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A Cup of Tea

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

A Cup of Tea was written on 11 January 1922 in the space of just ‘4-5 hours’ and was published in a popular magazine the Story-teller in May of the same year. It then appeared in the collection The Dove’s Nest and Other Stories compiled by Katherine Mansfield’s husband John Middleton Murry and published in 1923.

A Cup of Tea

A Cup of Tea – critical commentary

The ostensible point of the story is that a rich and self-regarding woman has her complacency disturbed. On a whim, she makes what she thinks of as a charitable gesture to a destitute lower-class girl, only to discover (via her husband) that the girl has qualities that she herself does not possess.

However, there is another reading of the story buried subtly in the narrative and its dialogue. Rosemary is a rich and spoiled woman with a self-indulgent lifestyle who feels that her sudden encounter with a girl off the streets could be ‘an adventure … like something out of a novel by Dostoevsky’ – which in a sense that Rosemary would not understand, it does turn out to be.

She takes the girl back home, ushers her into her private bedroom, and undresses her (in the sense of taking off her hat and coat). She has the intention of leading her into another room for tea but does not do so. When the girl begins to cry, she puts her arm around the girl’s ‘thin, bird-like shoulders’ and promises to look after her.

When Rosemary’s husband Philip interrupts, the young girl gives what is clearly a false name (‘Smith’) and is strangely unfazed by the situation in which she finds herself: she is ‘strangely still and unafraid’. Rosemary describes their encounter in terms of procurement: ‘I picked her up in Curzon Street. She’s a real pick-up’.

Philip, the husband, is shocked by two things – first, by how attractive the girl is, and second by the inappropriate relationship that exists between the two women. He asks satirically if ‘Miss Smith’ will be dining with them, in which case he might be forced to look up The Milliner’s Gazette.

The surface implication of this remark is that the girl might be an unemployed shop girl who is sponging off his wealthy wife, but at a deeper level there is a suggestion that she might be a prostitute of some kind. At that time in the early twentieth century, the employment of single females in occupations such as milliner (hat maker) shop assistant, and other forms of casual jobs was regarded as loosely equivalent to prostitution. This suggestion in the story is reinforced by what happens next. Rosemary pays off the girl with three pound notes and sends her on her way.

The sting in the tale for Rosemary is that she wonders if she, for all the wealth and luxury in her life, lacks the animal magnetism possessed by the lower-class young girl which has left her husband Philip ‘bowled over’ after a single glance.

Narrative voice

The literary quality in the story comes largely from the skillful manner in which Mansfield creates a fluid narrative voice which combines an engagement with her subject, her readers, and even (to some extent) with herself as an identifiable narrator.

Technically, the story starts in third person narrative mode: ‘Rosemary Fell was not exactly beautiful’ – but that ‘not exactly’ establishes a conversational style and an attitude to the character. She raises questions, cancels thoughts (‘No, not Peter—Michael’) employs slang (‘a duck of a boy’) and speaks to an imaginary interlocutor (‘she would go to Paris as you and I would go to Bond Street’).

It is also interesting to note that her use of fashionable exaggeration is remarkably similar to that being used today – almost a hundred years later: (‘her husband absolutely adored her … the man who kept it was ridiculously fond of serving her’). This captures perfectly the speech mannerisms and the attitudes of the nouveau riche milieu in which the story is set.

A Cup of Tea – study resources

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon US

A Cup of Tea – plot summary

Rosemary Fell is a socially poised young woman who has been married for two years to a rich and devoted husband. She shops in the fashionable and expensive part of the West-End in London. An ingratiating antiques dealer shows her a small enamelled box which she covets but asks to be put by for her.

Coming out of the shop into the rain, she is accosted by a poor young woman who asks for the price of a cup of tea. Rosemary sees the incident as a potential adventure and invites the girl back home.

When they reach the house Rosemary takes the girl into her bedroom and relieves her of her hat and coat. The girl breaks down in tears and says she cannot go on any longer.

Rosemary gives the girl tea and sandwiches, whilst she herself smokes cigarettes. This relieves the girl, and they are about to start a conversation when they are interrupted by the arrival of Rosemary’s husband Philip.

Philip takes Rosemary into an adjoining room and asks her what is going on. She explains that she is merely trying to be kind to a poor girl. But Philip points out that the girl is remarkably pretty, but the relationship not desirable.

Rosemary gives the girl some money, and she leaves, after which Rosemary asks her husband if she can have the enamel box she has seen – but what she really wants to know from him is if she is pretty or not.

Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations

Katherine Mansfield at Online Books
Collections of her short stories available at a variety of online sources

Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

© Roy Johnson 2014

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Twentieth century literature
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A Day in the Country and Other Stories

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19th century master of the short story form

Guy de Maupassant was a prolific and very famous writer in his own lifetime. Between 1880 and 1891 for instance he wrote about 300 short stories, 200 articles, six novels, two plays, and three travel books. He wrote in the heyday of the short story, and it is this literary form for which he is now best remembered. Maupassant was one of the late nineteenth-century writers shaping what was to become the modern short story. His contribution to the genre was to pare down the means of expression and to focus on the effect of the tale.

A Day in the Country and Other StoriesHis stories are not abbreviated novels or rambling prose poems. They tell a story – and often it has a sting in the tail. Like other French writers of the late nineteenth century he was keen to explore ordinary everyday life – often exposing its less appetising and even grim features. I bought this particular collection after watching Jean Renoir’s beautiful film Partie de campagne which is a completely faithful account of the title story. But I was amazed to discover that the full length feature film and masterpiece of the cinema was based on a tale no more than a few pages long.

His style, much influenced by his friend Flaubert, is one of scrupulous clarity. Everything is pared to a minimum, and the material world is rendered in well-chosen detail. His attitude is that of a sceptical realist, with an eye for the tragic and sad elements of life which lead many critics to brand him a pessimist. They may have a point, because it’s remarkable just how many of his stories end with someone’s abrupt death.

He was shortening and concentrating the narrative, stripping it of excrescence. Yet he still drags along some of its traditional features – the whiplash ending for instance. Some of them are not much more than well-articulated anecdotes, but they are usually resolved with an ironic or dramatic twist.

Despite these weaknesses, it’s his contribution to the development of the short story for which he is still respected. It is his stories which are still widely read, not his full-length novels.

[Maupassant] fixes a hard eye on some spot of human life, usually some dreary, ugly, shabby, sordid one, takes up the particle, and squeezes it either till it grimaces or till it bleeds. Sometimes the grimace is very droll, sometimes the wound is very horrible … Monsieur de Maupassant sees human life as a terribly ugly business relieved by the comical.

It’s amazing to think that Henry James, a friend and admirer who wrote those words was writing at the same time – though when considering the compositional crudities in some of these stories, their origin in newspapers and popular magazines should be taken into account.

But this famous terseness of style is not quite so ubiquitous as is often claimed. He is quite prepared to indulge in rhetorical flourishes to make his point – as in this account of a Parisian visiting the provinces:

I wondered: ‘What on earth can I do after dinner?’ I thought how long an evening could be here in this town in the provinces: the slow, grim stroll through unfamiliar streets, the depressing gloom which the solitary traveller feels oozing out of passers by who are complete strangers in every respect, from the provincial cut of their jackets, hats, and trousers to their ways and the local accent, an all-pervading misery which drips from the houses, the shops, the outlandish shapes of the vehicles in the streets, and the generally unaccustomed hubbub, an uneasy sinking of the spirits which prompts you to walk a little quicker as though you were lost in a dangerous, cheerless country and makes you want to go back to your hotel, that loathsome hotel, where your room has been pickled in innumerable dubious smells, where you are not entirely sure about the bed, and where there’s a hair stuck fast in the dried dust at the bottom of the washbasin.

In one of the finest tales in this collection he tackles a subject which has a long and honourable history amongst writers – the story of a man who, as a result of some trivial argument or misplaced notion of pride, suddenly finds that he is about to fight a duel. It also includes his best known – ‘The Necklace’ – another tale which has spawned many variations, as well as ‘Le Horla’, a story which strangely parallels Maupassant’s own descent into premature madness and death, brought on by syphilis.

Later writers such as James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and especially Virginia Woolf were to take his stylistic developments further – and bring the short story into closer contact with the prose poem and the philosophic meditation. But connoisseurs of this literary form will always be well rewarded by re-visiting one of the earlier masters of the genre.

© Roy Johnson 2000

A Day in the Country Buy the book at Amazon UK

A Day in the Country Buy the book at Amazon US

Guy de Maupassant, A Day in the Country and Other Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp.312, ISBN 0192838636

More on literature
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A Day of Days

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

A Day of Days first appeared in The Galaxy magazine for June 1866. Its initial appearance in book form was as part of the collection Stories Revived published in three volumes by Macmillan in London, 1885.

A Day of Days

New England – Summer

A Day of Days – critical commentary

This early story reveals James’s enormous potential for generating psychological interest out of very little drama. Almost nothing happens in this story except that a young woman has vague romantic thoughts about one man, when another man unexpectedly arrives. They circle round each other emotionally, go for a walk, and she tempts him to stay. He decides that despite the attraction, it would be better to regard the meeting as a self-contained pleasure. He sticks to his original plans, and moves on.

But in the space of this short narrative we are treated to Adela’s movements from listless boredom, through vague expectancy, to her slightly patronising interest in Ludlow’s frank honesty, and then her overt attempts to detain him when she thinks he might be leaving. All this is done with a Jane Austen-like touch of irony and satirical inflation. Adela is described thus:

Even after six years of the best company, too, she had excellent manners. She was, moreover, mistress of a pretty little fortune, and was accounted clever without detriment to her aimiability, and aimiable without detriment to her wit.

A Day of Days – study resources

A Day of Days The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

A Day of Days The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

A Day of Days Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon UK

A Day of Days Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon US

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

A Day of Days

A Day of Days – plot summary

Young Adela Moore has decided to take a break from society: she goes to live with her elder widowed brother in the countryside. Whilst he is away at a university conference, she lounges at home, secretly hoping that Wheatherby Pysent, a young local parson will visit. Instead, Thomas Ludlow appears, hoping to meet her brother. He is seeking letters of introduction regarding their shared interest in fossils, which he intends to study in Germany.

The couple flirt with each other over the question of his staying or leaving. They decide to go for a walk, but whilst she is changing young Pysent does call at the house. However, Ludlow tells him Adela is not at home. Once in the countryside, they continue their banter. He tells her about himself and his plans to go the very next day to study in Berlin.

When they return to the house she tempts him to stay, and he perceives her as a very attractive option. But on mature reflection he decides that the romance of a single day is sufficient unto itself, and he leaves to take up his journey.

A Day of Days – principal characters
Mr Herbert Moore a childless widower
Adela Moore his rich young sister (23)
Whetherby Pysent a young local parson
Thomas Ludlow a student of fossils from New York
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 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

© Roy Johnson 2013

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More tales by James
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A Handful of Dust

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tutorial, study guide, commentary, and further reading

A Handful of Dust (1934) was Evelyn Waugh’s fourth novel. It was very well received on first publication, and he followed it up with similar acerbic satires such as Scoop (1938) and Put Out More Flags (1942). After the war his novels became more serious. Brideshead Revisited (1945) and the Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-1961) explore similar themes in a more sober fashion, though there are still brilliant flashes of humour in all his work.

A Handful of Dust

A Handful of Dust – critical commentary

Social decline

Evelyn Waugh’s essential subject matter is the study of upper-class decline and its causes. He is powerfully attracted to a nostalgic view of traditional aristocratic life in grand country houses and estates, together with all their culture of inherited wealth and property. This includes the architecture of previous centuries, and the social life of weekend parties, plentiful servants, and an existence divided between London and a house in the country.

But he knew it was a social system that was coming to an end. It was a privileged economy which could not be sustained. And he knew that the principal characters caught up in this decline were conspiring in their own downfall – by over-indulgence, wilful excess, and moral blindness to the changing world in which they lived.

The middle class characters in his novels are largely endeavouring to claw their way into this decadent echelon, and their tastes and habits are generally presented as inferior, awkward, and doomed to failure. The lower orders hardly feature at all, except as occasional servants. Waugh does not have a simplistic hope that any working class people are going to be the saviours of this decline.

Humour

Waugh’s early novels were once regarded as the last thing in barbed humour and rib-tickling satire. They don’t seem quite so humorously pointed now, but there remain traces of comic characterisation, and he does have the distinction of introducing an element of black comedy into the modern novel.

Mrs Beaver’s greed and relentless opportunism are funny because they are linked to the main theme of downward social mobility. She has come from the upper echelons of society but has fallen on hard times as a widow with a socially useless son. She lives in Sussex Gardens – then a downmarket region of Bayswater- but she misses no opportunity to sell people what we would now call fashionable junk or tat from her shop

She has also devised the entrepreneurial scheme of splitting up houses into smaller flats to rent. Her clients are people who have dubious purposes, as does Brenda, and those who are downwardly socially mobile such as ‘Princess’ Jenny Abdul Akbar. Mrs Beaver simultaneously promotes her services to these people as a so-called interior designer.

She also embodies all that Waugh finds offensive in modernism and a lack of sensitivity to tradition. In the middle of the novel she is converting one of the rooms in Tony Last’s old Tudor home Hetton Abbey by lining the walls with chromium plate.

It is interesting that Waugh sees the issue of social decline in architectural terms – from the draughty grandeur of Hetton Abbey to these ‘service flats’ carved out of the Victorian splendour of London’s Belgravia.

Another marvellously comic character is Mr Tendril the local preacher at Hetton. He is a hopelessly indurate creation who goes on preaching sermons he has written years before for troops in British expeditionary wars in India. His speeches contain references to the pitiless sun, threats from tigers, and loved ones back at home – when he is addressing a congregation in what seems to be rural Warwickshire.

How difficult it is for us to realise that this is indeed Chhristmas. Instead of the glowing log fire and widows tight shuttered against the drifting snow, we have only the harsh glare of an alien sun; instead of the happy circle of loved faces, of home and family, we have the uncomprehending stares of the subjugated, though no doubt grateful, heathen. Instead of the placid ox and ass of Bethlehem, we have for companions the ravening tiger and the exotic camel, the furtive jackal and the ponderous elephant.

And of course the most memorable scene in this novel is the black comedy of Mr Todd forcing Tony to read the works of Charles Dickens. The mad settler Todd cannot read himself, but enjoys their entertainment value, and uses that as an excuse to keep Tony prisoner.

The two endings

There is interpretive difficulty and even a possible dilemma concerning the end to A Handful of Dust. This is not surprising, because Waugh wrote the most reprinted version of the conclusion before he wrote the novel. On a visit to South America in 1933, whilst he was stranded in Boa Vista (‘Good View’) in northern Brazil, Waugh spent his time writing a story called The Man Who Liked Dickens, based on an eccentric character he had met. The story was published in Hearst’s International in the United States and reprinted in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine in the UK.

It was ten months later before he began work on what was to become A Handful of Dust – and he did not have any clear plan for how it was to end. This problem of two endings was created because the novel was issued as a serial in America as well as a stand-alone one-volume publication in England. His story The Man Who Liked Dickens had already been published in America, so Waugh produced the alternative ending for serial publication.

The two endings are completely different, and they also create quite different meanings for the novel as a whole. Tony’s imprisonment by the quasi-madman Mr Todd is the more dramatic, and the more frequently reprinted. It continues the theme of downward social mobility that Waugh had explored earlier in Decline and Fall (1928) and it takes it to a new extreme.

Tony is the upholder of traditional aristocratic values and he cherishes the house and the country estate he has inherited. But he is betrayed by his adulterous wife, and when he seeks solace in foreign travel, he encounters only misery, discomfort, and finally a sort of living death. Mr Todd’s final thwarting of Tony’s hopes for rescue is truly black humour at its most grim. Tony’s relatives inherit Hetton Abbey, his wife marries one of his friends, and his existence is reduced to a memorial plaque in the chapel.

The problem with this ending is that there is an abrupt shift in tone, mise en scene, subject matter, and geographic location between the first three-quarters of the novel and its conclusion. The principal events and characters have been established at Hetton Abbey and in fashionable London. The sudden switch to an equatorial jungle and deranged explorers such as Doctor Messinger and Mr Todd is too much. It disrupts the coherence of the narrative. Waugh’s friend the novelist Henry Yorke wrote to him: “the end is so fantastic that it throws the rest out of proportion”.

The serial version of the ending is far more logical and coherent – but it is much shorter, not so dramatic, and it is not funny. In the alternative ending Tony merely returns from what has been a therapeutic cruise, and he ruefully drifts into a reconciliation with Brenda. It is a downbeat, not a catastrophic ending to events.

The setting, the characters, and the subject matter remain the same, as does the tone of the narrative. But there are important ramifications to this version of the novel’s conclusion. Tony returns to his estate as its living inheritor. He has also commissioned renovations to Hetton Abbey during his absence on the Caribbean cruise – and these works reverse the absurd ‘improvements’ Brenda has made at the suggestion of Mrs Beaver (the chromium-plated walls). Moreover, Tony secretly retains ownership of the flat in Belgravia, and he lies to Brenda about having got rid of it.

This alternative ending leaves Tony a little bruised, but intact. He has lost nothing – except his son – and Brenda is pregnant again. Hetton Abbey will have its new bathrooms, and he obviously has plans for a little ‘private life’ in the Belgravia flat. This is altogether a different ending – which in turn creates a different novel. It forces the reader to regard the preceding events in a more light-hearted manner. What was previously a downhill plunge into disaster and destruction suddenly becomes no more than a series of minor comic setbacks from which the protagonist emerges unscathed.

A Handful of Dust – study resources

A Handful of Dust – Penguin – Amazon UK

A Handful of Dust – Penguin – Amazon US

A Handful of Dust – Study Guide – Paperback – Amazon UK

A Handful of Dust – DVD film – Amazon UK

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited – Amazon UK

A Handful of Dust

Evelyn Waugh – by Henry Lamb

A Handful of Dust – plot summary

Chapter One — John Beaver lives with his mother in the unfashionable district of Bayswater in reduced circumstances. She has an antiques shop: he is twenty-five, unpopular, and has no occupation.

Chapter Two — Tony Last and his wife Brenda live at Hetton Abbey – a cold Gothic country house. John Beaver arrives for the weekend as their largely uninvited guest. Everyone feels uncomfortable, but Brenda tries to be hospitable to Beaver.

Brenda thinks to have a pied-a-terre for her trips into London, and Mrs Beaver can supply rooms in Belgravia. John Beaver takes Brenda to dinner and they make the opening moves of a flirtation.

Their relationship develops into an adulterous affair, and it becomes the subject of social gossip in London, even though people wonder what she sees in him. Brenda moves into the flat then announces to her husband that she is going to take up some sort of study courses.

Chapter Three — Tony and Jock Grant-Menzies get drunk at their club and threaten to call on Brenda, who is at the flat with Beaver. They go to a nightclub instead. Brenda stays at the flat during the week and only goes home at weekends. She hopes to distract her husband with her pushy neighbour ‘Princess’ Jenny Abdul Akbar, but Tony does not like her. Jock brings to Hetton his ‘shameless blonde’ friend Mrs Rattery, who arrives by aeroplane.

There is a hunt meeting at which young John Last is killed by a frightened horse. Brenda is brought back from London, but she feels it is all over for her with Tony, and she asks him for a divorce.

Chapter Four — Tony arranges to take a prostitute from the nightclub to Brighton for the weekend to provide evidence for a divorce. Milly the prostitute insists on bringing her awkward young daughter along. Brenda’s family reveal that Beaver will not marry her unless she receives a large settlement as alimony. This means Tony would be forced to sell his house, so instead he refuses to proceed with the divorce.

Chapter Five — Tony embarks on an expedition to South America with the very dubious Doctor Messinger in search of a ‘lost city’. En route via the West Indies he has a brief on-board flirtation with an eighteen year old girl. When he reaches the jungle he is tormented by insect bites and thinks wistfully of home. Native bearers desert the expedition, so Tony and Messinger are stranded. Messinger is clearly lost and incompetent. Tony catches a fever and becomes delirious. Messinger goes to seek help, but he drowns in river rapids.

Meanwhile back in London John Beaver and Brenda cannot move on because there has been no divorce. His mother, sensing that the marriage might not happen, plans to take him to America. Brenda tries to get money from the family solicitor, but Tony has tied up their finances to restore Hetton – and he has made a new will.

Chapter Six — Tony is rescued and cured by an eccentric settler Mr Todd, who forces him to read aloud the works of Charles Dickens. As the months go by Todd thwarts Tony’s attempts to leave the jungle. A previous prisoner tried to escape, but died at the encampment. When a passing traveller calls, Tony secretly gives him a note begging for help. But some time later, when Tony is unconscious for two days from the effects of a local drink, rescuers arrive from Europe. Mr Todd gives them Tony’s watch, shows them a cross on a grave, and sends them away.

Chapter Seven — Hetton is inherited and taken over by Tony’s cousin Richard Last and his family. Brenda marries Jock Grant-Menzies. A commemorative plaque is unveiled in the Hetton chapel to record Tony’s death as an ‘explorer’.

The alternative ending — Tony returns from a sea cruise in the West Indies and is met by Brenda, who has been ditched by John Beaver. They re-unite faux de mieux, Tony returns to Hetton Abbey, and he secretly takes over Brenda’s flat in Belgravia.

A Handful of Dust – principal characters
Mrs Beaver an aggressively commercial antique shop owner
John Beaver her lacklustre and talentless son
Tony Last the owner of Hetton Abbey and estate
Brenda Last Tony’s adulterous wife
John Andrew Last their young son
Marjorie Brenda’s sister
Jock Grant-Menzies Tony’s friend
‘Princess’ Jenny Abdul Akbar Brenda’s next door neighbour in Belgravia
Mrs Rafferty the ‘shameless blonde’, an aviatrix
The Revered Tendril the eccentric vicar attached to Hetton
Mr Todd a mad explorer and settler
Doctor Messinger an incompetent explorer

© Roy Johnson 2018

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A Haunted House

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

A Haunted House first appeared in Monday or Tuesday (1921) – a collection of experimental short prose pieces Virginia Woolf had written between 1917 and 1921. It was published by the Hogarth Press and also included A Society, Monday or Tuesday, An Unwritten Novel, The String Quartet, Blue and Green, and Solid Objects.

A Haunted House

Virginia Woolf

A Haunted House – critical commentary

Pronouns

First time readers of this story are likely to be bewildered by Woolf’s very indirect form of narrative, the lack of formal identification of anybody in the story, and her switching between one pronoun and another.

In the opening sentence – ‘Whatever hour you awoke’ – she is using you in the sense of one, not speaking of any person in particular. In the very next sentence – ‘From room to room they went’ – they refers to the ‘ghostly couple’ who are re-visiting the house in search of something.

They are referred to as she and he in what follows, but in their imagined conversation – ‘Quietly’ they said, ‘or we shall wake them’ – the them refers to the couple who currently occupy the house, one of whom is the narrator of the story.

And the point of view switches back to the narrator, who confirms ‘But it wasn’t that you woke us’, and goes on to observe ‘They’re looking for it’. At this point it is not at all clear what it refers to. It appears be something like the spirit of the house: ‘Safe, safe, safe,’ the pulse of the house beat gladly, ‘The treasure yours.’

The ghostly couple then revisit their old bedroom, where the current occupants are asleep. They reflect on their own previous happiness there, which parallels that of the current occupiers, and the narrator, who has been imagining the visiting ghosts, awakens to wonder if the hidden treasure they were seeking was a sense of joy at living there.

A Haunted House -study resources

A Haunted House The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

A Haunted House The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

A Haunted House The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

A Haunted House The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

An Unwritten Novel Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

A Haunted House A Haunted House – Hogarth reprint edition – Amazon UK

A Haunted House A Haunted House – Hogarth reprint edition – Amazon US

An Unwritten Novel The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

An Unwritten Novel The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

A Haunted House The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

A Haunted House

A Haunted House – story synopsis

An un-named narrator and one of the current occupants of an old house recounts the impression of a visit to it by previous occupants in the form of ghosts.

The ghostly couple are in search of something, and move through the rooms, whilst the narrator is reading in the garden.

The house and its garden are evoked with rural images, shafts of light and shade, and the passage of time and seasons.

The ghostly couple re-visit their old bedroom at night where the current occupants are asleep. They find what they are looking for – in the form of memories of their previous existence, doing the same things as the current occupants, living in harmony with the house.

A Haunted House – principal characters
I the narrator
you (singular) as in ‘one’
they the previous occupants of the house
she previous occupant
he previous occupant
it the ‘ghostly treasure’
them the current occupants of the house
you (plural) the previous occupants
us the current occupants
A Haunted House – first edition

A Haunted House

Cover design by Vanessa Bell

Monk’s House – Rodmell

Monk's House

Virginia Woolf’s old house in Sussex

Further reading

Red button Quentin Bell. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

Red button Hermione Lee. Virginia Woolf. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Red button Nicholas Marsh. Virginia Woolf, the Novels. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Red button John Mepham, Virginia Woolf. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Red button Natalya Reinhold, ed. Woolf Across Cultures. New York: Pace University Press, 2004.

Red button Michael Rosenthal, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Study. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Red button Susan Sellers, The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Red button Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader. New York: Harvest Books, 2002.

Red button Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon UK
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The Complete Shorter FictionThe Complete Shorter Fiction contains all the classic short stories such as The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, and The String Quartet – but also the shorter fragments and experimental pieces such as Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. These ‘sketches’ (as she called them) were used to practice the techniques she used in her longer fictions. Nearly fifty pieces written over the course of Woolf’s writing career are arranged chronologically to offer insights into her development as a writer. This is one for connoisseurs – well presented and edited in a scholarly manner.
Virginia Woolf - The Complete Shorter Fiction Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - The Complete Shorter Fiction Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf: BiographyVirginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013

Virginia Woolf – web links

Red button Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Virginia Woolf web links Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

Virginia Woolf web links Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Virginia Woolf web links Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Virginia Woolf web links Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

Virginia Woolf web links Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

Virginia Woolf web links BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

Virginia Woolf web links A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – short stories
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
Virginia Woolf – life and works

A Hunger Artist and Other Stories

by

short stories by a master of modernism

A Hunger Artist is a collection of short fictions by one of the most remarkable writers of the early twentieth century. Franz Kafka was a completely original writer. He’s classified as a novelist and writer of short stories, and yet most of his novels were not finished, and many of his short works don’t have normal characters or recognisable stories. Many of them are not continuous, logical narratives that we expect in work classified as fiction. Much of his writing is closer to being philosophic meditations or the exploration of bizarre images and metaphors. Yet such is the power of his symbol-making and his imagination that there is really nowhere else for him to be categorised.

A Hunger ArtistSome of his stories are as short as one-sentence aphorisms or the exploration of curious metaphors, striking images, and parables that present one idea in the guise of another. In one story a man is a bridge, stretched across a chasm, terrified of the responsibility he bears. In another a man spends his entire life at a gateway, pleading to be admitted to the Law. On the point of his death he asks the gatekeeper why nobody else has ever requested entry. The gatekeeper tells him “Nobody else could be granted entry for this entrance was meant only for you. I shall now go and close it.”

Kafka was a writer of great contradictions: the semi-mystical believer who doubted everything; the prudish sceptic of personal relationships who consorted with prostitutes; the neurasthenic who was devoted to sunbathing and swimming; the self-denying ascetic who was described by one of his friends as ‘the best-dressed man I have ever known’.

He wrote a great deal about animals, birds, insects, and rodents which nevertheless have human thought processes. In one of his most famous stories The Metamorphosis a young travelling salesman wakes up to find that he has changed into a giant insect. Another story features the effect on a small village when it is visited by a giant mole. In The New Advocate a horse is appointed as a lawyer, and A Report to an Academy is the transcript of a lecture in which the speaker describes his former life as an ape.

All the now-familiar elements of Kafka’s world are tried out in these stories, parables, and fragments – the inaccessible palace or castle, the closed gate, incomprehensible foreigners, the remote unknowable figure of Authority, and the unspecified menace from without. The essence of a Kafka story is often an inexplicable mystery, a paradox, or a vague un-named threat. He establishes a situation then immediately undermines it by introducing the opposite or a contradiction

It was a beautiful day and K. intended to go for a stroll. But he had scarcely taken two steps before he was already in the graveyard.

In fact K. finds that he is a witness to his own burial. A story such as The Burrow combines the animal motif with a study in paranoia when an unspecified rodent describes the building of a giant network of tunnels against some un-named exterior threat. But the construction is eventually so elaborate that maintaining it becomes a threat in itself.

This collection is made up of some of his earliest and his last published works – from the almost journalistic Aeroplanes at Brescia (1909) to Josephine, the Singer or The Mouse People (1924) completed the year of his death. It also contains some of his most famous and anthologised stories – Investigations of a Dog, The Burrow, Before the Law, and The Great Wall of China.

This volume makes an excellent starting point for anyone who has not tackled Kafka before. The translations in these new Oxford University Press editions are recently commissioned, and the texts come with an extensive critical apparatus of introductory essay, explanatory notes, biographical details, and lists of further reading.

A Hunger Artist Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2012

Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist and Other Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, trans. Joyce Crick, 2012, pp.218, ISBN: 0199600929

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A Landscape Painter

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tutorial, synopsis, commentary, and study resources

A Landscape Painter first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly magazine for February 1866. Its initial appearance in book form was as part of the collection Stories Revived published in three volumes by Macmillan in London, 1885.

A Landscape Painter

New England seascape – Winslow Homer (1836-1910)

A Landscape Painter – critical commentary

The principal theme in this story is that of deceit. The Captain ‘deceives’ Locksley with his sailor’s yarns; Locksley deceives the Blunt family quite explicitly by pretending to be poor; and Esther deceives Locksley by pretending to be in love with him.

The instance of Esther’s deceit is all the more pointed because Locksley has gone into his seaside retreat following the discovery that his fiancée Josephine was marrying him for his money. So in the end he is doubly deceived by the outcome of his venture.

There is an interesting leitmotiv of Locksley’s poor health, though it does not seem to be linked to anything essential in the narrative as a whole. At the outset of the story Mrs M. mentions that ‘He [Locksley] was looking very poorly’. Then whilst living with the Blunts he falls ill. This gives Esther the chance to read his diaries. But following only a few years marriage to her, he dies at the age of only thirty-five.

It is interesting in such an early work by James (1886) that he should make use of a metafictional device – a story that reflects upon itself. It is also the first of his stories to use the device of the ‘framed’ narrative – a principal story which is introduced by a smaller, separate narrative.

A Landscape Painter – principal characters
Mrs M. the outer narrator
Locksley a very rich bachelor, the diarist, a landscape painter (30)
‘Captain’ Richard Blunt an old sailor
Esther Blunt his daughter, a handsome talented woman (27)
Mr Johnson an admirer of Esther’s
John Bannister formerly engaged to Esther
A Landscape Painter – study resources

A Landscape Painter The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

A Landscape Painter The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

A Landscape Painter Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon UK

A Landscape Painter Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon US

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

A Landscape Painter Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

A Landscape Painter Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

A Landscape Painter

A Landscape Painter – plot summary

Rich bachelor Locksley has broken off his engagement to beautiful Josephine Leary upon discovering her mercenary nature. He dies at the age of thirty-five. His estate comes into the possession of Mrs M, and she presents the events described in the ‘last hundred’ pages of a diary he kept between the ages of twenty-five and thirty.

Following the split with his fiancée Locksley goes into seclusion and is pleased with his isolation at Newport, but feels he ought to explore his surroundings. He hires a boat, finds an island and, caught by the tide, has to be taken back by Captain Blunt, an old sailor. Blunt invites him to be a lodger in his home, subject to the approval of his daughter, who teaches music in a local school.

Esther Blunt turns out to be young, handsome, and intelligent. Locksley later changes his opinion of her and revises her age. Having decided to change his life and conceal his wealth, he feels that a simple rustic life will suit his purposes. He is aware that he is acting out the part of a ‘poor’ person, and he believes that the captain indulges in romantic fibs and sailors’ yarns. He writes in a self-congratulatory manner about his integration with the household.

On a Sunday, instead of going to church, Locksley flirts with Esther, who lectures him on being less egotistical and more sociable. The captain reveals that Esther was formerly engaged to John Banister, who failed to become rich and later left for China.

Esther helps nurse Locksley through a period illness, after which it is revealed that she has refused an offer of marriage from Mr Johnson. The captain, Esther, and Locksley go on a picnic to a local island, all of which Locksley describes in his diary as an impressionist painting.

When the captain is absent one night, Locksley proposes to Esther, and although teasing him the meanwhile, she accepts. He still maintains his pretense of being poor, but plans to reveal the truth after they are married.

But on honeymoon, when he gives her his diaries to read, she reveals that she has already read them whilst he was ill. She knows he is rich, and even points out that she doesn’t love him and has only married him for his money.

A Landscape Painter – 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 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.
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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

© Roy Johnson 2013

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Laodicean

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tutorial, study guide, commentary, further reading, web links

A Laodicean (1860-1861) was first published as a serial in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and subsequently in novel form by Sampson Low in 1881. It bears two sub-titles – The Castle of the de Stancys and A Story of To-Day. It is one of Thomas Hardy’s lesser-known novels, but it incorporates many of his personal interests – particularly architecture and the effects of modern technology. It is one of the earliest novels you are likely to come across that features electrical telegraphy (the telegram) as part of the plot.

A Laodicean

A Laodicean – commentary

The sensation novel

Hardy wrote in the wake of the ‘sensation novel’ that had been popularised by writers such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon in the middle of the nineteenth century. Hardy never exploited to a similar extent the sensationalist elements of plotting that they had developed – but neither was he averse to including them as an obvious encouragement to gain readers and popular acclaim.

These elements show up more obviously in his weaker novels that do not have the compensating powerful psychological insights and credible dramas that pervade his greatest works.

A Laodicean includes the following typical elements of the sensation novel in its plotting:

  • sex outside marriage
  • illegitimacy
  • personation
  • theft
  • blackmail
  • forgery

William de Stancy has had an illicit sexual relationship in his earlier life. This has led to the birth of his son, who is therefore illegitimate. But the son goes under the name of William Dare (with ‘De Stancy’ tattooed on his chest) which is a form of ‘personation’ – someone masquerading under a false identity.

Dare steals George Somerset’s correspondence in order to become his assistant on the castle restoration project. He then steals the plans to form an alliance with the rival architect Havill. Meanwhile he is blackmailing his own father. He not only drains de Stancy of money to fund his self-indulgent life style, but he threatens to reveal the truth of their relationship, which would ruin Captain de Stancy’s social reputation and marriage prospects (which is eventually what happens).

On top of all that, Dare is guilty of forgery on two counts. He sends a telegram to Paula Power demanding money which purports to come from George Somerset. Then he forges a photograph that is constructed to show Somerset in a state of intoxication.

These are the stock-in-trade elements of the sensation novel, and it is interesting to note that Hardy relies on them more extensively than he does in his more serious novels, for which he is quite rightly better known.

Plotting

There are a number of issues and details in the narrative that are either unexplained or not followed up, once having been introduced. For instance there are two related issues at opposite ends of the novel.

In the first, George Somerset falls into the tower pit on one of his early visits to the castle. Whilst there he notices carvings in the wall:

Among these antique inscriptions he observed two bright and clean ones, consisting of the words ‘De Stancy’ and ‘W. Dare’ crossing each other at right angles. From the state of the stone they could not have been cut more than a month before

There are only two people in the novel who know the relationship between De Stancy and Dare, and those are the two individuals themselves. At that point neither of them have had access to the castle. Hardy clearly inserts George’s observation into the text to create a little mystery, but no subsequent explanation is given for how the names got there. Moreover, the incident and its implications are never mentioned again throughout the whole of the novel.

We know that as a result of an illness, Hardy was forced to complete the novel by dictation rather than longhand composition, and he may have simply forgotten this detail.

But in the second example at the other end of the novel Abner Power threatens to expose William Dare and his creation of a bogus telegram and a faked photograph to smear the reputation of George Somerset. Dare counters this attack by saying he will reveal Power’s role in the fabrication of an explosive device for a group of revolutionaries.

The result of this confrontation is a stalemate which does not affect the plot in any way. More importantly however, no explanation is given for how either of these characters came to have detailed knowledge of the other’s doings.

There are also ambiguities or elisions in the plot that seem to suggest that Hardy himself was not sure about the logic and coherence of his story. The destruction by fire of the castle contents at the close of the novel are the work of an arsonist described as a ‘flitting’ figure, who is not named.

This term ‘flitting’ immediately suggests a female – who might be Charlotte, putting an end to the burden of family history before she retires into a convent. But this would be uncharacteristic of such an honest, principled, and self-effacing young woman.

The other suspect – with a powerful motive of resentment – would be Dare, who we know has been denied his ambition to become a genuine de Stancy, and is still in the vicinity at the time. But it is hard to believe that a penniless and unscrupulous confidence trickster would burn paintings by Vandyck, Kneller, Tintoretto, Titian, and Giorgione when he could just easily steal and sell them.

Hardy does not seem to have made up his mind on this issue, and is content to leave an ambiguous, unresolved mystery hovering over the uncharacteristically ‘happy ending’ to the novel.

The basic plot is quite reasonable. An indecisive young woman is caught between competing interests – her instinct for love and a desire for social advancement. But the events of the narrative are stretched out to aesthetically unacceptable lengths. Perhaps this is a case where serial magazine publication worked against the best interests of the author. Hardy met his monthly quotas, but the net result is a novel that very few people bother to read – and one cannot blame them.

Wessex

Hardy makes very little effort to root the events of A Laodicean in a realistic manner. It seems that the location of de Stancy castle might be anywhere in southern England. It is certainly within easy reach of London by train.

But the local town of Markton in the novel is not mentioned in any of the other ‘Wessex’ works that constitute his essential oeuvre. Hardy was of course at liberty to produce fiction which stood independently of his other major productions. But the fictional world of ‘Wessex’ that he created in novels stretching from Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) to Jude the Obscure (1895) is of such power and is so vividly realised that it forms a gravitational field of an enduring intensity that affects judgements of all his works.

Structure

There are at least three major structural weaknesses in the narrative. The first is that the sub-plot of the villainous William Dare is set up successfully enough in the opening part of the story. Dare infiltrates George Somerset’s professional and romantic endeavours; he steals his designs for the rival architect Havill; and he has a secret desire to become a legitimate de Stancy. Indeed, he even has the name tattooed on his chest.

Yet in the middle sections of the novel, this Dare sub-plot disappears completely. The story switches to Somerset’s frustrations in trying to wring an emotional response out of the seemingly coquettish Paula Power. This section of the novel also embodies another subsidiary plot weakness – the over-elaborated passages of the theatricals and George’s adolescent torments of jealousy.

But these weaknesses pale into insignificance compared with the endlessly repetitive will-she-won’t-she pursuit of Paula by de Stancy during their excursion around Europe.

It is clear that Hardy wishes to show Paula under enormous pressure. George Somerset has been maligned by both Dare’s bogus telegram asking for money and the faked photograph apparently showing him in a state of intoxication. Paula is also being offered marriage into a family of pedigree. She will become Lady de Stancy if only she says “Yes”.

Dramatically, this is a credible plot, but de Stancy’s pursuit of Paula and her refusal to yield to his entreaties goes on and on, from one town to another, with no change, no development, and no new arguments – until the reader could be excused for losing the will to live.

It is astonishing to realise that only a few years before, Hardy had written a work as psychologically insightful as The Return of the Native (1878) and only a few years hence he was to produce his all-inclusive masterpiece The Mayor of Castebridge (1886) which bears fruitful comparison with King Lear in terms of universal scope and tragic intensity.

A Laodicean – study resources

A Laodicean A Laodicean – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Laodicean A Laodicean – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Laodicean A Laodicean – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

A Laodicean A Laodicean – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

A Laodicean The Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle eBook

Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

A Laodicean

A Laodicean – plot summary

Book the First. George Somerset

I.   George Somerset is refreshing his studies of English Gothic architecture under pressure from his father, a painter and academician.

II.   George comes across a modern chapel built in an ugly style. A baptism ceremony is taking place, but the attractive young celebrant refuses to go into the pool. He follows a telegraph wire that leads him to an old castle.

III .   Next day he looks over Castle de Stancy and its ancient contents. The ancestral portraits are decaying.

IV.   Charlotte de Stancy shows him round the castle and relates its history. It was bought by engineer John Power and is now being restored by his daughter. Paula Power has had a telegraph line installed and has contact with contemporary culture. The two young women are close friends.

V .   Next day George is invited to lunch with Sir William de Stancy (the previous owner) in his modern suburban villa. Sir William is obsessed with frugality and ‘luck’ He has lost all his money by extravagance and bad investments.

VI.   The following day George meets William Dare who wishes to photograph the castle. He then encounters the Baptist minister who is berating Paula theologically.

VII .   George debates biblical niceties with the minister, who gives up the argument. Paula speaks positively on Mr Woodwell’s behalf, and afterwards the two men are reconciled.

VIII.   George has lunch at the castle. He gets into an argument with fellow architect Mr Havill. There is general agreement that Mr Dare is an unreliable entity.

IX.   George falls into a pit in the castle turret, where he sees Dare’s name recently carved into the wall. Paula asks him to supervise the castle restoration. He proposes a competition with Mr Havill.

X.   Paula takes him round the castle whilst they discuss plans – without Havill. George moves to lodge in local village Markton.

XI.   Paula creates a studio for George in the castle. He feels more powerfully drawn to her – even though she appears enigmatic and even contradictory.

XII.   George goes to inspect Mr Power’s famous railway tunnel. He meets Paula there, and they are frightened by trains travelling up and down the line. Dare steals George’s correspondence and puts himself forward as his assistant.

XIII.   Paula holds a dinner party which George does not attend. She changes her mind about creating a Greek courtyard – then invites him to a garden party.

XIV.   An anonymous newspaper article appears, accusing Paula of desecrating the castle and its historic value. She tells George she wishes she were a de Stancy. They are spied on by Dare.

XV.   At the garden party George sacks Dare for idleness, then shelters from a rainstorm in a hut with Paula, to whom he declares his love.

Book the Second. Dare and Havill

I.   Dare finds Havill’s notebook containing the draft of the newspaper article. They then spy on George and Paula in the hut. Dare proposes a pact between them to steal George’s designs and cause trouble between George and Paula..

II.   Dare calls at Havill’s office and helps to bamboozle one of his creditors. Dare and Havill copy George’s designs in his studio. They then dine together, staying overnight at an inn.

III.   Havill wakes in the night and discovers Dare is carrying a gun. Dare then takes a close interest in an army brigade that arrives in the town.

IV.   George meets Charlotte with her brother Captain de Stancy and gives him Dare’s photo to show to the police. De Stancy is shocked on recognising Dare, and burns the photo.

V.   Captain de Stancy meets Dare, his illegitimate son, who is blackmailing him. Dare proposes that de Stancy should marry Paula and reclaim the castle and estates for the de Stancy family – of which he considers himself a member. However, de Stancy has taken a vow of adult celibacy.

VI .   The architecture competition is a tie. Dare explains to Havill his plan to bring Paula and de Stancy together. He discovers that Paula will look her most attractive when taking morning exercises in her private gymnasium.

VII.   Dare takes de Stancy to the gymnasium, where he is enchanted by the sight of Paula exercising.

Book the Third. De Stancy

I.   William de Stancy immediately becomes a changed man. He abandons his vows of teetotalism and avoiding women. He wants his sister Charlotte to help him in his pursuit of Paula, and he takes a sudden interest in the family history.

II.   William visits the castle and shows off his (very recently acquired) knowledge of the de Stancy family to Paula. Dare arrives, and they plan to make copies of all the family portraits.

III.   The copying begins, but William wants a portrait of Paula herself, which she refuses. Havill goes bankrupt and his wife dies. Paula is persuaded to split the project into two parts out of sympathy for Havill.

IV.   Havill has pangs of conscience and resigns from the project. Dare and de Stancy fear that the return of Somerset will spoil their plans.

V.   George wonders if his own family has a ‘pedigree’. When he goes to recover a genealogical document from the bank he sees Paula collecting a jewelled necklace.

VI.   George follows Paula to the Markton Hunt Ball. Charlotte is taken home in a faint when she sees Somerset. George learns that there are to be theatricals (Love’s Labour’s Lost) for which he designed the costumes.

VII.   George returns to the castle, but he jealously objects to Paula taking an active part in the theatricals.

VII.   He is further distressed when parts are changed and romantic scenes from Romeo and Juliet are interpolated.

IX.   A mysterious stranger enters, makes enquiries about Paula and de Stancy, then pays people to applaud them. George reproaches Paula for taking part in the final love scene in the play.

X.   Next day Paula hires a professional actress to take her part. After the performance she introduces the mysterious stranger as her uncle Abner Power – which gives George further cause for jealous worry.

XI.   Paula’s engagement is announced in a newspaper – but she denies it to George. She plans a trip to Nice. George discovers that the newspaper announcement was placed there by her uncle Abner.

Book the Fourth. Somerset, Dare, and de Stancy

I.   George and Paula exchange telegraph messages and letters. He continues to plead for signs of affection, and she continues to refuse.

II.   Abner Power wishes to influence his niece. George wants to visit her in Nice. She eventually stops writing to him – so he sends a message demanding to know what is happening.

III.   When he learns that de Stancy is also visiting Nice, George is inflamed with jealousy and immediately sets off to join them. The party has moved on to Monte Carlo, so he follows them there.

IV.   In the Casino George meets William Dare who tries to borrow money from him, which he refuses to do. Dare despatches a bogus telegram to Paula, claiming to be from Somerset and asking for money to pay a gambling debt.

V.   Paula despatches de Stancy with the money for Somerset. Dare turns up to collect it, but de Stancy refuses to hand it over.

Book the Fifth. De Stancy and Paula

I.   De Stancy joins Paula in Strazbourg where he returns the money. He declares his passion for her.

II.   They move on to Baden where de Stancy pesters Paula for attention and the reciprocation of his feelings. She refuses him, but he is supported by her uncle Abner.

III.   Dare catches up with de Stancy in Karlsruhe, flush with a recent gambling success. De Stancy advises him to return to England.

IV.   Paula asks to see Dare, who smears Somerset by implication then produces the doctored photograph apparently showing Somerset drunk.

V.   Somerset arrives and is treated coldly by Paula, who now accepts de Stancy as a potential suitor instead. Dare departs for England.

VI.   Somerset and Paula meet again by accident in Heidelberg, and they part with cold misunderstanding of each other.

VII.   Paula chooses to walk up a long hill with de Stancy, who continues to harass her with emotional demands. She continues to equivocate.

VIII.   The party sail down the Rhein on a pleasure boat. Paula and de Stancy discuss their relationship, and there are further supplications and equivocations.

IX.   De Stancy continues to court Paula as they journey through northern Europe. Somerset writes to say that he wishes to resign from the castle restoration project.

X.   Charlotte becomes ill in Amiens. Abner Power arrives from Paris saying that the proposed marriage must not go ahead. De Stancy harasses Paula yet again, then receives notice of his father’s death. Paula finally accepts him.

XI.   Dare checks on the marriage preparations and makes veiled blackmail threats. Abner Power arrives to expose the truth about Dare. But Dare counter-attacks with a history of Power’s making an explosive device for revolutionaries. They threaten each other with guns, then agree to call it quits. Abner Power disappears again.

XII.   Somerset meets Charlotte, who tells him about about the fake telegram. He goes next day to challenge Dare, but en route hears that the marriage has just taken place. He goes on holiday to Normandy.

XIII.   Charlotte is suspicious regarding Dare and uncovers the truth about the bogus photograph. Although she is in love with Somerset herself, she feels she ought to give the information to Paula.

XIV.   Charlotte reveals the truth to Paula on her wedding day. Paula threatens to have Dare arrested. When. De Stancy protests he is forced to admit that Dare is his son. The marriage is called off.

Book the Sixth. Paula

I.   Paula sets off for Normandy in search of Somerset. She traces him to Lisieux, where she just misses his departure for Caen.

II.   In the next town she meets Somerset’s father. When they move on to Etretat, George is seen in a dance hall. Paula feels she has been humiliating herself, and vows to go back home.

III.   Next day the two parties meet by accident. Paula re-appoints Somerset as architect, but does not reveal what she knows. George becomes ill. Paula visits him they are reconciled, and agree to marry.

IV.   A few weeks later Paula and Somerset return to Markton. De Stancy meets Dare, and they bemoan their separate lots.

V.   Charlotte retreats to a nunnery, and a fire consumes the contents of the castle. Paula and Somerset agree to build a new home alongside the ruins.

A Laodicean – characters
George Somerset a young architect
John Power railway engineer, who bought the de Stancy estate
Paula Power his daughter, current owner of the estate
Captain William de Stancy a middle-aged bachelot
Charlotte de Stancy Paula’s friend
William Dare de Stancy’s illegitimate son
Mr Woodwell a local Markston minister
Mr Havill a local Markston architect
Mrs Goodman Paula’s aunt and chaperon
Abner Power Paula’s uncle

© Roy Johnson 2017

More on Thomas Hardy
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

A Life

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

A Life (Una vita) was the first novel written by Italo Svevo, and like all his other works it was published at his own expense. He wrote it in 1888 and originally gave it the title Un inetto (A Bungler). Svevo submitted his manuscript to the publishing house Treves, where it was turned down. Eventually it was accepted by Vram and published in 1892, with the stipulation that the title be changed and Svevo pay for the printing. Once published, it was completely ignored. Not until twenty years later did Svevo find any degree of literary success, following the support and encouragement of his English language teacher, the young James Joyce, who was living in exile in Trieste at the time.

A Life

Italo Svevo

A Life – critical commentary

Setting

Although it is not explicitly named in the text, there is no reason for thinking that the location of events is anywhere other than Trieste. Svevo set all his major novels in his native city. Characters go for walks along the Corso; the city is located on the sea; and the bank of Maller & Company has commercial relationships with Italy, Germany, and France – all of which were close geographic and political connections with Trieste, the fourth largest city of the Hapsburg Empire and its only Mediterranean sea port in the late nineteenth century.

The main theme

As its original title implies (Un inetto – An Inept One) the novel is a study in social alienation and personal failure. Alfonso is in one sense a precursor of the modern and existential anti-hero. He acts from the best motives and strives for honourable and spiritually elevated relationships with those around him, but he is defeated by petty bureaucracy on one hand and his own emotional weakness on the other.

Svevo repeatedly dwells on the ironic twists of fate that beset his protagonist. At the start of the novel Alfonso feels that he is not well regarded in his lowly position of correspondence clerk, yet his boss and head of the bank Signor Maller specifically assures him that he respects his work, and proves it by inviting him to his home.

This gives Alfonso the opportunity to meet Annetta, the attractive daughter of his boss – yet it is significant that having socially recognised Alfonso with an invitation to his own house, Signor Maller absents himself on the occasion of his visit, and Alfonso is left to the frosty reception provided by Annetta and the housekeeper Francesca (who is also Maller’s ex-mistress).

Alfonso is in an ambiguous position in terms of social position – from a lower middle-class family, with enough education to escape his rural native village and to secure a clerk’s job in the city, but not enough status or capital to mix easily with those he sees as his peers. He inherits money from the sale of his family home following the death of his mother – but he improvidently sells it for below its market value. He is yearning ambitiously for connections that are socially beyond his means. His relationship with his boss’s daughter Annetta only exposes him to suspicions of fortune hunting, as well as being emotionally calamitous.

He is noble and self-sacrificing in nursing his dying mother , and with his inheritance he provides a dowry for the unlovely daughter of his landlady – only to have his generosity misunderstood and even held against him.

Alfonso is similar to one of Kafka’s characters – Franz Kafka being a writer who Svevo clearly prefigures. Alfonso’s plight would be one of comic misunderstanding if it were not so painful and ultimately tragic. The scene where his feckless landlord Lanucci tries to sell him a personal insurance policy he neither needs nor can afford is like a passage from another tragedian of the comic grotesque – Samuel Beckett.

Pre post-modernism

There are elements of post-modern meta-fiction in the text. Annetta suggests writing a novel collaboratively with a plot which is Alfonso’s own story of a provincial boy who falls in love with a rich woman. This is also the plot of Una vita in which they are both characters. This theme is not explored or developed any further, since once Alfonso returns to his native village and his dying mother, the subjects of his literary collaboration and his relationship with Annetta are both abandoned.

Tightness of structure is not one of Svevo’s strong points as a novelist. He follows the day to day events of Alfonso’s life in an almost naturalistic manner, which renders the account tedious. Apart from the slow-moving development of Alfonso’s relationship with Annetta, there is a noticeable absence of any narrative tension or drama. Instead, the narrative comprises a detailed account of the minutiae of psychological processes – the relentless analysis of people’s conversations, their possible and actual motivations, and the cataloguing of trivial events. Svevo’s interest seems to be mainly in the shifting, contradictory, and sometimes paradoxical nature of human consciousness – something he was to explore in even further detail in Confessions of Zeno (1925).

The only evidence of formal structure to the novel is the fact that it begins and ends with two letters. The first is from Alfonso to his mother expressing his homesickness, and the second is from the bank to the family solicitor disclaiming any financial responsibility following Alfonso’s suicide.

A Life – study resources

A Life A Life – Secker & Warburg- Amazon UK

A Life A Life – Secker & Warburg – Amazon US

A Life As A Man Grows Older – NYRB Classics – Amazon UK

A Life As A Man Grows Older – NYRB Classics – Amazon US

A Life Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Life Confessions of Zeno – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Life Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon UK

A Life Italo Svevo: A Double Life – Clarendon Press – Amazon US

A Life Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon UK

A Life Svevo’s London Writings – Troubador Press – Amazon US

A Life – chapter summaries

1   Alfonso Nitti writes a letter to his mother back home in the countryside. He is poor, homesick, and feels inferior in his work at the bank.

2   The clerks at Maller and Company are kept late copying letters. Signor Maller knows that Alfonso has written home complaining and reassures him that he is well regarded. Alfonso has ambitions, but they are daydreams.

3   Alfonso lodges with the impoverished Lanucci family. Signor Lanucci gauchely tries to sell Alfonso life insurance that he cannot afford and does not need.

4   Alfonso is invited to Signor Maller’s house. He is impressed by his boss’s wealth, but Signor Maller leaves him with his housekeeper Francesca and daughter Annetta, who treats him very rudely. Annetta’s cousin Macario later explains that she is snobbishly disdainful towards her father’s employees.

5   Alfonso and his work colleagues are trapped in a routine of petty rivalries and bureaucratic divisions of responsibility – as a result of which Alfonso receives a promotion.

6   Alfonso finds his new work very demanding. To relieve his sense of alienation he takes up the study of philosophy and criticism.

7   Driven by romantic desire, Alfonso takes to following women in the street – but he is too timid to make any serious contact with any of them. He gives lessons in Italian grammar to Lucia Lanucci, but she is not a good student. They quarrel, and Alfonso believes Signora Lanucci is trying to snare him into a relationship with her daughter.

8   Alfonso falls ill and takes up walking every day as a cure. He also launches an ambition to write a philosophic thesis, but gets nowhere with it. He meets Macario in the library: they discuss literature and both read Balzac’s Louis Lamberrt.

9   Alfonso pays a second visit to the Maller family home, where he finds Annetta very friendly and encouraging. But Francesca is rather distant with him.

10   Francesca asks Alfonso’s mother for a room in her house, but Signor Maller countermands this request. Alfonso decides he is in love with Annetta, but when he attends her Wednesday salon he feels no desire for her.

11   When Alfonso visits Annetta on his own, she has the idea of writing a novel in collaboration, and she suggests a plot which is exactly Alfonso’s own story. They describe to each other ‘previous works’ that they haven’t actually written. But Alfonso doesn’t know how to begin writing.

12   They collaborate enthusiastically, but Annetta asks Alfonso to re-write his drafts because she claims they are dull. Writing the novel becomes as burdensome to him as working at the bank, but he suppresses his criticisms of the novel because of his rapture for Annetta. He discovers that Fumigi is also in love with Annetta and has plans to marry her. Annetta turns down Fumigi’s offer, but she reproaches Alfonso for compromising her social reputation. Fumigi later appears in an agitated state, which Prarchi diagnoses as incipient paralysis.

13   The Lanucci family become further impoverished. Alfonso is encouraged to bring friends home to pay court to Lucia. Finally, the printer Mario Gralli is prepared to marry her.

14   Francesca advises Alfonso to win Annetta by feigning coldness, but he finds it very difficult. They start work on the novel again, and eventually they spend a night together and become lovers.

15   The next day Alfonso feels disappointed. Annetta is going to tell her father, and advises Alfonso to leave Trieste for a while, before the marriage. Francesca advises him not to leave. Next day he is given a fortnight’s leave from the bank.

16   When Alfonso returns to his native village he discovers that his mother is dying. He feels ashamed of his dalliance with Annetta. A letter from Francesca tells him that all will be lost unless he returns, but the bank grant him an additional two weeks’ leave. He nurses his mother through to her death, then he himself gets typhoid fever. He sells the house for much less than its value, and returns to Trieste.

17   On return he learns that Annetta is now engaged to marry Macario, and Lucia has been jilted by Gralli. He is received in a cool manner at the bank, and the Lanucci family is beset by anxieties following Lucia’s problems.

18   Alfonso works hard at the bank and eventually finds some satisfaction from his job. There are rivalries over the appointment of a branch manager for the Venice office. Alfonso preaches stoicism to Lucia but cannot suppress the jealousy aroused by his rival Macario.

19   Lucia has been made pregnant by Gralli, who refuses to marry her. Alfonso offers to pay Lucia’s dowry, and Gralli changes his mind. The Lanucci family are reluctantly grateful, but Lucia does not love Gralli, so Alfonso’s generous gesture is wasted.

20   The bank clerks are given their annual bonuses, but Alfonso is demoted to the counting room. He protests to Maller, but to no effect. Feeling unjustly persecuted, he appeals to Annetta for a meeting. However, at the appointed hour Annetta’s brother appears and challenges him to a duel. Alfonso goes home and commits suicide.

A Life – principal characters
Alfonso Nitti a bank correspondence clerk (22)
Signora Carolina Nitti his widowed mother
Maller & Co the bank where Alfonso works
Signor Maller his austere boss
Annetta Maller his attractive daughter
Frederico Maller Annetta’s brother
Signor Lanucci Alfonso’s feckless landlord, a sales representative
Signora Lucinda Lanucci a friend of Alfonso’s mother
Gustavo Lanucci their son (18)
Lucinda Lanucci their unattractive daughter (16)
Signora Francesca Barrini Maller’s housekeeper and his ex-mistress
Avvocato Macario Maller’s nephew, and lawyer
Signor Fumigi a maths enthusiast and inventor
Doctor Prarchi a member of Annetta’s salon
Signor Gralli a printer, suitor to Lucia
Signor Marotti notary to the Nitti family

© Roy Johnson 2016

More on Italo Svevo
Twentieth century literature

A Light Man

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

A Light Man first appeared in The Galaxy magazine in July 1869. Its first appearance (heavily revised) in book form was in the collection Stories by American Authors published in New York by Scribner in 1884.

A Light Man

A Light Man – critical commentary

It is interesting that the quotation at the head of this tale is from Robert Browning – who is famous both for his dramatic monologues and his use of dubious ‘narrators’. One thinks for instance of the Duke in My Last Duchess who is explaining away with apparent sang froid the fact that he has had his former wife murdered.

First person narrators may be honest; they may be misguided; and they may be outright liars. Henry James was alert to the possibilities of this literary device from the earliest days of his writing career, and is famous for the use he made of it in his later works, such as the very complex situation he creates in The Turn of the Screw.

A Light Man seems to be a study in both ambiguity and the unreliable narrator. – but one which does not quite resolve itself to any satisfactory conclusion.

At one level, Max is quite honest in revealing that he is both hypocritical and insincere. He is an empty man emotionally and spiritually, and yet he tells us so. He has no ambition, and eventually thinks he ought to marry a rich woman just for something to do. He describes himself as an ‘adventurer’.

But his account of Sloane reveals his most disgusting characteristics. Whilst accepting the comforts of his host’s hospitality, he unleashes a torrent of criticism belittling and criticising him. .

Yet in his final dealings with Theodore in the conflict over Sloane’s will, he expresses a wish to remain friendly with Theodore. This is either completely insincere or yet another level of his duplicity. The narrative offers few clues about how this should be interpreted.

And of course at the end of the story he is waiting for Miss Meredith – the woman who has inherited from her wealthy relative Sloane and who will fit the template for a rich wife Max has created for himself.

The only way the story makes more sense and these inconsistencies and contradictions can be resolved, is to see it as a lightly coded study of Sloane as an aged homosexual paying for the attention of two much younger men who are vying with each other to be his favourite. The extensive revisions made to the text after its first publication support this reading.

A Light Man – study resources

A Light Man The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

A Light Man The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

A Light Man Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon UK

A Light Man Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon US

A Light Man A Light Man – paperback reprint – Amazon UK

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

A Light Man

A Light Man – plot summary

The narrative takes the form of a diary written by Maximus (Max) Austin, who has returned to his native America after living in Europe. He receives a letter from his friend Theodore Lisle inviting him to spend a month with Frederick Sloane at his house in the country. Sloane is old and infirm, but a bon viveur, and he has embarked on writing his memoirs.

Max recounts the story of his friend Theodore, who returned from living in Europe to look after his sisters. He then became ill, and finally got the job of amanuensis to Sloane, which Max sees as a demeaning role.

Sloane invites Max to stay on at the house. Max gives an account of his own nature, which reveals him as complacent, uncreative, and self-congratulatory. He can think of nothing to do with his life, and decides he might as well look for a rich wife.

He provides a hypocritical summary of his host’s life: Sloane married a rich woman who died young; he has spent most of his life (and fortune) living in Europe, and has returned to America to restore his present home. He has had a succession of hangers-on living with him. Max’s account becomes a vituperative character assassination of his host.

When Theodore falls ill, Sloane implores Max to stay with him as a form of surrogate son, and he begins to be critical of Theodore, whose role Max takes over. Theodore receives letters from his sister, which Sloane uses as a pretext to get rid of him. Theodore discusses his insecurity with Max, who thinks of his friend as merely a vulgar fortune hunter.

Max tells Sloane he must leave to find employment in New York, because he has no money – at which Sloane offers to alter his will if Max will stay (the implication being that the will is currently made in Theodore’s favour). When slightly recovered, Sloane asks Max to retrieve his will, with a view to destroying it.

But when Max goes to fetch the will, Theodore has it. They discuss its contents without actually reading it. Theodore burns the will, then the two men challenge each other. Theodore believes that Max has usurped his position and hoped to gain the property: Max unconvincingly claims innocence and says he wishes to remain friends.

Meanwhile, Sloane dies. His estate will go to a distant niece, Miss Meredith, for whom Max is waiting at the end of the story.

Principal characters
Maximus Austin the American narrator (32)
Theodore Lisle his old friend
Frederick Sloane a rich widower (72)
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 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
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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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© Roy Johnson 2013

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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