Mr Grove-Steward is returning early from India, where news of Miss Hamer’s behaviour has reached him. Mackern wants to marry MIss Hamer, but Mrs Despard thinks that would be disastrous.

Part V. Mrs Despard complains to Miss Hamer that her husband has unexpectedly returned and asked for a reconciliation, which she does not want. She admits she has behaved badly by encouraging Reeve. Miss Hamer reveals that she might continue her relationship with Mackern.

Part VI. Reeve visits Mrs Despard and insists that she owes it to him to accept his offer of marriage. She admits she has made a mistake in encouraging him, but that she feels she must stay with a husband who she dislikes more than ever. They part company very painfully.

Part VII. Mackern goes to Mrs Gorton’s to speak to Miss Hamer. Mrs Gorton wants him to leave and reproaches him for compromising her sister’s reputation. But Mackern insists he has a right to present his case. When Miss Hamer arrives it’s to say that her fiancé cannot understand or tolerate her behaviour – and that she pities him. The implication is that she will now accept Mackern’s offer.

Other works by Henry James

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 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.

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

The Golden Bowl

February 26, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, resources, video, further reading

The Golden Bowl (1904) comes as the climax of James’ late period. His writing is mannered, baroque, complex, and focused intently on the psychological relationships between his characters. There is very little ‘plot’ here in the conventional sense. The bowl in the title is a gift from one couple to another – but there’s a lot more to it than that of course. It will not be giving away too much of the story to say that it concerns an American heiress as she becomes aware of the secret affair between her new husband and her father’s young wife. As usual in many of James’s great novels, much of the drama is fuelled by relations between Europe and America (his ‘International’ theme) by class, social mobility, and by sex and money.

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

The Golden Bowl – plot summary

Prince Amerigo, an impoverished but charismatic Italian nobleman, is in London for his marriage to Maggie Verver, only child of the fabulously wealthy American financier and art collector, Adam Verver. Amerigo meets Charlotte Stant, a former mistress who he didn’t marry because both of them were seeking to marry into money. They go shopping for a wedding present for Maggie. They find a curiosity shop where the Jewish shopkeeper offers them an antique gilded crystal bowl. But the rather anti-Semitic Prince declines to purchase the bowl because he suspects it contains a hidden flaw.

After Maggie’s marriage she is afraid that her father has become lonely. She persuades him to propose to Charlotte, unaware of the past relationship between Charlotte and Amerigo. Adam’s proposal is accepted, and soon after the wedding, Charlotte and the Prince find themselves thrown together because their respective spouses seem more interested in their father-daughter relationship than in their marriages. The Prince and Charlotte finally consummate an adulterous affair.

Maggie eventually begins to suspect Amerigo and Charlotte. This suspicion is intensified when she accidentally meets the shopkeeper and buys the golden bowl. Uncomfortable with the high price she paid for the bowl, the shopkeeper visits Maggie and confesses to overcharging her. At Maggie’s home he sees photographs of Amerigo and Charlotte. He tells Maggie of the pair’s shopping trip on the eve of her marriage and their intimate conversation in his shop. (They had spoken Italian, but he happens to understand the language.)

Maggie now confronts Amerigo, and then begins a secret campaign to separate the Prince and Charlotte while never letting her father know of their affair. She lies to Charlotte about not having anything to accuse her of, and she gradually persuades her father to return to America with his wife. Amerigo appears impressed by Maggie’s delicate diplomacy, after he had previously regarded her as rather naive and immature. The novel ends with Adam and Charlotte about to depart for America, while Amerigo can “see nothing but” Maggie and embraces her.

Study resources

The Golden Bowl – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Golden Bowl – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Golden Bowl – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Golden Bowl – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Golden Bowl – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Golden Bowl – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

The Golden Bowl – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Golden Bowl – etext of the 1909 edition

The Golden Bowl – audioBook at LibriVox

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James – biographical notes

The Golden Bowl – Merchant-Ivory film site

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

The Golden Bowl – characters

Adam Verver	an American multi-millionaire art collector
Maggie	his loving daughter
Prince Amerigo	an impoverished Italian nobleman
Charlotte Stant	an impoverished friend of Maggie
Fanny Assingham	an inquisitive friend of the family
The Colonel	her easy-going husband

The Golden Bowl – film version

2000 film adaptation

Merchant-Ivory pull out all the stops in their repertoire for creating lush period detail. Costumes, furniture, jewellery, and art objects all help to recreate a convincing fin de siècle atmosphere. The inclusion of original film footage from early last century adds tremendously to the period flavour. Nick Nolte plays the American millionaire Adam Verver, Kate Beckinsdale his daughter Maggie, and Uma Thurman the poor but scheming Charlotte. James Fox and Angelica Huston in supporting roles provide added depth. There is an odd use of ‘chapter’ titles – “Adam Verver’s rented castle” – which one associates more with the eighteenth century than the early twentieth, and as in their other productions, the sex is far more explicit than in the original. James implies: Merchant-Ivory shows.

See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

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

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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.

More on Henry James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

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The Coxon Fund – study resources

The Coxon Fund – plot summary

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The Death of the Lion – study resources

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The Europeans – study resources

The Europeans – plot summary

The Europeans – principal characters

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Henry James – web links

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The Figure in the Carpet – study resources

The Figure in the Carpet – plot summary

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Henry James – web links

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

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The Friend of the Friends – study resources

The Friends of the Friends – plot summary

Further reading

Ghost stories by Henry James

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

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

The Ghostly Rental – critical commentary

The Ghostly Rental – study resources

The Ghostly Rental – plot summary

Principal characters

Ghost stories by Henry James

Further reading

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

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

The Given Case – critical commentary

The Given Case – study resources

The Given Case – plot summary

Further reading

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

tutorial, characters, resources, video, further reading

The Golden Bowl – plot summary

Study resources

The Golden Bowl – characters

The Golden Bowl – film version

Further reading

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

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