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The Abasement of the Northmores

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The Abasement of the Northmores first appeared in the collection of tales, The Soft Side in 1900 – which was a remarkably fertile period for Henry James in terms of his production of tales. It was a year which saw the publication of Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie, The Third Person, The Great Good Place, The Tone of Time, The Tree of Knowledge, and the story which is widely regarded as his finest – The Beast in the Jungle. James produced all of these (and more) in addition to working on his next novel, The Sacred Fount (1901).

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

The Abasement of the Northmores – commentary

Towards the end of his career, James wrote a number of pieces which fictionalise his concern for public reputation and the use which might be made of his private papers after his death. He destroyed most of his own private papers during the period 1909-1915 when he suffered a number of severe illnesses.

He also wrote in stories such as The Papers of inflated and completely bogus public reputations established by nonentities and in The Private Life people who do not have any personal substance behind the facade of their public personae.

The most remarkable feature of this story is that almost nothing in the narrative is dramatised. The whole story is delivered via omniscient third person narration. And in addition, none of the active participants in the drama actually talk to each other on the page.

The reader is kept at a considerable distance from events, because no extracts from any letters are quoted, so we have no way of judging the true extent of John Northmore’s fatuousness or of Warren Hope’s neglected talents. In this sense the story is told, not shown.

The ending of the story seems particularly hurried. Within the space of less than a page, two major strands of the story are finished off and a third introduced. First, Mrs Hope concludes that Northmore’s two volumes of letters will themselves undermine his reputation. This would be ending enough, if only we had evidence on which to judge its veracity. But she then burns her own packet of letters from John Northmore – which have contributed little to the drama of the story. Then she prepares the rival collection of her own correspondence with her husband Warren that she hopes will vindicate him in public estimation. Finally she arranges for posthumous publication by changing her will.

It is significant that in the notebook entry on the original ideas for this story, James was not certain how the story would conclude:

She wants to score. She publishes—and does.—Or is there anything ELSE in it?—in connection with the letters she eventually publishes ????—???—

The Abasement of the Northmores – study resources

The Abasement of the Northmores The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Abasement of the Northmores The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Abasement of the Northmores Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Abasement of the Northmores Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Abasement of the Northmores The Abasement of the Northmores – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Abasement of the Northmores The Abasement of the Northmores – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Abasement of the Northmores Tales of Henry James – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

The Abasement of the Northmores The Abasement of the Northmores – read the story on line

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Abasement of the Northmores

The Abasement of the Northmores – plot summary

Part I. Having made a great reputation by using other people, Lord Northmore dies to widespread public sorrow. Mrs Warren Hope feels aggrieved that Northmore has particularly exploited her husband – his oldest friend. When Mr Warren Hope attends the Northmore burial service he contracts pneumonia and dies.

Part II. Mrs Hope subsequently receives a request from Lady Northmore for any letters written by her late husband, to be used in a memorial publication that is designed to inflate his reputation even further. Mrs Hope has a bundle of letters from Lord Northmore, who was once her suitor, but she decides not to send them. Warren Hope however has kept all Lord Northmore’s correspondence, and despite her temptation to thwart the plan, Mrs Hope hands over all the letters.

Part III. There is a great public response to Lady Northmore’s request for material, which piques Mrs Hope into the idea of publishing correspondence between herself and her husband, which she thinks will be much more interesting. She too makes a public appeal – but nobody has saved any of her husband’s letters.

Part IV. When Lord Northmore’s letters are published (in two volumes) Mrs Hope realises that they reveal nothing except his inanity, and she suspects that her late husband might even have saved so many for the very purpose of revealing the fact. She visits Lady Northmore intending to enjoy some form of triumph over her, but she leaves feeling nothing but pity.

Part V. She burn her own bundle of letters from Lord Northmore, edits her correspondence with Warren Hope, has a single copy printed, and leaves instructions in her will for it to be published after her death. ‘Her last was to hope that death would come in time.’

Principal characters

Lord John Northmore ‘a great political figure’
Lady Northmore his wife
Warren Hope an old friend and colleague of Northmore
Mrs Warren Hope his wife

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

Henry James The BostoniansThe 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.

The Abasement of the Northmores Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Abasement of the Northmores Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James What Masie KnewWhat 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.

Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon UK
Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James The AmbassadorsThe 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.
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon UK
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

Henry James 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.

Henry James 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.

Red button 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2012

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The Adventures of Augie March

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The Adventures of Augie March (1954) was Saul Bellow’s third novel. It was widely regarded as his ‘breakthrough’ work, in that it was not only different from his first two books but was a refreshingly new ‘voice’ in American fiction. That voice was a combination of urban vernacular speech with the sophisticated language of European literary and intellectual discourse. These elements were wrapped up in a freewheeling story that captures the modern city in all its vitality and the existential choices that faced man after the second world war.

The Adventures of Augie March

The Adventures of Augie March – commentary

The picaresque novel

The Adventures of Augie March can be seen as a modern form of the picaresque novel. The picaro was a rogue or rascal who featured as the hero in many examples of post-Renaissance literature. He was usually of lower-class origins: his fortunes varied rapidly from success to failure and disaster; he skirted the edges of criminality; his adventures usually involved travel; and he recounted his own history in a language which was plain and realistic.

Typical examples of novels in this genre include Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605), Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), Voltaire’s Candide (1759), and Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull (1954).

Picaresque novels rarely have any tightly organised plot. They are constructed from loosely related episodes as the hero encounters a succession of secondary characters who draw him into a series of temptations. These may lead variously to danger, opportunistic self-indulgence, brief periods of triumph, or impoverishment.

Augie’s story certainly fits the stereotype, and he is at pains to stress his very humble origins. His father has deserted the family, his mother is virtually an invalid, and the household is run by an elderly matriarch they call ‘Grandmother’ but who is not actually related to them and seems to have been placed with the family by social workers.

Augie’s younger brother Georgie is mentally retarded, and both poverty and hand-me-down clothes dominate the early chapters of the story. Bellow is quite frank about the real-life origins of his novel:

I remebered a pal of mine whose surname was August – a handsome, breezy, freewheeling kid … His father had deserted the family, his mother was, even to a nine-year-old kid, visibly abnormal, he had a strong and handsome older brother. There was a younger child who was retarded – and they had a granny who ran the show … I decided to describe their lives.

Augie is pulled between his poor origins and the chances for enrichment and social improvement that are placed by chance before him. He comes from the lower echelons of society and keeps being pulled back towards the gutter. However, it is noticeable that no matter how glamorous or tempting the offers of social ease and material prosperity might be, it is his roots in lower-class Jewish Chicago life that keep drawing him back and providing him with a sort of moral and spiritual stability.

It is in this sense that the novel was also a ‘breakthrough’ for Saul Bellow – because in writing it he mapped out elements of fiction and social concern which he was to develop for the rest of his writing life. His principal theme in all the novels and stories produced in the next four and a half decades was that of the Jew in America. His protagonists are immigrants, urban, with a past in Europe and a future they must devise for themselves.

Literary style

Saul Bellow is renowned for his novels which have fast-talking first person narrators. They are stories told by fictional characters who deliver the events of the narrative, an amusing commentary on contemporary society, and quasi-philosophic reflections – all at the same time. He also employs a style of narration which is a fascinating admixture of street language, colloquial expressions, slang, and the vocabulary of intellectual and even philosophic discourse.

What’s more, this narrative voice was consciously developed, and is a reflection of Bellow’s desire to fuse Eurocentric culture absorbed via his higher education with the American demotic in which he had been raised as the son of first-generation immigrants. He describes the exhilaration he felt at inventing a narrative voice that was distinct and new.

What I found was the relief of turning away from mandarin English and putting my own accents into the language My earlier books had been straight and respectable. As if I had to satisfy the demands of H. W. Fowler. But in Augie March I wanted to invent a new sort of American sentence. Something like a fusion of colloquialism and elegance … Street language combined with a high style.

The Adventures of Augie March

The genesis of the novel

In 1948 Saul Bellow was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to spend time writing in Paris. He took with him the manuscript of a third novel on which he was working. Progress did not go well, so he abandoned the novel and

began writing about an ordinary family he had known years before, mixing with it elements from his own life history:

It poured out of me. I was writing many hours every day. In the next two years I seldom looked into Fowler’s Modern English Usage … It was enormously exhilarating to take liberties with the language … For the first time I felt that the language was mine to do with as I wished.

Like many other writers he created an indelible picture of his home town (Chicago) whilst living abroad – just as Joyce created a memorable literary version of Dublin whilst living in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. Bellow also mined a rich seam of themes, topics, and incidents that would be expanded into a whole sequence of stories, novellas, and novels that followed The Adventures of Augie March.

He celebrates the sheer heterogeneous nature of Chicago urban life, and does so with a prose style that reflects its overwhelming vitality. Early in the novel Augie befriends fellow street urchin Jimmy Klein and they discover the excitement of city life:

After this it wasn’t hard for Jimmy to induce me to go downtown with him … to ride, if there was nothing better to do, in the City Hall elevator … In the cage we rose and dropped, rubbing elbows with bigshots and operators, commissioners, grabbers, heelers, tipsters, hoodlums, wolves, fixers, plaintiffs, flatfeet, men in Western hats and women in lizard shoes and fur coats, hothouse and arctic drafts mixed up, brute things and airs of sex, evidence of heavy feeding and systematic shaving, of calculations, grief, not-caring, and hopes of tremendous millions in concrete to be poured or whole Mississippis of bootleg whisky and beer.

The Adventures of Augie March – study materials

The Adventures of Augie March – Amazon UK

The Adventures of Augie March – Amazon US

The Adventures of Augie March – Classic Notes

The Adventures of Augie March – Study Guide

Saul Bellow – Essays – Amazon UK

Saul Bellow – Letters – Amazon UK

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

The Adventures of Augie March

The Adventures of Augie March – plot summary

I.   Augie recalls the poverty of his Chicago childhood. He is raised largely by his matriarchal grandmother. His father has deserted the family, leaving his mother with three sons. His elder brother Simon is very studious, and his younger brother Georgie is mentally retarded.

II.   As a young boy Augie delivers newspapers and advertising bills. His aunt Anna wants him to marry her daughter. Her brother, Five Properties, is in search of a wife.

III.   Augie’s family are ambitious for him, and are exasperated by his youthful misbehaviour. He works in Woolworth’s basement with his brother. Simon finds him a better job, but he is sacked for incompetence. He plays truant from school and goes to vaudeville shows.

IV.   Augie and his friend Jimmy Klein are caught pilfering during their Xmas vacation jobs at a department store. He has a teenage crush on Hilda Novison, an unattractive girl. Georgie is put into a care home, and Grandma Lausch loses her authority in the family.

V.   Augie is employed to look after William Einhorn, a crippled grandee in a family real estate business. Although he suffers from paralysis, Einhorn lusts after women and engages in slightly dubious commerce.

VI.   Augie still has no real purpose in life. Dingbat manages an amateur heavyweight boxer. The grandmother is transferred to a care home. The commissioner fades away and dies. After the funeral Augie helps Einhorn take stock of his debtors.

VII.   The great depression of the late 1920s arrives, and the Einhorn empire collapses. Augie gets a job as a soda jerk and sees his brother Simon become more socially sophisticated. Augie takes part in a petty robbery organised by a poolroom friend. Einhorn reproaches him, but on Augie’s graduation night he takes him out to a whorehouse as a celebratory treat.

VIII.   Augie gets a job selling shoes in a department store, then progresses to work in Mr Renling’s luxury sporting goods shop. He escorts Mrs Renling to a holiday resort and falls in love with an attractive fellow guest. The girl rejects him, but he is pursued by her sister, Thea Fenchel.

IX.   The Renlings want to adopt Augie, but he rejects their offer and takes a job selling paint. When that fails, he joins a childhood friend smuggling illegal immigrants from Canada. He discovers their car is stolen, and they separate. Augie is reduced to hitch hiking and ends up in jail.

X.   On return to Chicago he finds the Grandmother has died, and his mother has been taken in by neighbours. His brother has sold the household furniture, borrowed money from Einhorn, and lost it in a betting syndicate. He has also lost his fiancée to Five Properties. Augie gets a job washing dogs. His Mexican student friend teaches him the art of shoplifting – but Augie reads the books he steals. His brother Simon shows up and announces his semi-arranged marriage.

XI.   Augie works as a caretaker’s assistant in a student house and befriends Mimi Villars, a waitress with strong opinions. Simon introduces Augie to his new rich wife-to-be Charlotte Magnus and her all-embracing family. Simon gains money but loses personal integrity.

XII.   Simon marries the rich Charlotte and wants Augie to profit from contact with this wealthy family. Augie takes up with Lucy Magnus but does not have marriage in mind. Simon puts more pressure on Augie in his work at the coal yard. Augie’s friend Mimi becomes pregnant by her married and absent lover. Augie helps her to secure an abotion, but he is spotted by a friend of the Magnus family. The family break off his relationship with their daughter Lucy. Augie spends New Year’s Eve in hospital, where Mimi is haemorrhaging.

XIII.   Augie gets a job as a trade union organiser and he takes up with a Greek girl. But suddenly Thea Fenchel arrives in pursuit of him. He is sent to deal with an inter-union dispute and is beaten up.

XIV.   He escapes, goes to Thea, then stays with her, giving himself up to a sudden passion. She is married, no longer rich, and is en route to Mexico to seek a divorce. She also has eccentric plans to hunt lizards with a trained eagle. His friends warn him against the plan.

XV.   They drive to Mexico, recognising that they might have different goals in life. Thea purchases a wild eagle and they begin the laborious and painful process of trying to train it. In Mexico City, Thea has divorce proceedings with a lawyer.

XVI.   They travel on to Thea’s old family home. Augie is humane and sentimental about the eagle, whereas Thea wants it to be a savage killer. They socialise with cosmopolitan residents in the town. When they take the eagle to hunt Thea is angry that it will not attack an iguana.

XVII.   Augie has a riding accident. His horse is killed and he is badly injured. Thea sells the eagle then starts collecting snakes. She and Augie begin to drift apart, and he takes up gambling. Eventually, they decide to move on.

XVIII.   There is a party the night before departure. Augie gets drawn into helping a woman escape her husband who is wanted by the US government. They spend a night together in the mountains. Next day on return he has a heated argument with Thea who is jealous. She breaks with him and leaves for Chilpanzingo.

XIX.   Augie goes into an emotional collapse for several days, then convinces himself that he can repair the damage and make a success of a renewed relationship with Thea. He learns that she has gone to Chilpanzingo with Talavera, a former lover. Fuelled by hatred and revenge in mind, he tracks her down and asks for a second chance, but she refuses him.

XX.   Augies goes back to Mexico City and is sheltered by a Yugoslav Bolshevik. He is asked to be a bodyguard for the exiled Leon Trotsky, who wants to evade Stalin’s GPU – but the scheme is called off.

XXI.   After two years away, Augie returns to Chicago, calling to see his brother Georgie and his mother, who are both in care homes. His brother Simon has become a rich and successful businessman, but is loud and vulgar. Augie works as a research assistant for the eccentric millionaire Robey who wants to write a book about the history of happiness.

XXII.   Time passes. Augie becomes a trainee teacher and takes up again with Sophie Geratis, who is now married. He has a quasi-Utopian dream to establish a model school for orphans. War breaks out, but he fails his medical examination. His brother Simon has an attractive mistress Renee. Simon’s wife Charlotte discovers the deception, and Renee becomes pregnant.

XXIII.   Augie enlists in the merchant navy. He spends his first weekend leave with Stella Chesney whom he met in Mexico. On the strength of this he thinks he has fallen in love, and the following weekend he asks her to marry him.

XXIV.   A week before the wedding, lawyer Mintouchian regales Augie withe stories of adultery, deceit, and lying. One tale of a stolen necklace is about his own lover, Agnes Kuttner.

XXV.   On his first naval posting Augie becomes an unofficial confidante to the rest of the crew. His ship is sunk by a submarine. He drifts in a lifeboat with Basteshaw, a carpenter-philosopher who claims he has reproduced life in cell forms. He has deranged and paranoid plans, and overpowers Augie, putting their lives at risk. Eventually they are picked up by a British ship and taken to recover in an Italian hospital.

XXVI.   After the war Augie and Stella go to live in Paris where she works in an international film unit. He becomes a travelling salesman, doing illegal deals for Mantouchian. He discovers that Stella had a rich former lover with whom she still has complex and legally dubious dealings.

The Adventures of Augie March – characters
Augie March the narrator, a poor boy from Chicago
Georgie March his younger brother who is retarded
Simon March his elder brother who is studious and becomes rich
Grandma Lausch a Jewish matriarch
Rebecca March Augie’s mother, who goes blind
Anna Coblin Rebecca’s cousin
Hyman Coblin her generous husband
‘Five Properties’ Anna’s brother
The Commissioner head of a property company
William Einhorn his son, who has polio
‘Dingbat’ Einhorn’s half-brother
Arthur Einhorn William’s son, a university student
Mr Renling owner of a luxury sporting goods store
Mrs Renling his wife, who acts as a mother to Augie
Padilla a poor Mexican student, maths wizard, and book thief
Mimi Villars a waitress with strong opinions
Charlotte Magnus Simon’s wife, from a rich family
Sophie Geratis a Greek chambermaid
Stella Chesney a would-be actress, later Augie’s wife
Agnes Kuttner Stella’s rich friend
Mintouchian a rich Armenian lawyer

© Roy Johnson 2018

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Twentieth century literature

The Age of Innocence

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The Age of Innocence (1920) is perhaps Edith Wharton’s most famous novel. It was written immediately after the First World War, when she had settled permanently to live just outside Paris. She takes as her subject three issues she knew very well from first-hand experience: old New York upper-class society of the 1870s, marriage, and divorce. She had been encouraged to take this as her material by her friend Henry James, who urged her to ‘do’ old New York. And like James she also included as a substantial fourth subject, the tensions between European and American culture.

The Age of Innocence

first edition dust cover 1920

The Age of Innocence – plot summary

Part I

Newland Archer is a rather conventional member of ‘old money’ New York society. He works half-heartedly in a legal firm and has just become engaged to May Welland, who is also a member of a respectable family. Into this group there suddenly appears Countess Ellen Olenska, an American who has separated from her Polish husband. Archer and his set try to arrange a dinner to integrate Ellen into New York society, but they receive refusals on the unspoken grounds that she is not respectable because of her tainted past. So her relatives appeal to one of the oldest families, the Van der Luydens, who invite Ellen to meet a visiting English Duke. The occasion is a social success, and it provides Ellen with the seal of approval she needs.

Edith Wharton - The Age of InnocenceArcher visits Ellen (at her request) and is impressed by her bohemianism and her radical attitudes. He feels increasingly stifled by the expectations of his family and what he sees as the dull predictability of the married life ahead of him. Almost unknown to himself, he is attracted to Ellen and what she represents as a free spirit. Archer is asked by his law firm to handle the case Ellen wishes to bring against her husband for divorce. New York society prefers to avoid such a scandal, and Archer is successful in managing to persuade her against the action.

When his fiancee May goes south for a winter holiday, Archer follows Ellen to a weekend in the country, but their intimacy is spoiled by the arrival of Julius Beaufort, of whom Archer feels jealous. Archer then abruptly visits May on her holiday, where he tries to convince himself that he still wants to marry her. He asks her to bring their marriage date forward. She wonders if there is somebody else in Archer’s life – and he is relieved to discover that she is thinking of someone in his distant past.

Returning to New York, Archer finally manages to arrange a private audience with Ellen, whereupon he declares his love for her. She reciprocates his feelings but argues that having provided her with his protective friendship, he should now stand by his engagement to May. She feels it would be dishonourable to take advantage of people who have shown her friendship. On returning home he receives a telegram from May announcing that she will marry him in a month’s time.

Part II

On his wedding day Archer is oppressed by the weight of expectancy and tradition that he realises marriage will entail. Even on his honeymoon he also realises that there is an emotional and intellectual gulf between himself and May – though he realises that she is likely to be a good and loyal wife.

He continues to be disturbed by visions of Ellen. He follows her to Boston where she has just turned down an offer to re-join her husband. Over a private lunch they agree that they must stay separate and love each other from a distance. Archer also meets Count Olenski’s emissary, who pleads that Ellen should remain in America, and reveals that Archer’s family now want her to return to her husband.

Beaufort’s bank crashes, which indirectly affects Archer’s family. At the same time the family dowager matriarch Mrs Mingott has a stroke. Ellen is summoned from a retreat in Washington to live with her and provide support. Archer proposes to Ellen that they should commit themselves to each other in some sort of alliance, but she refuses on the grounds that this would put them both outside society. She finally suggests to him that they spend just one night together before she returns to Europe.

The love tryst fails to materialize, and Ellen is given a send-off dinner, at which Archer realises that everybody believes that he and Ellen are lovers. This is their way of getting rid of the social problem without even officially recognising it. Archer has decided to follow Ellen to Europe, but when he attempts to confess all to May, she reveals that she is pregnant, and has told Ellen about it earlier.

Twenty-six years later, after a faultless life of public service, Archer is visiting Paris with his son Dallas, who has made an appointment to visit his relation Countess Olenska, who still lives on the Left Bank. Dallas reveals that his mother (as she was dying) told him about the relationship between Archer and Ellen. Archer despatches his son to meet Ellen, but does not go himself.

The Age of Innocence – study resources

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – Cliff’s Notes study guide – Amazon UK

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – eBook formats at Gutenberg

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – audioBook version at Gutenberg

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – Kindle eBook edition

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Principal characters
Newland Archer a young well-to-do ‘gentleman lawyer’
Mrs Adeline Archer his old-fashioned mother
Janey Archer his sister, an old-fashioned virgin
Mr Welland an advanced valetudinarian
Mrs Welland May’s mother
May Welland Archer’s fiancee
Lawrence Lefferts adulterous man-about-town, friend of Archer
Mr Sillerton Jackson an authority on ‘old society’, ‘the drawing room moralist’
Miss Sophy Jackson his sister
Mrs Manson Mingott a rich and obese New York dowager matriarch
Lovell Mingott her son
Julius Beaufort an English banker of doubtful provenance
Van der Luydens old New York society family
Mrs Lemuel Struthers raffish nouveau riche
Duke of St Austrey shabby and comic English toff
Ned Winsett journalist on woman’s weekly magazine, friend of Archer
Mrs Thorley Rushworth Archer’s former married lover
Count Stanislas Olenski Ellen’s Polish husband
Marchioness Medora Manson Ellen’s flambouyant and eccentric aunt
Dr Agathon Carver a fashionable spiritualist
Mr Riviére personal tutor and emissary of Count Olenski
The Age of Innocence – Video

1993 adaptation by Martin Scorsese

Further reading

Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman of her Time, New York: Viking, 1971,

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp.222. ISBN: 0820305138

Janet Beer, Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work), New York: Northcote House, 2001, pp.99, ISBN: 0746308981

Millicent Bell (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.232, ISBN: 0521485134

Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1992, pp.329, ISBN: 0824078489

Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, ISBN: 0810927950

Gloria C. Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, California: University of California Press, 1992, pp.223, ISBN: 0520075838

Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals, UPNE, 1990, pp.220, ISBN: 0874515246

Irving Howe, (ed), Edith Wharton: A collection of Critical Essays, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986,

Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.240, ISBN: 0521830893

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, London: Vintage, new edition 2008, pp.864, ISBN: 0099763516

R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975, pp.592, ISBN: 0880640200

James W. Tuttleton (ed), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.586, ISBN: 0521383196

Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991,

Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Work, Fact on File, 1998, pp.352, ISBN: 0816034818

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, New York: Perseus Books, second edition 1994, pp.512, ISBN: 0201409186

Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the CountryThe Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book at Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book at Amazon US

Edith Wharton - The House of MirthThe House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book at Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book at Amazon US

The ReefThe Reef deals with three topics with which Edith Wharton herself was intimately acquainted at the period of its composition – unhappy marriage, divorce, and the discovery of sensual pleasures. The setting is a country chateau in France where diplomat George Darrow has arrived from America, hoping to marry the beautiful widow Anna Leith. But a young woman employed as governess to Anna’s daughter proves to be someone he met briefly in the past and has fallen in love with him. She also becomes engaged to Anna’s stepson. The result is a quadrangle of tensions and suspicions about who knows what about whom. And the outcome is not what you might imagine.
Edith Wharton - The Reef Buy the book at Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Reef Buy the book at Amazon US

Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

Edith Wharton Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith WhartonEdith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

Edith WhartonThe Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

Edith WhartonThe Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith WhartonEdith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith WhartonEdith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

© Roy Johnson 2011

More on Edith Wharton
More on the novella
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More on short stories

The Altar of the Dead

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Altar of the Dead (1895) holds a very high distinction amongst the stories of Henry James – for it is the one from the hundred or more that he wrote with which he said he was ‘least dissatisfied’. And it is generally held in positive regard amongst literary critics, along with similar stories such as The Beast in the Jungle which he wrote a few years later. One amazing feature of this story is that it was turned down by several magazine editors, and only first published in the collection Terminations in 1895.

His great achievement in this story is to compress what seems like the entire adult lives of his characters into the space of a few pages. It is intensely focused in terms of location, characters, and tone. And whilst reading it, one actually feels that half a lifetime has passed.

The Altar of the Dead

The altar of the dead

The Altar of the Dead – critical commentary

Interpretation

Some critics have seen the story as a fable which shows that love and forgiveness can conquer deep seated hostilities and cure old wounds. The woman has forgiven Acton Hague, and in the end Stransom too is prepared to add Hague to his list of the Remembered – though it is not clear if the ‘one final candle’ he intends for his altar is for Hague or for Stransom himself. This reading would see the last-minute change of heart on both their parts as a rather sad conclusion to a tale with a morally uplifting message.

A more critical reading however would see the story as a ghastly picture of two people who have rationalised their emotional emptiness as self-sacrifice. For like The Beast in the Jungle this is a story of lost opportunities, of missed chances, fear of ‘life’, and the choice of a spiritual ‘death in life’. Both the principal characters have devoted their lives to the memory of someone dead – Stransom to Mary Antrim and his other friends, the woman to Acton Hague.

Even whilst we might admire their loyalty and firmness of purpose, their emotional investment is in something negative and life-denying. And they cling morbidly to these associations whilst all the time the chance of establishing a a healthy human relationship with each other is staring them in the face.

They appear to have so much in common – their devotion to lost friends and the steadfastness of their beliefs. Everything in the story appears to point to them having a mutual interest in forming a supportive emotional bond. But in fact both of them are very secretive with each other. Stransom deliberately withholds information about himself:

it was natural enough that of his previous life she should have ascertained only what he judged good to communicate. There were passages it was quite conceivable that even in the moments of tenderest expansion he should have withheld.

In other words he is emotionally costive, secretive, and withdrawn. She in her turn refuses to let him into her home until her aunt has died, because she fears what the aunt might reveal about her. It takes him ‘years and years’ to even learn her address.

It is then no wonder that the relationship between them is doomed to be unfulfilled. And yet there is a beautifully symbolic and delicately orchestrated scene of potential intimacy that takes place when Stransom visits her for the first time in her own home.

First of all she gives him an open invitation to return: ‘You can always come now, you know’. Then she invites him into her own private room, which they reach via a ‘narrow hall’. Once inside she sits beside him on a sofa and takes his hand in hers whilst she tells him she has forgiven Acton Hague.

The scene is very lightly suggestive of what could exist between them, and it is echoed in the final scene when she comforts him in the church as he is dying, but by then it is then Too Late.

Like The Beast in the Jungle there is a wonderful evocation of years and years slipping by as they both become older and nearer to death. At the start of the story Stransom is ‘an elderly man’ of fifty-five and by the repetition of small phrases such as ‘months passed … years later … they were growing old together in their piety’ – a whole lifetime seems to drift by, and at the end of only twenty pages he is expiring in the church from a weak heart. The woman when he first meets her at the music recital is ‘pretty’, yet in no time ‘her faded beauty was like a summer twilight’

James certainly saw Stransom’s devotion in quite a positive light in the plans he made for the story in his Notebooks:

He cherishes for the silent, for the patient, the unreproaching dead, a tenderness in which all his private need of something, not of this world, to cherish, to be pious to, to make the object of a donation, finds a sacred, and almost a secret, expression.

However, it should be borne in mind that James’s notebooks entries recorded his original ideas for stories. The details and emphases might change during the process of composition. And conversely, his famous Prefaces which form the introductions to the New York Edition of The Novels and Tales of Henry James (1907-1909) were written a long time after the stories had been written and published. There is therefore considerable scope for post-rationalisation on James’s part. And of course we do not need to take as authoritative writers’ estimates of their own works. We should ‘trust the tale, not the teller’.

The Altar of the Dead – study resources

The Altar of the Dead The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Altar of the Dead The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Altar of the Dead Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Altar of the Dead Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Altar of the Dead The Altar of the Dead – Classic Reprints edition – Amazon UK

The Altar of the Dead The Altar of the Dead – Kindle eBook edition

The Altar of the Dead The Altar of the Dead – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Altar of the Dead The Altar of the Dead – audio book at LibriVox

The Altar of the Dead The Complete Tales (Vol 9) – Paperback edition – Amazon UK

Red button La Chambre Verte (The Vanishing Fiancée) – Film version – Amazon UK

The Altar of the Dead The Altar of the Dead – Henry James’s preface

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Altar of the Dead

The Altar of the Dead – plot summary

Distressed by the death of his fiancée, George Stransom devotes his adult life to keeping the memory of her alive. As he grows older, further names of friends are added to his personal roll call of the Dead.

In a cemetery he discovers an old church, inside which there is an empty altar that he decides to consecrate for his own personal use. He lights candles to the memory of all his dead friends – except one, Acton Hague, with whom he quarrelled.

In the course of his regular visits he meets a fellow mourner, a woman with whom he shares his altar. They know nothing personal about each other, except the fact that she is mourning one particular person, whilst he mourns several.

Following the death of her aunt, with whom she lives, the woman invites him to her home, where he realises that her mourning is for Acton Hague his former friend. Hague has done the woman some terrible wrong, but she has forgiven him. Feeling that he is getting older, Stransom wants her to devote herself to his shrine in the event of his own death. She wants him to add a candle for Acton Hague, but he refuses.

This difference splits them apart, and Stransom is left to realise that when he himself dies, the whole of his sacred memories will die with him. In failing health he returns to the church where he has a powerful vision of his former fiancée, and feels he ought to forgive Acton Hague.

His un-named woman friend has also returned to the church, having felt that their difference over Acton Hague is no longer significant. He offers to add another one candle on the altar, but she dismisses the idea. She has come to take up the memory of his collective – and she does so just as he dies beside her.

Principal characters
George Stransom an ‘elderly man’ of fifty-five
Mary Antrim his former fiancée who died
Sir Acton Hague KCB his old university friend, with whom he quarrelled
Paul Creston his younger friend
Kate Creston Creston’s former wife, who died
Mrs Creston his new (vulgar) wife
— an un-named woman who Stransom befriends

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

Henry James The BostoniansThe 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.

The Altar of the Dead Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Altar of the Dead Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James What Masie KnewWhat 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.

Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon UK
Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James The AmbassadorsThe 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.
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon UK
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

Henry James 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.

Henry James 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.

Red button 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2012

More tales by James
More on literature
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The Ambassadors

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tutorial, commentary study resources, commentary, criticism

The Ambassadors was written between October 1900 and July 1901, and initially appeared as a serial running in the North American Review. Its first appearance as a single novel was in the autumn of 1903 by Methuen in London and Harpers in New York.

The novel comes from what is called James’s ‘late period’. The 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. Much of the interest in the narrative is centred on the limitations of the principal character, from whose point of view the story is told. Lambert Strether is a morally upright, middle-aged American who feels that life has passed him by. He wants to do the right thing, but finds himself somewhat out of his depth when he visits Paris – which Walter Benjamin called ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’.

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

The Ambassadors – critical commentary

The Ambassadors is narrated in third person omniscient mode, almost entirely from Lambert Strether’s point of view. Just occasionally, James lapses into first person (plural) mode, speaking of Strether as ‘our friend’. The novel also follows a structural pattern, in keeping with its first publication as a serial, of taking each section (‘Book Tenth’) up to a point immediately preceding a dramatic climax, then beginning the next section after the dramatic event has taken place. The sequence of events is then re-traced retrospectively, with Strether reflecting endlessly on various possible nuances of behaviour.

In fact there is very little action in the novel at all. It consists of a series of conversations Strether has with other characters, punctuated by evocations of location (Chester, London, Paris). And the conversations consist almost entirely of the interlocutors trying to interpret or second-guess the psychological motivation and intentions of other characters in the plot.

These topics remain obscure for a number of reasons. The first is that almost all social intercourse is constrained by an elaborate set of protocols whereby everybody is forced to be extremely polite in their dealings with others. Nothing concrete or specific can be discussed openly, and all conversations are shrouded in mists of subtle inference, hints, allusions, and guesswork.

The second is that most of the characters talk to each other in a manner which is almost a continuation of James’s own style as narrator. Nobody speaks in the concrete and the here and now as most human beings normally do. They use elaborate metaphors and allusions, talking about other characters and the events of the novel (in so far as there are any) in oblique, orotund terms:

‘Ah,’ Miss Goostrey sighed, ‘the name of the good American is as easily given as taken away! What is it, to begin with, to be one, and what’s the extraordinary hurry? Surely nothing that’s so pressing was ever so little defined. It’s such an order, really, that before we cook you the dish we must at least have our receipt. Besides, the poor chicks have time! What I’ve seen so often spoiled,’ she pursued, ‘is the happy attitude itself, the state of faith and—what shall I call it?—the sense of beauty.’

There is a third reason that makes it difficult for the reader to form judgements about the events and the characters of the plot. James has them refer to each other as ‘tremendous…wonderful…magnificent… [and] immense’ – but none of the characters is shown or dramatised doing anything by which we can form an opinion on these matters. Everything is filtered through the eyes of Strether or James – and it is often difficult to see where one begins and the other ends.

There is also a great deal of concealment going on in the novel. Quite apart from the nature of the relationship between Chad Newsome and Mdme de Vionnet being concealed from Strether, it is also concealed from him by Maria Goostrey. She conceals her desire for Strether himself out of deference to his theoretical attachment to Mrs Newsome. This is not apparent to Strether until the end of the novel, though it can be perceived by the reader. This is a mild form of dramatic irony that James offers as easily digestible crumbs to readers whilst they grapple with the larger issues of obfuscation.

Moreover there is a larger form of concealment practised by James himself. As the author and the outer narrator he is in possession of all the facts from the very start of the novel, and occasionally shows his hand by mentioning that something will be revealed later (‘two or three incidents with which we have yet to make acquaintance’). But he deliberately obfuscates events and motives in a way which is likely to strain the patience of all but the most tolerant readers.

Homo-eroticism

Strether is a typical figure from James’s late works – a middle-aged man taking stock of his somewhat emotionally empty life. He has lost his wife and child; his only social function is acting as the titular editor of a literary magazine which is funded by Mrs Newsome (and doesn’t sell many copies); and he is very conscious that life seems to have passed him by.

“I seem to have a life only for other people … it’s as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having the gumption to know it was there. Now I hear the faint receding whistle miles and miles down the line”

There are also a number of homo-erotic undertones to the novel – as there were in the latter part of James’s own life. Both Strether and Waymarsh have removed themselves from intimate contact with women (Strether’s wife is dead, and Waymarsh is separated). They travel together, and they share a certain scepticism regarding the opposite sex – all of whom are regarded as potential predators. In an early scene Strether visits Waymarsh whilst he is in bed. Waymarsh tells Strether ‘You’re a very attractive man’ and they joke about being married.

He looked across the box at his friend; their eyes met; something queer and stiff, something that bore on the situation but that it was better not to touch, passed in silence between them.

In fact whenever the male characters in the novel meet each other, there is a great deal of eye contact and touching of the knee, the hand, the shoulder. Although he is technically engaged to Mrs Newsome, Strether gradually drifts away from her during the novel and spends all his time in concern about her young son, who he describes in rhapsodic terms.

Strether is also pursued by Maria Goostrey, but when she finally makes him an offer of marriage, he rejects the opportunity on grounds that he wouldn’t wish to be seen profiting personally from the errand on which he has been sent. In other words, he rationalises his fear of heterosexual intimacy on grounds of a lofty self-denying moral principle.

Study resources

The Ambassadors The Ambassadors – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Ambassadors The Ambassadors – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Ambassadors The Ambassadors – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Ambassadors The Ambassadors – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Ambassadors The Ambassadors – Dover Thrift – Amazon UK

The Ambassadors The Ambassadors – Dover Thrift – Amazon US

The Ambassadors The Ambassadors – Kindle eBook (includes sixty James books)

The Ambassadors The Ambassadors – York Notes – Amazon UK

The Ambassadors The Ambassadors – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Ambassadors The Ambassadors – etext of the 1909 edition

The Ambassadors The Ambassadors – audioBook edition

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Pointer Henry James – biographical notes

Pointer Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, web links

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

The Ambassadors

The Ambassadors – characters
Lewis Lambert Strether 55 year old American widower, magazine ‘editor’, engaged to Mrs Newsome
Mr Waymarsh a rich American lawyer, separated from his wife, Strether’s travelling companion
Miss Maria Goostrey American woman living in Paris who offers herself as ‘a guide to Europe’
Mrs Newsome a rich American widow
Chadwick Newsome a 28 year old heir to his father’s successful business
Sarah Newsome Chad’s 30 year old sister, married to Jim Pocock
Jim Pocock a leading Woolett business man, married to Chad’s sister
Mamie Pocock Jim Pockock’s young sister
John Little Bilham an American enthusiast about art, friend of Chad’s
Miss Barrace a slightly eccentric American spinster and commentator on events
Signor Gloriani a famous Italian sculptor
Countess Marie de Vionnet a society beauty, separated from her husband, friend of Chad’s
Jeanne de Vionnet her attractive young daughter
Paris interior – La belle epoque

Belle Epoque - Paris interior

The Ambassadors – plot summary

Lambert Strether is a middle-aged American widower who is engaged to be married to Mrs Newsome, the widow of a wealthy manufacturer. She dispatches him on an errand to bring back her son Chadwick (Chad) who is living in Paris, so that he can take his place at the head of the family business. She also fears that he has fallen under someone’s bad influence, presumably a woman.

Henry James The AmbassadorsStrether makes the journey, and on the way meets Miss Goostrey, a spirited American woman who has lived in Paris for years and offers to act as his ‘guide to Europe’. He discovers that Chad has improved and become more confident and sophisticated during his stay in Paris. This seems to be largely due to his relationship with Madame de Vionnet, a glamorous countess who is separated from her husband and who has an equally attractive daughter. Strether is not sure with which of the two women Chad is contemplating a relationship, but he too is attracted to them, and he also falls under the positive influence of the capital city and its pleasures.

When Strether fails to send Chad back to America and decides not to return there himself, a second rescue party is sent out to effect the diplomatic mission. This comprises Sarah, Chad’s sister, her husband Jim Pocock, and Mamie, Jim’s younger sister. The principal characters spend a great deal of time speculating about which of them is having the greater degree of influence on the others, but eventually Chad’s sister reveals that both she and her mother think Madame de Vionnet is a disgraceful woman. Mrs Newsome makes her displeasure felt by suspending her correspondence with Strether.

Strether thinks he has a solution to the problem, but on an outing into rural France he encounters Chad and Mdme de Vionnet in a situation that reveals their true intimacy, which other people have known about all along. Strether feels he has been used and betrayed, but nevertheless that Mdme de Vionnet’s influence on Chad has been positive. Knowing that he can no longer count on his engagement to Mrs Newsome, and turning down an offer of marriage to Maria Goostrey, he decides to go back to America, and face an uncertain future.

The novel in a nutshell

“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? … I’m too old—too old at any rate for what I see… What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t, like me to-day, be without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it, and now I’m a case of reaction against the mistake… Do what you like so long as you don’t make it. For it was a mistake. Live, live!”

Lambert Strether to Little Bilham Book Fifth: Chapter Two

Henry James's Study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry James Manuscript

a Henry James manuscript

This is an example of what’s called ‘criss cross’ writing. To save paper, and because the postal service once charged by the sheet, many people wrote their letters in two directions on the page, perpendicularly to each other. It was not unusual to use both sides of the page, and thus get four pages of writing onto one sheet of paper.

The writing is not so difficult to read as you might imagine. We are accustomed to reading English language from left to right and from top to bottom on the page. Writing going in another direction becomes like ‘wallpaper’ in the background.

Other works by Henry James

Henry James Washington SquareWashington 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.
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James The Aspern PapersThe 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.
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James The Spoils of PoyntonThe 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.
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

Henry James 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.

Henry James 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.

Red button 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2010

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

The American

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The American first appeared as a twelve part serial in The Atlantic Monthly 1876-1877. It was then published as a single volume in May 1877. The text was extensively revised when James came to re-publish the novel as part of the 1907 New York Edition of his collected works. So the story exists in two slightly different versions – although the outcome of events is the same in both cases.

In 1888, when James entered his period of theatrical aspirations, he was persuaded to adapt the novel for the stage. In this version he both emphasised the melodramatic aspects of the story and gave it a new (happy) ending.

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

The American – critical commentary

America and Europe

Henry James is well know for exploring the theme of relations between Europe and America. He was born and bred in America, but was educated in Europe, and spent most of his adult life living there – eventually becoming an English citizen as an act of solidarity during the first world war.

The first (and more successful) part of the novel features what appears at first glance to be a symbolic clash between two cultures. Newman is a young, tall, and successful American who represents democratic principles, a free market economy, and a positive engagement with society in general. He is plain-spoken, honest and slightly unsophisticated, but rich enough to buy whatever he desires.

However, he is at a distinct disadvantage when confronted by the Bellegarde family and their particular form of European culture. They are cripplingly snobbish, old-fashioned, and take their adopted aristocratic principles to an almost ludicrous degree.

However, it is worth noting that their claims to medieval heritage are quasi-bogus, having been acquired via marriage. They are also keen to prop up the family finances via marriage – but they draw the line at allowing a connection with ‘commerce’.

Actually, when James was revising the novel for the New York Edition of his works in 1907, thirty years after its first appearance, he changed his mind about the Bellegarde’s motivation. He felt that rather than rejecting Newman’s money on the grounds of its origins in commerce, they would have grabbed at it. But by then it was too late for any such radical changes.

Weaknesses

The main problem with the novel is that whilst the first half is a tasteful, witty, and elegant account of Newman’s confrontation with French society and his romantic engagement with Claire de Bellegarde, the second part of the novel descends into melodrama.

There is also very little connection between the main story and the occasional sub-plot of Noemie Nioche and her father. Noemie herself is a ruthless (and successful) social climber who eventually reaches the lower rungs of the very family that rejects Newman. She is last seen in the company of Lord Deepmere when Newman visits London. But no serious parallels between the two narrative strands are ever established, although Noemie’s success can be seen as an ironic counterpart to Newman’s failure to achieve his aims.

It could also be argued that Noemie is a connecting thread in the relationship between Newman and Valentin a relationship strongly tinged with homo-erotic overtones. Newman is attracted to Noemie as a character of social interest, and Valentin is attracted to her as a lively antidote to his stifling family. But neither of their interests are as strong as the attractio they feel for each other.

There is also a character introduced half way through the novel – the reverend Benjamin Babcock – who plays no part in the story at all, and he disappears from it just as suddenly as he first appears.

James often ended his novels on a note of ambiguity or uncertain resolution (one thinks of The Bostonians or The Portrait of a Lady) but he does not rely on creaking plot devices such as a duel, a murder, and a death-bed revelation. His more successful novels have outcomes which proceed logically and develop naturally out of the realistic events they contain.

The American – study resources

The American The American – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The American The American – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The American The American – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The American The American – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The American The American – Cliff’s Notes – Amazon UK

The American The American – Kindle edition

The American The American – eBooks at Project Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

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

The American The Prefaces of Henry James – Introductions to his tales and novels

The American The American – Notes on editions (Library of America)

Henry James Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Amarican

The American – plot summary

Christopher Newman is a successful American businessman touring Europe. He meets Noemie Nioche and her father in the Louvre, where he buys her painting and arranges to have French lessons. He then meets an old friend Tom Tristram and reveals that he is giving up business and planning to explore the best that Europe has to offer. He befriends Mrs Tristram and tells her of his desire to marry. She introduces him to the beautiful widow Claire de Bellegarde, the Countess de Cintre.

The AmericanNewman learns French from the bankrupt M.Nioche each day and commissions more pictures from Noemie so that she can create a dowry for herself. He then takes off and travels for several months, returning to Paris where Claire is under pressure from her family to marry for money for a second time. She had previously been unhappily married to an older man at the behest of her family, who coveted his pedigree and his money.

Newman revisits the family Bellegarde and despite their social reserve and snobbishness he is permitted to visit them. He is subsequently befriended by Claire’s younger brother Count Valentin, who envies Newman’s freedom to act at will. Newman reveals to him that he wants to marry his sister.

Newman proposes to Claire, who tells him she does not wish to re-marry, but asks for more time to consider his offer. He is interviewed by the Bellegarde family, who ask him about his wealth. He spars with them, stands his ground, then introduces Valentin to Noemie and M. Nioche in the Louvre.

Newman is summoned to a family dinner where they patronise and insult him, though finally granting him permission to ask Claire to marry him. From that point, Newman visits the family home regularly, despite its frigid social atmosphere. He is encouraged by the elderly English servant Mrs Bread who has served the household for forty years. She urges him.to be patient, and to take Claire away from her family,

After waiting the six months she has asked of him, Newman renews his offer of marriage, and Claire accepts him. He wishes to celebrate with a party, but the family insist on holding one first. Meanwhile, Valentin has fallen enamoured of Noemie, who has become more attractive but is a mercenary social climber.

Newman is the centre of attention at Mme de Bellegarde’s grand society ball. Lord Deepmere, a distant English cousin, passes some mysterious news to Claire and her mother.

Newman tries to persuade Valentin to accept his offer of a new commercial start in America. Valentin is on the point of doing so when he picks a quarrel with one of Noemie’s admirers at the opera and a duel is precipitated.

When Newman calls to see Claire he is suddenly told by her family that she is not allowed to marry him after all. They object to Newman because of his commercial background. He is about to follow Claire to the family’s country estate when he receives a note that Valentin has been injured.

He travels to Switzerland where the duel has taken place. Valentin is dying of a gunshot wound. Newman reluctantly tells him of the family’s perfidy, whereupon Valentin reveals that there is a skeleton somewhere in the family’s cupboard that he can use against them.

Following Valentin’s death and burial at the family’s estate near Poitiers, Newman goes to see Claire and renews his plea that they marry. She tries to explain why she cannot, then reveals that she is to become a nun, to escape from the pressures of her family.

Newman revisits Mme de Bellegarde and her elder son Urbain and appeals to them to change their minds. When they refuse, he threatens to unearth the family’s guilty secret – but they still do not yield. So Newman arranges an interview with Mrs Bread who recounts (at great length) the story of Mme de Bellegarde killing her sick husband. However, shortly before his death he has given to Mrs Bread a letter revealing the truth of his wife’s treachery. Mrs Bread gives the letter to Newman.

Newman returns to Paris, savouring his ‘thunderbolt’ of evidence, and Mrs Bread joins him as his housekeeper. He visits the Carmelite nunnery where Claire is immured, then confronts the family with his evidence. They try to bribe him, but he refuses. He then seeks to relay his news in society – choosing a Duchess who he met at the Bellegarde’s party, but he is met with a wall of polite small talk.

At Mrs Tristram’s suggestion he then retreats to London, where he bumps into Noemie Nioche with Lord Deepmere. Struggling to overcome his sense of loss and being wronged, he travels back to America, but feels alien amongst his own people – so he returns to Paris.

He visits the even more secluded nunnery to which Claire has been transferred, then feels his need for revenge on the family evaporate. He burns the incriminating letter and leaves Paris for ever.

The American – principal characters
Christopher Newman a financially successful American bachelor of 42, ex civil war
Noemie Nioche an amateur painter
M. Nioche her bankrupt father, who wears a wig
Tom Tristram a flaneur, Newman’s ex civil war friend
Mrs Elizabeth (‘Lizzie’) Tristram his plain ‘unfinished’ wife
Claire de Bellegarde Comtesse de Cintre – an upper-class divorcee of 28
Count Valentin de Bellegarde her younger brother of 25
Benjamin Babcock an American vegetarian minister
Mme de Bellegarde dowager head of the family – the daughter of an English Earl, from Wiltshire
Marquis Urbain de Bellegarde her eldest son
Marquise de Bellegarde his wife
Mrs Bread aged English retainer with 40 years service
Lord Deepmere Mme de Bellegarde’s Anglo-Irish cousin – bald, 34, missing teeth
Stanislas Kapp German admirer of Noemie who shoots Valentin in the duel

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

Red button Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James, London: Macmillan, 1984.

Red button Martha Banta (ed), New Essays on The American, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987

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

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

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

Red button Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, London: Macmillan, 2010.

Red button Oscar Cargill, The Novels of Henry James, New York: Macmillan, 1961.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry James - manuscript page

a Henry James manuscript

This is an example of what’s called ‘criss cross’ writing. To save paper, and because the postal service once charged by the sheet, many people wrote their letters in two directions on the page, perpendicularly to each other. It was not unusual to use both sides of the page, and thus get four pages of writing onto one sheet of paper.

The writing is not so difficult to read as you might imagine. We are accustomed to reading English language from left to right and from top to bottom on the page. Writing going in another direction becomes like ‘wallpaper’ in the background.

Other work by Henry James

Henry James Washington SquareWashington 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.
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James The Aspern PapersThe 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.
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James The Spoils of PoyntonThe 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.
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

Henry James 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.

Henry James 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.

Red button 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

The Angel at the Grave

by

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

The Angel at the Grave first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine in February 1901 and was collected in Edith Wharton’s compilation of short stories Crucial Instances published later the same year. Scribner’s was a New York company which went on to present the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. Many of its authors have been Pulitzer Prizewinners – including Edith Wharton herself.

The Angel at the Grave

cover design by Parish Maxfield

The Angel at the Grave – critical commentary

This is a story which is poised very delicately between a tragedy of wasted spirit and a redemptive tale of long-suffering patience finally rewarded. Paulina Anson is a figure of female self-sacrifice. She rejects the early offer of love from Hewlett Winsloe, and chooses to remain at home rather than go to New York. The house which symbolises the life and work of her grandfather starts out as a place of comfort for her, but gradually becomes a living tomb. Even her creative efforts in writing her grandfather’s biography come to nothing, and eventually she feels that her life has been wasted.

The success of the redemptive ending depends a great deal on its credibility. Corby intends to write an article commenting on Anson’s pamphlet on the amphioxus, which demonstrates missing evolutionary links between the invertebrate and the vertebrate world. We are expected to believe that this will restore interest in Anson’s work, possibly make Corby famous, and will validate Paulina’s long-unrewarded dedication to her grandfather. This is rather a lot to ask, and any idea that there might be some romantic link between the two believers (‘she looked as though youth had touched her on the lips’) should be tempered by the observation that Paulina is by this stage of the tale a middle-aged woman and Corby a ‘fresh-eyed sanguine youth’.

The Angel at the Grave – study resources

The Angel at the Grave Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

The Angel at the Grave Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Angel at the Grave - eBook edition The Angel at the Grave – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

The Angel at the Grave - eBook edition The Angel at the Grave – eBook format

Edith Wharton - biography The Angel at the Grave – hardback edition

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Angel at the Grave

The Angel at the Grave – plot summary

Part I   Paulina Anson has grown up in the New England house of her grandfather, a celebrated Transcendentalist philosopher. She is the only member of the family who can read and understand his works. When a young New York scholar visits the house and marriage seems a possibility, she turns him down because she refuses to go to New York.

Part II   She devotes herself to the house and to the memory and work of her grandfather. By the age of forty she has written his definitive biography, but when she takes the manuscript to his publisher they tell her there is no longer any public interest in his work. She then tries to understand how and why her grandfather’s reputation has faded when those of his contemporaries (Emerson and Hawthorne) remain alive. She concludes in despair that both she and her grandfather have wasted their lives.

Part III   Subsequently, she is visited by a young scholar George Corby who wants to write an article on one of Anson’s early anatomical discoveries. When Paulina produces the long-forgotten pamphlet from the archives, Corby is ecstatic. She warns him that she has ruined her life guarding her grandfather’s legacy – but he argues that by staying in the house she has saved from oblivion a work which will now bring his reputation back to life.

The Angel at the Grave – main characters
Orestes Anson a New England transcendentalist philosopher
Paulina Anson his grand-daughter
George Corby a young researcher
Hewlett Winsloe a young man and suitor to Paulina

Edith Wharton's writing

Edith Wharton’s writing

Further reading

Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman of her Time, New York: Viking, 1971,

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp.222. ISBN: 0820305138

Janet Beer, Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work), New York: Northcote House, 2001, pp.99, ISBN: 0746308981

Millicent Bell (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.232, ISBN: 0521485134

Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1992, pp.329, ISBN: 0824078489

Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, ISBN: 0810927950

Gloria C. Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, California: University of California Press, 1992, pp.223, ISBN: 0520075838

Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals, UPNE, 1990, pp.220, ISBN: 0874515246

Irving Howe, (ed), Edith Wharton: A collection of Critical Essays, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986,

Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.240, ISBN: 0521830893

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, London: Vintage, new edition 2008, pp.864, ISBN: 0099763516

R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975, pp.592, ISBN: 0880640200

James W. Tuttleton (ed), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.586, ISBN: 0521383196

Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991,

Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Work, Fact on File, 1998, pp.352, ISBN: 0816034818

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, New York: Perseus Books, second edition 1994, pp.512, ISBN: 0201409186

Video documentary

Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the CountryThe Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon UK
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Edith Wharton - The House of MirthThe House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
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The ReefThe Reef deals with three topics with which Edith Wharton herself was intimately acquainted at the period of its composition – unhappy marriage, divorce, and the discovery of sensual pleasures. The setting is a country chateau in France where diplomat George Darrow has arrived from America, hoping to marry the beautiful widow Anna Leith. But a young woman employed as governess to Anna’s daughter proves to be someone he met briefly in the past and has fallen in love with him. She also becomes engaged to Anna’s stepson. The result is a quadrangle of tensions and suspicions about who knows what about whom. And the outcome is not what you might imagine.
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Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

© Roy Johnson 2014

Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
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The Aspern Papers

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Aspern Papers (1888) comes in the middle years of Henry James’s development as a writer. Disappointed by the reception of his recent novels The Bostonians and The Princess Cassamassima, he intensified his exploration of the long story, the ‘tale’, and the novella. He was also exploring the relationship between authors, readers, and literary reputations. The story first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and was then published in book form later the same year.

The Aspern Papers

Venice – St Mark’s Square

The Aspern Papers – critical commentary

The Novella

Henry James described The Aspern Papers as a ‘tale’ – but then he used that term for most of his fiction which was not obviously in the novel genre. It seems to me that this piece of work qualifies as a novella by the normal criteria for distinguishing between the novella and the long short story – and the short novel for that matter.

Unity of place

The whole of the drama takes place in one location – Venice. The narrator is already there when the story begins. The first pages are used to say how he got there, and the suppositions upon which his quest is based. In fact the location is further concentrated by the fact that he goes to lodge in the same palazzo as the two other principal characters – Juliana Bordereau and her niece Miss Tina.

Much of the drama takes place in this one building, with the principals spying on each other and conducting their occasional conversations in the garden that the narrator has used as the pretence for his being there. Following the midnight debacle in Juliana’s room, he leaves the location for twelve days, but returns to the original scene for the denouement.

Unity of character

There are only three important figures in the drama, and they are all living in the same building. Juliana is intent on protecting her privacy against the narrator’s intrusiveness, and extracting maximum pecuniary advantage from him in terms of rent. She does this by making herself absent, which causes him maximum frustration. The narrator has his single-minded quest for the ‘papers’, and wishes to deceive Juliana and Miss Tina, who herself has a slender hope of ensnaring the Narrator out of some native sense of survival.

There is also tension between the two women. Juliana seems to have prematurely imprisoned Miss Tina in her Venetian seclusion. Tina certainly does everything within her limited powers to clutch at the Narrator as a possible saviour. And Juliana wishes to put Miss Tina forward to the Narrator, in order to extract an exorbitant rent from him which will go towards Tina’s dowry.

Unity of action

In temporal terms the action is spread over a number of months – but it is unified in the sense that nothing else is introduced to dilute its dramatic effect. The drama is concentrated upon the interlocked issues of the Narrator’s desire for the papers, Juliana Bordereau’s double strategy of thwarting his plans whilst extracting money from him, and Miss Tina’s plight as a pawn in the struggle between them.

Unity of atmosphere

The topographical ‘atmosphere’ is provided by occasional descriptions of Venice (the canals, the old houses) – but it is the psychological atmosphere which is more important. This is generated by two principal factors. The first is the tension which exists between the Narrator’s desire to locate the ‘papers’ and Juliana’s stubborn refusal to co-operate, which thwarts his ambition.

The second is the tension created by the Narrator’s naive account of events. He obviously doesn’t fully comprehend what is happening, and he is unable to see his own crass and blundering behaviour, even though he is recounting it. The reader therefore is offered what the critic Wayne Booth called the pleasure of ‘collaboration with the author’.

The Aspern Papers – themes

Privacy and Revelation

The Narrator is a critic and biographer whose work is to delve into the private life of his subject and reveal to the world whatever discoveries he thinks important. But the papers he seeks are private communications between Aspern and Juliana Bordereau, which might contain information she does not wish to reveal – either about herself or Aspern. The Narrator is dramatically intrusive into the situation he finds in Venice.

Juliana aand Tina Bordereau are very private people who have lived in seclusion and isolation for many years, and it is very obvious that Juliana is hostile to the Narrator’s intrusion – even though she wishes to profit from it. Miss Tina is habituated to solitude, but it seems that she may welcome a release from the situation in which she finds herself.

The Narrator violates their privacy by proposing himself as their lodger, and he then procedes to spy on them in his attempt to locate the papers. He conceals his intention, lies to them about his reasons for being there, and even invents a false identity for himself. However, the two women in their turn spy on him in order to uncover his true motives and intentions.

Juliana Bordereau maximises her sense of privacy by avoiding all contact with the outside world. She bandages her eyes and wears a green eye shield – which is very significantly removed on the occasion of her catching out the Narrator as he attempts to pry into her room at night.

Fear of marriage

This is one of many Henry James stories which features a bachelor, often middle-aged, threatened by the prospect of single women with marriage in mind. In this case Juliana Bordereau actively promotes her niece as a lure to the Narrator, and Miss Tina herself tempts him with access to the papers if he were to become ‘a relation’.

But the Narrator’s account of Miss Tina should leave us in no doubt what his response will be. He consistently describes her in misogynistic terms as frowzy and unappealing, a prematurely aged drab – except when he changes his mind and decides to accept her proposal. Then she becomes ‘younger; she was not a ridiculous old woman’. But when she rejects him she immediately becomes ‘a plain dingy elderly person’ again.

In other words, his narrative objectivity is not something we as readers can rely upon, and we have yet another example of James exploring a theme which pervaded the latter part of his life – to marry or not? – a question whose psychological significance he did not seem to recognise in himself but which he dramatised in many of his works.

The Aspern Papers

The Aspern Papers – study resources

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

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

The Aspern Papers Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Aspern Papers Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Aspern Papers The Aspern Papers – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Aspern Papers The Aspern Papers – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Aspern Papers The Aspern Papers – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Aspern Papers The Aspern Papers – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Aspern Papers The Aspern Papers – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Aspern Papers The Aspern Papers – audioBook version at LibriVox

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Aspern Papers – full length opera adaptation

In this version Juliana Bordereau is transformed into an opera singer, and Jeffrey Aspern into a composer.

Composed by Dominick Argento (1987)

The Aspern Papers – plot summary

An unnamed American biographer and literary scholar specialises in the work of Jeffrey Aspern, a celebrated early nineteenth century American poet. He learns from John Cumnor, a colleague in London, that Juliana Bordereau, a woman with whom Aspern had a romantic liaison years ago, is still alive and living in Venice in seclusion. Cumnor has written seeking permission to view any of Aspern’s ‘papers’ which might still be in her possession, but he has been rebuffed by Tina Bordereau, her niece who lives with her.

Henry James The Aspern PapersBelieving that Juliana will be in possession of valuable letters and personal memorabilia, the narrator assumes a false identity and persuades the two women to take him as a lodger in their large but neglected Venetian palazzo. Not daring to reveal his true intent of gaining access to the papers, he agrees to pay an exorbitant amount to rent a suite of rooms.

But the two women live in a state of extreme isolation, and the narrator becomes frustrated in his attempts to make contact with them and win their confidence. Juliana Bordereau is an old and very private woman, but she wishes to secure both a dowry and a potential husband for her plain middle-aged niece before she herself dies.

A battle of wills develops between the three principal characters. Juliana refuses to discuss anything to do with her past, but puts forward her niece. The narrator feels sorry for Tina Bordereau, but eventually manages to persuade her to help him. He reveals his interest in the ‘papers’ and even his real name, and Tina promises to do what she can to help him.

When Juliana falls ill and is thought to be dying, the narrator takes advantage to go into her room at night with the intention of looking for the papers – but he is caught in the act by Juliana herself, who collapses with fright at the intrusion.

The narrator flees Venice in embarrassment , but when he returns he discovers that Juliana has died, without leaving a will. Tina reveals that Juliana had hidden the papers in her bed, but she feels that she cannot show them to the narrator out of respect for her aunt’s wish for privacy. However, she does suggest to him that he would have access to them by natural right if he were ‘part of the family’. The narrator recoils from this oblique offer of marriage in horror.

The next day however he has changed his mind, and visits Tina to give his acceptance. She however tells him that she has burned the entire collection of letters and never wants to see him again.

The Aspern Papers – flim adaptation

Brace yourself. In this recent film version, the action has been transposed from Venice to Venezuela.

Directed by Mariana Hellmund (2010)

Principal characters
I the unnamed narrator, an American writer and biographer of Jeffrey Aspern
Mrs Prest his old friend in Venice
John Cumnor his fellow biographist and Aspern enthusiast in London
Jeffrey Aspern a celebrated early nineteenth century American poet
Miss Juliana Bordereau Aspern’s former lover, an American living in seclusion in Venice
Miss Tina Bordereau her niece
Pasquale the Narrator’s servant
Olimpia Juliana Bordereau’s servant

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

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

Henry James 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.

Henry James 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.

Red button 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2011

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The Aspern Papers and Other Stories

by

stories of writers, readers, and literary reputations

The Aspern Papers (18888) was composed at a critical period in Henry James’s life. It might seem odd one hundred and thirty years later, but his reputation took something of a minor dive in mid career. He was disappointed by the reception of both The Bostonians (1885) and The Princess Cassamassima (1887) and he retreated for a while into the pleasures of the shorter forms of the novella and the short story – both of which he described as ‘tales’. This collection brings together four pieces of work which have a common subject matter – the relationship between authors, readers, and the texts which join them. James was well aware of the rich fictional potential in the writer as a public figure.

The Aspern Papers and Other StoriesThe most famous here is his celebrated novella The Aspern Papers, which like many other of his works has been a fertile source for film, theatre, and opera adaptations. An unnamed writer goes to Venice in search of letters written by Jeffrey Aspern, a famous nineteenth century poet. They were written to and in the possession of Juliana Bordereau, an elderly American woman who was his lover many years ago. She wishes to guard her privacy; the writer wishes to get hold of the letters as material for a biography he is working on. A battle of wills ensues, in which Miss Bordereau dangles before him the prospect of marriage to her niece, Tina Bordereau, a plain middle-aged woman.

It’s a very typical James work, in that there is very little movement or external drama. The three characters are living in the same palazzo in a very charged psychological atmosphere, keeping a very close eye on each other. The denouement is precipitated by Juliana catching the Narrator snooping in her room late at night. The papers have indeed been hidden in a most significant place – but in the end nobody triumphs. In fact, they all fail to get what they want.

James knew full well that many accomplished writers and artists were unremarkable in their private lives, and that conversely there were exuberant talkers and entertainers over the dinner table who had no creative talent. The Private Life is a curious exercise in exploring this difference between an artist’s public manifestation and his personal life. Clare Vawdrey is perfectly at ease in a social group, but when asked to present his latest literary creation, he is unable to face his admirers. He needs privacy and seclusion in order to reveal his imaginative life. This case is wittily contrasted with an example of an accomplished public figure whose personality disappears completely once there is nobody present with whom he can interact.

The Middle Years is a much anthologised tale in which a dying novelist meets a young doctor who is also an enthusiastic reader of his work. Feeling re-charged with creative force by the quality of the younger man’s appreciation, he conceives of a ‘second chance’, an extension to his creative life, in which to say all that he feels he still has within him. But it is too late: he finally realises that life has presented him with his one and only ‘chance’ – and dies.

The Death of the Lion is a variation on the same theme. A journalist feels he must guard and nurture the reputation of Neil Paraday, an ailing novelist he admires. He befriends Paraday, who shows him the manuscript of a novel he has written but not yet published. Paraday becomes celebrated, and he is drawn into fashionable society that basks in his fame but does not actually read his work. The journalist is horrified to learn that the manuscript is being passed around and is eventually lost. Paraday is distracted from his work, becomes ill, and he too dies. But in this version, the journalist marries a fellow Paraday admirer, and they settle to search for the lost manuscript.

There are plenty more stories in the James oeuvre which deal with writers and artists (though none about musicians): he wrote more than a hundred stories in all. But this is an excellent selection – and worth it for the inclusion of the magnificent Aspern Papers alone.

The Aspern Papers and Other Stories Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2011

Henry James, The Aspern Papers and Other Stories, London: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.212, ISBN: 0199538557

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The Author

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theories of authorship from Homer to the present

This volume in the Critical Idiom series investigates the changing definitions of the author, what it has meant historically to be an ‘author’, and the impact that this has had on literary culture. Andrew Bennett discusses the various theoretical debates surrounding authorship, exploring such concepts as authority, ownership, originality, and the ‘death’ of the author. Scholarly, yet stimulating, this study offers the ideal introduction to a core notion in critical theory.

The Author He deals with the fundamental question of ‘what is an author?’ and its correlative ‘what does the text mean?’ Asking these question leads to others which take into account copyright law, printing technology, censorship, plagiarism, and forgery. The study begins (rather curiously) by looking at two influential essays – Roland Bathes’s ‘The Death of the Author’, and Michel Foucault’s riposte ‘What is an Author?’ Their theories appear to remove the author, but in fact they are just saying that taking the author into account is only one way of interpreting a text.

You need a strong intellectual stomach to take this as a starting point. Andrew Bennett might have been kinder to his readers if he had led up to this abstract theorising after an explanation of more traditional notions of authorship, such as that offered by Martha Woodmansee which he quotes:

an individual who is solely responsible – and thus exclusively deserving of credit – for the production of a unique, original work

Beginners could easily skip to chapter two and come back later, because he then goes on to trace the history of authorship through European cultural history.

First there is the question of Homer. Was he a real person, of just a ‘figure of speech’ or a ‘back-formation’ in the tradition of oral poetry which produced The Iliad and The Odyssey?

In the medieval period the author was only one of a number of people who might contribute to the composition of a work. Their fundamental concept of authorship was different than ours, and the author might even be anonymous:

Since manually copied books were … distributed amongst the limited circle of the writer’s community, adding the writer’s name to a manuscript was largely redundant. [Then] as the copied manuscript was disseminated more widely, the writer’s name became irrelevant in a different, opposite sense: precisely because the writer was not known to readers outside his community, his name had little importance.

There’s a fascinating discussion of Chaucer as a major transitional figure who straddles three traditions: the oral poet performing to a group; the writer working in a textual tradition; and the precursor of a modern author who inserts himself between the text and the reader. It is at this point that the modern concept of authorship enters European culture – at the end of the fourteenth century.

Then comes the important development of the age of printing. This changes everything, and introduces notions of control, censorship, and copyright. This in turn leads to some mind-turning concepts – for instance that print leads to something fundamentally new and contributes to the process of individualisation. Much of his argument at this point is heavily indebted to the work of Elizabeth Eisenstein and Walter Ong.

It should be remembered that in the early Renaissance there was “an aristocratic disdain for the profession of writing and a prejudice against publication in print on account of its perceived propensity to undermine the fragile class boundary between the aristocracy and the lower gentry”.

This is a tough read, but it’s exciting because it raises so many issues that are important to our understanding of what constitutes ‘literary studies’, and it also seems that these relationships between author, text, and reader are being given a re-shaping with the advent of the Internet and digital writing (though he doesn’t deal with that).

He covers Romantic notions of authorship, which persisted well into the twentieth century, then looks at Formalism, Feminism, and New Historicism. This involves the famous Wimsatt and Beardsley essay ‘The Intentional Fallacy’; the attempts made by feminists to reconcile ‘death of the author’ with their desire to rescue women authors; and what he sees as the New Historicists failure to get rid of the individual creator.

There’s a chapter on collaborative authorship which also includes consideration of film, and he ends by testing out contemporary notions of authorship on recent examples of literary ‘events’ – in particular the publication of Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters.

This will be of interest to all students of literature at undergraduate level and above – and in particular those taking courses which include consideration of authorship and the history of the book. One thing is for sure. Anyone who has not considered these theoretical issues before will find some thought-provoking ideas here.

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© Roy Johnson 2005

Andrew Bennett, The Author, Abingdon: Routledge, 2005, pp.151, ISBN: 0415281644

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