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Nostromo – a tutorial

January 27, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Nostromo (1904) is Joseph Conrad’s ‘big’ political novel – into which he packs all of his major subjects and themes. It is set in the imaginary Latin-American country of Costaguana – and features a stolen hoard of silver, desperate acts of courage, and characters trembling on the brink of moral panic. The political background encompasses nationalist revolution and the Imperialism of foreign intervention. Silver is the pivot of the whole story – revealing the courage of some and the corruption and destruction of others. Conrad’s narration is as usual complex and oblique. He begins half way through the events of the revolution, and proceeds by way of flashbacks and glimpses into the future.

Joseph Conrad - portrait

Joseph Conrad


Nostromo – critical commentary

Political theme

This is generally regarded by most Conrad commentators as his greatest novel. It embraces wide ranging themes of political struggle, international capitalism, the expansion of Europe and the United States into Latin America, various forms of personal heroism and sacrifice, and the dreams and obsessions which can lead people to self-destruction.

Nostromo - first editionThe location of the novel is Costaguana, a fictional country on the western seaboard of South America, and the focus of events is in its capital Sulaco, where a silver mine has been inherited by English-born Charles Gould but is controlled by American capitalists in San Francisco. Competing military factions plunge the country in a state of civil war, and Gould tries desperately to keep the mine working. Amidst political chaos, he dispatches a huge consignment of silver, putting it into the hands of the eponymous hero, the incorruptible Capataz de Cargadores, Nostromo.

However, things do not go according to plan. It is almost impossible to provide an account of the plot without giving away what are called in movie criticism ‘plot spoilers’. But the silver does not reach its intended destination, and the remainder of the novel is concerned with both the civil conflict and the attitudes of the people who know that the silver exists, and their vainglorious attempts to acquire it.

Structure

The novel has a curious but on the whole impressive structure. The first part of the book is an extraordinarily slow-moving – almost static – account of Costaguana and the back-history of the main characters in the story. Then the central section – more than half the novel – is taken up with the dramatic events of just two or three days and nights in which rebel forces attack the town, the silver is smuggled out, and the scene is set for disaster.

This central section of the novel which covers the scenes of military insurgency and high drama conveys very convincingly the uncertainty of civil war, the powerlessness of individuals, and the force of large scale events. Bandits suddenly become generals, all normal communications are cut off, and nobody can be sure where to turn to for law and order. Amazingly, around two hundred pages of narrative cover only two or three days of action – much of it at night.

The silver of the mine

The main point of Conrad’s story is that the silver of the mine corrupts almost all who come into contact with it. The inheritance and running of the mine estrange Charles Gould from his wife; once Nostromo has concealed the silver, his knowledge of its location eventually corrupts him; and the rebel leader Sotillo is driven almost made with desire to possess it. Only the saintly Emilia Gould has the strength to resist it, refusing to know where it is buried, even when the information is offered by the last person to know, on his death bed.

Map of South AmericaA great deal of the narrative tension in this long novel turns on who knows what about whom, and many of the key scenes are drenched in dramatic irony built on coincidences which have all the improbability of the nineteenth century novel hanging about them. At one point a completely new character suddenly appears as a stowaway on a boat, and then improbably survives a collision with another ship in the dark by hanging onto the other boat’s anchor. And this is merely a plot device allowing him to transmit misleading information to his captors – and incidentally allows Conrad to indulge in a rather unpleasant bout of anti-semitism.

Narrative mode(s)

In common with many other novels from Conrad’s late phase, the narrative is conveyed to us in a very complex manner. It passes from third person omniscient narrator to first person accounts of events by fictional characters. Authorial point of view and the chronology of events both change alarmingly; the narrative is sometimes taken over temporarily by a fictional character, or is recounted via an improbably long letter which we are meant to believe is being written (in pencil) in the heat of gunfire and other tumultuous events.

There’s also a great deal of geographic uncertainty. As reports come in from one end of the country to the other, and the loyalty of one province and its leaders is mentioned in relation to another – as well as its strategic position on the seaboard – readers might begin to wish for a map to conceptualise events.

Once a heroic solution has been found for the plight of the beleaguered loyalists (an epic Paul Revere type ride on horseback by Nostromo) the story suddenly flashes forward to the successful years of recovery and the aftermath. Nostromo seeks to consolidate his successful position by a judicious marriage, but is distracted by his passionate love for his intended’s younger sister. Even this detail is linked to the silver of the mine, and it brings about the truly tragic finale.

Despite all Conrad’s stylistic peculiarities (and even some lapses in grammar) this is a magnificent novel which amply repays the undoubtedly demanding efforts required to read it. But that is true of many modern classics – from Mrs Dalloway to Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past.


Nostromo – study resources

Red button Nostromo – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon UK

Red button Nostromo – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon US

Red button Nostromo – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Red button Nostromo – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Red button Nostromo – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Red button Nostromo – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Red button Nostromo – Everyman’s Library – Amazon UK

Red button Nostromo – Everyman’s Library – Amazon US

Red button Nostromo – York Notes – Amazon UK

Red button Nostromo – 1996 BBC adaptation on VHS – Amazon UK

Red button Nostromo – eBook version at Project Gutenberg

Red button The Complete Novels of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook editions

Red button Conrad: Nostromo – Landmarks of World Literature – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Red button Nostromo – audioBook version at Project Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Red button Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Red button Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Joseph Conrad at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Nostromo


Nostromo – plot summary

Charles Gould is a native Costaguanero of English descent who owns the silver-mining concession in Sulaco. He is tired of the political instability in Costaguana and its concomitant corruption, and puts his weight behind the Ribierist project, which he believes will finally bring stability to the country after years of misrule and tyranny by self-serving dictators. Instead, the silver mine and the wealth it has generated become a bone for the local warlords to fight over, plunging Costaguana into a new round of chaos. Among others, the revolutionary Montero invades Sulaco; Señor Gould, adamant that his silver should not become spoil for his enemies, entrusts it to Nostromo, the trusted ‘capataz de los cargadores’ (head longshoreman).

NostromoNostromo is an Italian expatriate who has risen to that position through his daring exploits. (‘Nostromo’ is Italian for mate or boatswain, as well as a contraction of nostro uomo – ‘our man’.) He is so named by his employer, Captain Mitchell. Nostromo’s real name is Giovanni Battista Fidanza – Fidanza meaning ‘trust’ in archaic Italian. Nostromo is what would today be called a shameless self-publicist. He is believed by Señor Gould to be incorruptible, and for this reason is entrusted with hiding the silver from the revolutionaries. He accepts the mission not out of loyalty to Señor Gould, but rather because he sees an opportunity to increase his own fame.

A pivotal episode in the novel takes place at night, when Nostromo, together with an escaping French journalist Decoud, sets out at sea to save the silver – not realising he has a stowaway on board. His boat is in collision with a ship bringing the rebels, and he is forced to scuttle his boat and bury the silver on an island.

In the end it is Nostromo, together with a ruined cynic of a doctor and a journalist (all acting for self-serving reasons), who are able to restore some kind of order to Sulaco. It is they who are able to persuade two of the warlords to aid Sulaco’s secession from Costaguana and protect it from other armies. Nostromo, the incorruptible one, is the key figure in setting the wheels in motion.

In Conrad’s universe, however, almost no one is incorruptible. The exploit does not bring Nostromo the fame he had hoped for, and he feels slighted and used. Feeling that he has risked his life for nothing, he is consumed by resentment, which leads to his corruption and ultimate destruction, for he had kept secret the true fate of the silver after all others believed it lost at sea, rather than hidden on an offshore island. In recovering the silver for himself, he is shot and killed, mistaken for a trespasser, by the father of his fiancée, the keeper of the lighthouse on the island of Great Isabel.


Joseph Conrad – biography


Principal characters
Charles Gould Owner of the San Tome silver mine
Emilia Gould His principled and attractive wife
Dr Monygham An English expatriate doctor, survivor of torture
Martin Decoud Radical French journalist
Giorgio Viola Ex-Garibaldian inn-keeper
Teresa Viola Viola’s elder daughter – Nostromo’s ‘intended’
Giselle Viola Viola’s younger daughter
Captain Mitchell English harbour chief
Colonel Sotillo Savage insurrectionary leader
Pedro Montero Costaguanan war lord
Antonia Avellanos a patriot
Sulaco mining town on the coast of Costaguana
Costaguana Imaginary country on the western seaboard of South America

Conrad’s writing

Joseph Conrad - manuscript page

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness


The Cambridge Companion to Joseph ConradThe Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.

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


Joseph Conrad's writing table

Joseph Conrad’s writing table


The Complete Critical Guide to Joseph ConradThe Complete Critical Guide to Joseph Conrad is a good introduction to Conrad criticism. It includes a potted biography, an outline of the stories and novels, and pointers towards the main critical writings – from the early comments by his contemporaries to critics of the present day. Also includes a thorough bibliography which covers biography, criticism in books and articles, plus pointers towards specialist Conrad journals. These guides are very popular. Recommended.

 


Further reading

Red button Amar Acheraiou Joseph Conrad and the Reader, London: Macmillan, 2009.

Red button Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Red button Muriel Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, New Yoprk: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010

Red button Hillel M. Daleski , Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession, London: Faber, 1977

Red button Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Red button Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985

Red button John Dozier Gordon, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940

Red button Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958

Red button Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, London: Continuum, 2007.

Red button Owen Knowles, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990

Red button Jakob Lothe, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008

Red button Gustav Morf, The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad, New York: Astra, 1976

Red button Ross Murfin, Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1985

Red button Jeffery Myers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Cooper Square Publishers, 2001.

Red button Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007.

Red button George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Mercer University Press, 2005.

Red button John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Red button James Phelan, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Red button Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966

Red button Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues), London: Macmillan, 2006.

Red button J.H. Stape, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

Red button John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Arrow Books, 2008.

Red button Peter Villiers, Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner, Seafarer Books, 2006.

Red button Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980

Red button Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work), London: Northcote House, 1994.


Other novels by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad The Secret AgentThe Secret Agent (1907) is a short novel and a masterpiece of sustained irony. It is based on the real incident of a bomb attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1888 and features a cast of wonderfully grotesque characters: Verloc the lazy double agent, Inspector Heat of Scotland Yard, and the Professor – an anarchist who wanders through the novel with bombs strapped round his waist and the detonator in his hand. The English government and police are subject to sustained criticism, and the novel bristles with some wonderfully orchestrated effects of dramatic irony – all set in the murky atmosphere of Victorian London. Here Conrad prefigures all the ambiguities which surround two-faced international relations, duplicitous State realpolitik, and terrorist outrage which still beset us more than a hundred years later.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

 

Joseph Conrad Under Western EyesUnder Western Eyes (1911) is the story of Razumov, a reluctant ‘revolutionary’. He is in fact a coward who is mistaken for a radical hero and cannot escape from the existential trap into which this puts him. This is Conrad’s searing critique of Russian ‘revolutionaries’ who put his own Polish family into exile and jeopardy. The ‘Western Eyes’ are those of an Englishman who reads and comments on Razumov’s journal – thereby creating another chance for Conrad to recount the events from a very complex perspective. Razumov achieves partial redemption as a result of his relationship with a good woman, but the ending, with faint echoes of Dostoyevski, is tragic for all concerned.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010


Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad - tutorials Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Red button Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad - eBooks Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad - further reading Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad - adaptations Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Joseph Conrad - etexts Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

Joseph Conrad - journal The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

Conrad US journal The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Joseph Conrad - concordance Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.


More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
More on Joseph Conrad tales


Filed Under: Joseph Conrad Tagged With: English literature, Joseph Conrad, Literary studies, Nostromo, study guide, The novel

Pride and Prejudice

January 24, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, criticism, video, resources

Pride and Prejudice (1813) has the famous opening line “It is a fact universally recognised that a man with a fortune must be in search a wife.” It’s a story of the empty-headed and garrulous Mrs Bennet, who has but one aim in life – to find a good match for each of her daughters. Her husband is a mild-mannered and indolent man, much given to making witty cynicisms, and he refuses to take this vulgar prospect seriously.

Jane Austen - portrait

Jane Austen

The pride of the title belongs to its hero Mr Darcy, and the prejudice to heroine Elizabeth Bennet, who has lessons to learn from life. This was Jane Austen’s first major success as a novelist – though not the first of her books to be written. It’s a perfect place for readers to start – witty, sophisticated writing, and some well-observed character sketches. It seems as fresh today as ever.


Pride and Prejudice – plot summary

Pride and PrejudiceMr. Bingley, a wealthy young gentleman, rents a country estate near the Bennets called Netherfield. He arrives in town accompanied by his fashionable sisters and his good friend, Mr. Darcy. While Bingley is well-received in the community, Darcy begins his acquaintance with smug condescension and proud distaste for all the ‘country’ people. Bingley and Jane Bennet begin to grow close despite Mrs. Bennet’s embarrassing interference and the opposition of Bingley’s sisters, who consider Jane socially inferior. Elizabeth is stung by Darcy’s haughty rejection of her at a local dance and decides to match his coldness with her own wit.

At the same time Elizabeth begins a friendship with Mr. Wickham, a militia officer who relates a prior acquaintance with Darcy. Wickham tells her that he has been seriously mistreated by Darcy. Elizabeth immediately seizes upon this information as another reason to hate Darcy. Ironically, but unbeknownst to her, Darcy finds himself gradually drawn to Elizabeth.

Just as Bingley appears to be on the point of proposing marriage he quits Netherfield, leaving Jane confused and upset. Elizabeth is convinced that Bingley’s sisters have conspired with Darcy to separate Jane and Bingley.

Before Bingley leaves, Mr. Collins, the male relative who is to inherit Longbourn, makes a sudden appearance and stays with the Bennets. He is a recently ordained clergyman employed by the wealthy and patronizing Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Though he was partially entreated to visit by his patroness, Collins has another reason for visiting: he wishes to find a wife from among the Bennet sisters.

Mr. Bennet and Elizabeth are amused by his self-important and pedantic behaviour. He immediately enters pursuit of Jane; however, when Mrs. Bennet mentions her preoccupation with Mr. Bingley, he turns to Elizabeth. He soon proposes marriage to Elizabeth, who refuses him, much to her mother’s distress. Collins quickly recovers and proposes to Elizabeth’s close friend, Charlotte Lucas, who immediately accepts him. Once the marriage is arranged, Charlotte asks Elizabeth to come for an extended visit.

In the spring, Elizabeth joins Charlotte and her cousin at his parish in Kent. The parish is adjacent to Rosings Park, the grand manor of Mr. Darcy’s aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, where Elizabeth is frequently invited. While calling on Lady Catherine, Mr. Darcy encounters Elizabeth. She discovers from a cousin of Darcy that it was he who separated Bingley and Jane. Soon after, Darcy admits his love of Elizabeth and proposes to her. Insulted by his high-handed and insulting manner of proposing, Elizabeth refuses him. When he asks why she should refuse him, she confronts him with his sabotage of Bingley’s relationship with Jane and Wickham’s account of their dealings.

Deeply shaken by Elizabeth’s vehemence and accusations, Darcy writes her a letter justifying his actions. The letter reveals that Wickham soon dissipated his legacy-settlment (from Darcy’s father’s estate), then came back to Darcy requesting permanent patronage; he became angry when rejected, accusing Darcy of cheating him. To exact revenge and to make off with part of the Darcy family fortune, he attempted to seduce Darcy’s young sister Georgiana – to gain her hand and fortune, almost persuading her to elope with him – before he was found out and stopped. Darcy justifies his actions from having observed that Jane did not show any reciprocal interest in his friend; thus his aim in separating them was mainly to protect Bingley from heartache.

After reading the letter, Elizabeth begins to question both her family’s behaviour and Wickham’s credibility; she concludes that Wickham is not as trustworthy as his easy manners would indicate, and that her early impressions of Darcy may not have been accurate. Soon after receiving the letter Elizabeth returns home.

Some months later, during a tour of Derbyshire with her aunt and uncle, Elizabeth visits Pemberley, Darcy’s estate. Unexpectedly, Darcy arrives at Pemberly as they tour its grounds. He makes an effort to be gracious and welcoming to them, thus strengthening Elizabeth’s newly favourable impression of him. Darcy then introduces Elizabeth to his sister Georgiana. He treats her uncle and aunt very well, and finds them of a more sound character than her other relatives, whom he previously dismissed as socially inferior.

Elizabeth and Darcy’s renewed acquaintance is cut short when news arrives that Elizabeth’s younger sister Lydia has run away with Wickham. Initially, the Bennets believes that Wickham and Lydia have eloped, but soon it is surmised that Wickham has no plans to marry Lydia. Lydia’s antics threaten the family’s reputation and the Bennet sisters with social ruin. Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle hurriedly leave Derbyshire, and Elizabeth is convinced that Darcy will avoid her from now on.

Soon, thanks to the intervention of Elizabeth’s uncle, Lydia and Wickham are found and married. After the marriage, Wickham and Lydia make a visit to Longbourne. While bragging to Elizabeth, Lydia comments that Darcy was present at the wedding. Surprised, Elizabeth sends an inquiry to her aunt, from whom she discovers that Darcy was responsible for both finding the couple and arranging their marriage at great expense to himself.

Soon after, Bingley and Darcy return to the area. Bingley proposes marriage to Jane, and this news starts rumours that Darcy will propose to Elizabeth. Lady Catherine travels to Longbourn with the sole aim of confronting Elizabeth and demanding that she never accept such a proposal. Elizabeth refuses to bow to Lady Catherine’s demands. When news of this obstinacy reaches Darcy, it convinces him that her opinion of him has changed. When he visits, he once again proposes marriage. Elizabeth accepts, and the two become engaged.

Elizabeth and Darcy settle at Pemberley where Mr. Bennet visits often. Mrs. Bennet remains frivolous and silly, and often visits the new Mrs. Bingley and talking of the new Mrs. Darcy. Later, Jane and Bingley move from Netherfield to avoid Jane’s mother and Meryton relations and to locate near the Darcys in Derbyshire. Elizabeth and Jane manage to teach Kitty greater social grace, and Mary learns to accept the difference between herself and her sisters’ beauty and mixes more with the outside world. Lydia and Wickham continue to move often, leaving their debts for Jane and Elizabeth to pay off. At Pemberley, Elizabeth and Georgiana grow close, though Georgiana is surprised by Elizabeth’s playful treatment of Darcy. Lady Catherine stays very angry with her nephew’s marriage but over time the relationship between the two is repaired and she eventually decides to visit them. Elizabeth and Darcy also remain close with her uncle and aunt.


Study resources

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen Complete Works – 6-book Boxed Set – Amazon UK

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – Audio book – Amazon UK

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – 1995 BBC TV drama on DVD – Amazon UK

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – Brodie’s Notes – AMazon UK

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – York Notes (Advanced) – AMazon UK

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – York Notes (GCSE) – Amazon UK

Pride and Prejudice Pride and Prejudice – Cliffs Notes – Amazon UK

Red button Pride and Prejudice – eBook at Project Gutenberg – [FREE]

Red button Pride and Prejudice – audioBook at LibriVox – [FREE]

Red button Pride and Prejudice – Routledge Guide

Red button Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen – 6-book boxed set

Red button Jane Austen: Selected Letters – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen – Amazon UK

Red button The Complete Critical Guide to Jane Austen – Amazon UK

Red button Jane Austen: A Biography

Red button Jane Austen at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Jane Austen at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials


Principal characters
Mr Bennet Head of family, with wife and daughters, much given to sardonic criticism
Mrs Bennet His frivolous and excitable wife, socially ambitious for her daughters
Jane Bennet The eldest daughter – 22 years old – who is considered a local beauty
Elizabeth Bennet Second eldest daughter – 20 years old – intelligent, attractive, and witty
Mary Bennet The plain Bennet daughter – bookish and unsociable
Catherine (Kitty) Bennet The Fourth Bennet daughter – 17 years old
Lydia Bennet The youngest Bennet daughter – 15 years old – frivolous, flirtatious, and headstrong
Charles Bingley Gentleman without an estate – 22 years old – friend of Darcy
Caroline Bingley Bingley’s proud and snobbish sister
Fitzwilliam Darcy Wealthy estate owner – 28 years old – friend of Bingley
George Wickham Officer in the militia and old acquaintance of Darcy
William Collins Clergyman cousin to Mr Bennett – and heir to his estate
Lady Catherine de Bourgh Wealthy, haughty, domineering, and condescending
Mr Gardiner Mrs Bennett’s brother, and a friend to the family

Pride and Prejudice – film version

2005 adaptation, with Donald Sutherland and Keira Knightly


Genesis of the text

The novel was originally titled First Impressions by Jane Austen, and was written between October 1796 and August 1797. It was submitted for publication to a London bookseller by her father, but rejected.

Austen revised the text between 1811 and 1812, re-naming it Pride and Prejudice, and sold the manuscript outright for 110. It was published in three volumes in January 1813, priced at 18s. Two further editions were published in the next four years.

The scholarly edition produced by R.W.Chapman in 1923 has become the standard edition on which many modern editions of the novel are based.


Jane Austen’s writing

Jane Austen - manuscript page

the manuscript of Sanditon


Selected criticism

Red button F.W. Bradbrook, Jane Austen and her Predecessors, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.

Red button Julia Prewitt Brown, Jane Austen’s Novels: Social Change and Literary Form, Cambridge (Mass), 1979.

Red button Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975, revised 1987.

Red button W.A. Craick, Jane Austen: the Six Novels, London: Methuen, 1965.

Red button D.D. Devlin, Jane Austen and Education, London, 1975.

Red button Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels, Baltimore (Md) and London, 1971.

Red button Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination, New Haven and London, 1979.

Red button John Halperin (ed), Jane Austen Bicentenary Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Red button Barbara Hardy, A Reading of Jane Austen, London, 1975.

Red button Joycelyn Harris, Jane Austen’s Art of Memory, Cambridge, 1989.

Red button Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, Chicago and London, 1988.

Red button Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction, Brighton and Totawa (NJ) 1983.

Red button Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and her Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.

Red button A. Walton Litz, Jane Austen: a Study of her Artistic Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Red button Juliet McMaster (ed), Jane Austen’s Achievement, London: Macmillan, 1976.

Red button David Monaghan, Jane Austen in a Social Context, Totawa (NJ) 1981.

Red button Laura G. Mooneyham, Citical Essays on Jane Austen, Twayne Publishers, 1998.

Red button Susan Morgan, In the Meantime: Character and Perception in Jane Austen’s Fiction, Chicago, 1980.

Red button Norman Page, The Language of Jane Austen, London: Blackwell, 1972.

Red button K.C. Phillips, Jane Austen’s English, London: Andre Deutsch, 1970.

Red button Adrian Poole, The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen , London: Macmillan, 1976.

Red button Warren Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution, New York, 1979.

Red button B.C. Southam, Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts: A Study of the Novelist’s Development through the Surviving Papers, London and New York, 1964.

Red button B.C. Southam (ed), Critical Essays on Jane Austen, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.

Red button B.C. Southam (ed), Jane Austen: the Critical Heritage, 2 vols, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1968-87.

Red button Alison G. Sulloway, Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood, Philadelphia, 1989.

Red button Tony Tanner, Jane Austen, London: Macmillan, 1986.

Red button Ian Watt (ed), Jane Austen: a Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs (NJ): Prentice-Hall, 1963.


Pride and Prejudice – film version

1940 version, with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier


Other novels by Jane Austen

Sense and SensibilitySense and Sensibility (1811) casts two young and marriageable sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood as representatives of ‘sense’ and ‘sensibility’ respectively. Elinor bears her social disappointments with dignity and restraint – and thereby gets her man. Marianne on the other hand is excitable and impetuous, following her lover to London – where she quickly becomes disillusioned with him. Recovering and gaining more ‘sense’, she then finally sees the good qualities in her old friend Colonel Brandon, who has been waiting in the wings and is now conveniently on hand to propose marriage.
Jane Austen greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Jane Austen greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Northanger AbbeyNorthanger Abbey (1818) opens in the drawing rooms of Bath. The heroine is imaginative Catherine Morland who falls in love with Henry Tilney, a young clergyman. When he invites her to meet his family at the Abbey however, she sees nothing but Gothic melodrama at every turn – since they were very fashionable at the time. Her visions of medieval horror prove groundless of course. This is Jane Austen’s satirical critique of Romantic cliché and excess. But Catherine eventually learns to see the world in a realistic light – and gets her man in the end. This volume also contains the early short novels Lady Susan and The Watsons, as well as the unfinished Sanditon.
Jane Austen greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Jane Austen greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Mansfield ParkMansfield Park (1814) is more serious after the comedy of the earlier novels. Heroine Fanny Price is adopted into the family of her rich relatives. She is long-suffering and passive to a point which makes her almost unappealing – but her refusal to tolerate any drop in moral standards eventually teaches lessons to all concerned. (All that is except standout character Mrs Norris who is a sponging and interfering Aunt you will never forget.) The hero Edmund is dazzled by sexually attractive Mary Crawford – but in the nick of time sees the error of his ways and marries Fanny instead. Slow moving, but full of moral subtleties.
Jane Austen greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
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EmmaEmma (1816) Charming and wilful Emma Woodhouse amuses herself by dabbling in other people’s affairs, planning their lives the way she sees fit. Most of her match-making plots go badly awry, and moral confusion reigns until she abandons her self-delusion and wakes up to the fact that stern but honourable Mr Knightly is the right man for her after all. As usual, money and social class underpin everything. Some wonderful comic scenes, and a rakish character Frank Churchill who finally reveals his flaws by making the journey to London just to get his hair cut.

Jane Austen greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
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PersuasionPersuasion (1818) is the most mature of her novels, if one of the least exciting. Heroine Anne Elliott has been engaged to Captain Wentworth, but has broken off the engagement in deference to family and friends. Meeting him again eight years later, she goes against conventional wisdom and accepts his second proposal of marriage. Anne is a sensitive and thoughtful character, quite unlike some of the earlier heroines. Jane Austen wrote of her “She is almost too good for me”. There is a shift of location to Lyme Regis for this novel, which reveals for the first time a heroine acting from a deep sense of personal conviction, against the grain of conventional wisdom.
Jane Austen greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
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© Roy Johnson 2010


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Filed Under: Jane Austen Tagged With: 19C Literature, English literature, Jane Austen, Literary studies, study guide

Tess of the d’Urbervilles

January 27, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, video, and resource materials

Tess of the d’Urbervilles first appeared in a censored version and serialised form in the British illustrated newspaper The Graphic in 1891. It is probably the most popular of Hardy’s late, great novels. The sub-title is ‘A Pure Woman’, and it is a story which explores the tragic consequences of a young milkmaid who becomes the victim of the men she encounters. First she falls for the spiritual but flawed Angel Clare, and then the physical but limited Alec Durberville takes advantage of her.

This novel has some of the most beautiful and the most harrowing depictions of rural working conditions which reveal Hardy as a passionate advocate for those who work the land. It also has a wonderfully symbolic climax at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. There is poetry in almost every page. This is Hardy at his best.

Thomas Hardy - portrait

Thomas Hardy


Tess of the d’Urbervilles – plot summary

Jack Durbeyfield, a poor carter, is stunned to learn that he is the descendent of an ancient noble family, the d’Urbervilles. When his horse is killed in an accident he and his wife send Tess to the d’Urberville mansion, where they hope Mrs. d’Urberville will make Tess’s fortune. In reality, Mrs. d’Urberville is no relation to Tess at all: her husband simply changed his name to d’Urberville after he retired. But Tess does not know this, and when the rakish Alec d’Urberville procures Tess a job tending fowls, Tess feels she has no choice but to accept, since she blames herself for the horse’s death.

Tess of the d'UrbervillesShe spends several months at this job, resisting Alec’s attempts to seduce her. Finally, Alec takes advantage of her in the woods one night after a fair. Tess returns home to give birth to Alec’s child, which dies soon after it is born. Tess then spends a miserable year at home before deciding to seek work elsewhere. She finally accepts a job as a milkmaid at the Talbothays Dairy.

At Talbothays, Tess enjoys a period of contentment and happiness. She befriends three of her fellow milkmaids – Izz, Retty, and Marian – and meets a man named Angel Clare. They grow closer, and she eventually accepts his proposal of marriage. But she feels she should tell Angel about her past, and writes him a confessional note. She slips it under his door but it slides under the carpet and Angel never sees it.

On their wedding night, Angel and Tess both confess indiscretions. Angel tells Tess about an affair he had with an older woman in London, and Tess tells Angel about her history with Alec. Tess forgives Angel, but Angel cannot forgive Tess. He gives her some money and boards a ship bound for Brazil.

Tess has a difficult time finding work and is forced to take a difficult job at an unpleasant farm. She tries to visit Angel’s family but overhears his brothers discussing Angel’s poor marriage, so she leaves. She hears a wandering preacher speak and is stunned to discover that he is Alec d’Urberville, who has been converted to Christianity by Angel’s father, the Reverend Clare. Alec and Tess are each shaken by their encounter, and Alec begs Tess never to tempt him again. Soon after, however, he asks Tess to marry him.

Tess learns from her sister Liza-Lu that her mother is near death, and Tess is forced to return home to take care of her. Her mother recovers, but her father unexpectedly dies soon after. When the family is evicted from their home, Alec offers help. But Tess refuses to accept, knowing he only wants to obligate her to him again.

Angel Clare returns from Brazil prepared to forgive his wife. He finds Tess in an expensive boardinghouse where he begs her to take him back. Tess tells him he has come too late. She was unable to resist and went back to Alec d’Urberville. Angel leaves in a daze, and, heartbroken to the point of madness, Tess goes upstairs and stabs her lover to death. When the landlady finds Alec’s body, she raises an alarm, but Tess has already fled to find Angel.

They hide out in an empty mansion for a few days, then travel farther. When they come to Stonehenge, Tess goes to sleep, but when morning breaks shortly thereafter, a police search party discovers them. Tess is arrested and sent to jail. Angel and Liza-Lu watch as a black flag is raised over the prison, signaling Tess’s execution.


Study resources

Tess of the d'Urbervilles Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Tess of the d'Urbervilles Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Tess of the d'Urbervilles Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Kindle eBook

Tess of the d'Urbervilles Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Tess of the d'Urbervilles Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Tess of the d'Urbervilles Tess of the d’Urbervilles – a hypertext version

Tess of the d'Urbervilles Tess of the d’Urbervilles – eBooks at Gutenberg

Red button The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Red button Tess – film by Roman Polanski – Amazon UK

Red button Thomas Hardy: A Biography – definitive study – Amazon UK

Red button Tess of the d’Urbervilles – 2008 BBC drama on DVD – Amazon UK

Red button Tess of the d’Urbervilles – York Notes (Advanced) – AMazon UK

Red button Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Brodies Notes – Amazon UK

Red button Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Cliffs Notes – AMazon UK

Red button Tess of the d’Urbervilles – 1998 BBC drama on DVD – Amazon UK

Red button Tess of the d’Urbervilles – audioBook at LibriVox

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Red button The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Red button Authors in Context – Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Red button Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy – Amazon UK

Tess of the d'Urbervilles


Principal characters
Jack Durbeyfield dissolute head of family, with wife and large family
Joan Durbeyfield his hardworking wife
Tess Durbeyfield their eldest daughter
Eliza Louisa Durbeyfield Tess’s younger sister, who closely resembles her
Angel Clare bookish third son of a clergyman who becomes Tess’s husband
Alec Stokes-d’Urberville rakish but later reformed son of estate owners
Richard Crick owner of Talbothay Farm where Tess meets Angel
Car Darch former mistress to Alec
Farmer Groby churlish employer of Tess at Flintcombe-Ash farm
Sorrow illegitimate child of Tess and Alec, who dies

Tess of the d’Urbervilles – film version

Roman Polanski’s film version of Tess (1979) is beautifully faithful to the original novel and particularly unsparing in its depiction of country life as hard manual work – which chimes sympathetically with the unsentimental views held by Hardy himself.

The centrepiece is an outstanding performance by seventeen year old Natassia Kinski (Klaus Kinski’s daughter) who was Polanski’s lover at the time. She is astoundingly beautiful without seeming to ever realise it, which is exactly one of the causes of Tess’s downfall in the novel.

The film was shot in Brittany rather than England – to get round the extradition laws between the UK and the US from which he has been in exile since 1977, after jumping bail when charged with raping a 14 year old girl.

Red button See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database


Thomas Hardy - manuscript page

Manuscript of The Mayor of Casterbridge


Literary criticism

Red button Beer, Gillian. ‘Descent and Sexual Selection: Women in Narrative. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. by Scott Elledge. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1991: 446-451.

Red button Bloom, Harold. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

Red button Casagrande, Peter J. Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Unorthodox Beauty. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992.

Red button Laird, J. T. The Shaping of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

Red button LaValley, Albert J. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969.

Red button Mills, Sara, ed. Feminist Readings/Feminists Reading. New York: Prentice Hall, 1996.

Red button Parkinson, Michael H. The Rural Novel: Jeremias Gotthelf, Thomas Hardy, C.F. Ramuz. New York: P. Lang, 1984.

Red buttonVan Ghent, Dorothy. ‘On Tess of the d’Urbervilles’. in The English Novel: Form and Function. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964.

Red button Widdowson, Peter, ed. Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Thomas Hardy. Hampshire: Macmillan, 1993.

Red button Wright, Terence. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Hampshire: Macmillan Publishers, 1987.


The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas HardyThe Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy is a good introduction to Hardy criticism. It includes a potted biography of Hardy, an outline of the stories, novels, and poetry, and pointers towards the main critical writings – from the early influential full length study by D.H. Lawrence to critics of the present day. Also includes a thorough bibliography which covers biography, criticism in books and articles, plus pointers towards specialist Hardy journals.
Thomas Hardy Complete Critical Guide Buy the book here


Thomas Hardy's study

Hardy’s study (Dorset Museum)


Further reading

Red button J.O. Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary, Chapel Hill:N.C., 1970.

Red button John Bayley, An Essay on Hardy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Red button Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form, Brighton: Harvester, 1982.

Red button Kristin Brady, The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1982.

Red button L. St.J. Butler, Alternative Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1989.

Red button Raymond Chapman, The Language of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1990.

Red button R.G.Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1970.

Red button Ralph W.V. Elliot, Thomas Hardy’s English, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984.

Red button Simon Gattrel, Hardy the Creator: A Textual Biography, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

Red button James Gibson (ed), The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, London, 1976.

Red button I. Gregor, The Great Web: The Form of Hardy’s Major Fiction, London: Faber, 1974.

Red button Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1962. (This is more or less Hardy’ s autobiography, since he told his wife what to write.)

Red button P. Ingham, Thomas Hardy: A Feminist Reading, Brighton: Harvester, 1989.

Red button P.Ingham, The Language of Class and Gender: Transformation in the English Novel, London: Routledge, 1995,

Red button D. Kramer, Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy, London: Macmillan, 1975.

Red button J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970.

Red button Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist, London: Bodley Head, 1971.

Red button Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. (This is the definitive biography.)

Red button Michael Millgate and Richard L. Purdy (eds), The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978-

Red button R. Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, London: Routledge, 1988.

Red button Harold Orel (ed), Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, London, 1967.

Red button Norman Page, Thomas Hardy: The Novels, London: Macmillan, 2001.

Red button F.B. Pinion, A Thomas Hardy Companion, London: Macmillan, 1968.

Red button F.B. Pinion, A Thomas Hardy Dictionary, New York: New York University Press, 1989.

Red button Richard L. Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.

Red button Marlene Springer, Hardy’s Use of Allusion, London: Macmillan, 1983.

Red button Rosemary Sumner, Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist, London: Macmillan, 1981.

Red button Richard H. Taylor, The Neglected Hardy: Thomas Hardy’s Lesser Novels, London: Macmillan, 1982.

Red button Richard H. Taylor, The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, London, 1978.

Red button Merryn Williams, A Preface to Hardy, London: Longman, 1976.


The Cambridge Companion to Thomas HardyThe Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy offers commissioned essays from an international team of contributors, comprising a general overview of all Hardy’ s work and specific demonstrations of Hardy’s ideas and literary skills. Individual essays explore Hardy’s biography, aesthetics, his famous attachment to Wessex, and the impact on his work of developments in science, religion and philosophy in the late nineteenth century. Hardy’s writing is also analysed against developments in contemporary critical theory and issues such as sexuality and gender. The volume also contains a detailed chronology of Hardy’s life and publications, and a guide to further reading.
Thomas Hardy greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
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Other works by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Far from the Madding CrowdFar from the Madding Crowd (1874) was the first of Hardy’s novels to apply the name of Wessex to the landscape of south west England, and the first to gain him widespread popularity as a novelist. Heroine and estate-owner Bathsheba Everdene is romantically involved with three very different men. The dashing Sergeant Troy, who is handsome but unreliable; Farmer Boldwood, who is honourable but middle-aged; and man-of-the-soil Gabriel Oak, who is worthy and prepared to bide his time. The conflicts between them and the ensuing drama has lots of plot twists plus a rich picture of rural life.
Thomas Hardy greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
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The Return of the NativeThe Return of the Native (1878) It’s often said that this is one of the most Hardyesque of all the novels. There are some stand-out characters: Eustacia Vye, a heroine who patrols the moors looking out for her man through a telescope; Clym Yeobright, a hero who can’t escape his mother’s influence; and Diggory Ven, an itinerant trader who wanders in and out of the story covered in red dye. Improbable coincidences and dramatic ironies abound – and over it all presides the brooding presence of Egdon Heath. But underneath the melodrama, there are profound psychological forces at work. You need to be patient. This is one for Hardy enthusiasts – not beginners. This edition, unlike any other currently available, retains the text of the novel’s first edition, without the later changes that substantially altered Hardy’s original intentions.
Thomas Hardy greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Thomas Hardy greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US


Thomas Hardy – web links

Hardy at Mantex Thomas Hardy at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, book reviews. bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

Thomas Hardy complete works The Thomas Hardy Collection
The complete novels, stories, and poetry – Kindle eBook single file download for £1.29 at Amazon.

Hardy eTexts Thomas Hardy at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

Hardy at Wikipedia Thomas Hardy at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, the novels and literary themes, poetry, religious beliefs and influence, biographies and criticism.

Thomas Hardy web links The Thomas Hardy Society
Dorset-based site featuring educational activities, a biennial conference, a journal (three times a year) with links to the texts of all the major works.

Thomas Hardy web links The Thomas Hardy Association
American-based site with photos and academic resources. Be prepared to search and drill down to reach the more useful materials.

Hardy at IMDB Thomas Hardy on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production features, box office, film reviews, and even quizzes.

Thomas Hardy web links Thomas Hardy – online literary criticism
Small collection of academic papers and articles ‘favoring signed articles by recognized scholars and articles published in peer-reviewed sources’.

Red button Thomas Hardy’s Wessex
Evolution of Wessex, contemporary reviews, maps, bibliography, links to other web sites, and history.

© Roy Johnson 2010


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Filed Under: Thomas Hardy Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, study guide, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The novel, Thomas Hardy

The Golden Bowl

February 26, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, resources, video, further reading

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

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant


The Golden Bowl – plot summary

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

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

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

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


Study resources

The Golden Bowl The Golden Bowl – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Golden Bowl The Golden Bowl – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Golden Bowl The Golden Bowl – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Golden Bowl The Golden Bowl – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Golden Bowl The Golden Bowl – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Golden Bowl The Golden Bowl – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

The Golden Bowl The Golden Bowl – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Golden Bowl The Golden Bowl – etext of the 1909 edition

The Golden Bowl The Golden Bowl – audioBook at LibriVox

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James – biographical notes

Red button The Golden Bowl – Merchant-Ivory film site

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

The Golden Bowl


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

The Golden Bowl – film version

2000 film adaptation

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

Red button See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database


Henry James's study

Henry James’s study


Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Other works by Henry James

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

Buy the book at Amazon UK
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Henry James What Masie KnewWhat Masie Knew (1897) A young girl is caught between parents who are in the middle of personal conflict, adultery, and divorce. Can she survive without becoming corrupted? It’s touch and go – and not made easier for the reader by the attentions of an older man who decides to ‘look after’ her. This comes from the beginning of James’s ‘Late Phase’, so be prepared for longer and longer sentences. In fact it’s said that whilst composing this novel, James switched from writing longhand to using dictation – and it shows if you look carefully enough – part way through the book.

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

 

Henry James The AmbassadorsThe Ambassadors (1903) Lambert Strether is sent from America to Paris to recall Chadwick Newsome, a young man who is reported to be compromising himself by an entanglement with a wicked woman. However, Strether’s mission fails when he is seduced by the social pleasures of the European capital, and he takes Newsome’s side. So a second ambassador is dispatched in the form of the more determined Sarah Pocock. She delivers an ultimatum which is resisted by the two young men, but then an accident reveals unpleasant truths to Strether, who is faced by a test of loyalty between old Europe and the new USA. This edition presents the latest scholarship on James and includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times.
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon UK
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon US


Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2010


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Filed Under: Henry James Tagged With: English literature, Henry James, Literary studies, study guide, The Golden Bowl, The novel

The Portrait of a Lady

February 15, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, resources, film, writing

The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is generally regarded as the masterpiece of James’s middle period. Isabel Archer, a young American woman with looks, wit, and imagination, arrives to discover Europe. She sees the world as “a place of brightness, of free expression, of irresistible action”. Turning aside from suitors who offer her their wealth and devotion, she follows her own path.

But that way leads to disillusionment and a future as constricted as “a dark narrow alley with a dead wall at the end”. James explores here one of his favourite themes – the New World in contest with the Old. In a conclusion that is one of the most moving in modern fiction, Isabel is forced to make her final choice.

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant


The Portrait of a Lady – plot summary

Isabel Archer, originally from Albany, New York, is invited by her maternal aunt, Lydia Touchett, to visit Lydia’s rich husband Daniel at his estate near London, following the death of Isabel’s father. There, she meets her cousin Ralph Touchett, a friendly invalid, and the Touchetts’ robust neighbor, Lord Warburton.

Isabel later declines Warburton’s sudden proposal of marriage. She also rejects the hand of Caspar Goodwood, the charismatic son and heir of a wealthy Boston mill owner. Although Isabel is drawn to Caspar, her commitment to her independence precludes such a marriage, which she feels would demand the sacrifice of her freedom. The elder Touchett grows ill and, at the request of his son, leaves much of his estate to Isabel upon his death.

The Portrait of a LadyWith her large legacy, Isabel travels the Continent and meets an American expatriate, Gilbert Osmond, in Florence. Although Isabel had previously rejected both Warburton and Goodwood, she accepts Osmond’s proposal of marriage. She is unaware that this marriage has been actively promoted by the accomplished but untrustworthy Madame Merle, another American expatriate, whom Isabel had met at the Touchetts’ estate.

Isabel and Osmond settle in Rome, but their marriage rapidly sours due to Osmond’s overwhelming egotism and his lack of genuine affection for his wife. Isabel grows fond of Pansy, Osmond’s presumed daughter by his first marriage, and wants to grant her wish to marry Ned Rosier, a young art collector. The snobbish Osmond would rather that Pansy accept the proposal of Warburton, who had previously proposed to Isabel. Isabel suspects, however, that Warburton may just be feigning interest in Pansy to get close to Isabel again.

The conflict creates even more strain within the unhappy marriage. Isabel then learns that Ralph is dying at his estate in England and prepares to go to him for his final hours, but Osmond selfishly opposes this plan. Meanwhile, Isabel learns from her sister-in-law that Pansy is actually the daughter of Madame Merle, who had an adulterous relationship with Osmond for several years.

Isabel visits Pansy one last time, who desperately begs her to return some day, something Isabel reluctantly promises. She then leaves, without telling her spiteful husband, to comfort the dying Ralph in England, where she remains until his death.

Goodwood encounters her at Ralph’s estate and begs her to leave Osmond and come away with him. He passionately embraces and kisses her, but Isabel flees. Goodwood seeks her out the next day, but is told she has set off again for Rome. The ending is ambiguous, and the reader is left to imagine whether Isabel returned to Osmond to suffer out her marriage in noble tragedy (perhaps for Pansy’s sake) or whether she is going to rescue Pansy and leave Osmond.


Study resources

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – Cliff’s Notes – Amazon UK

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – Kindle eBook edition

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – eBook version at Project Gutenberg

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – audioBook version at LibriVox

Red button Preface to The Portrait of a Lady – for the 1910 New York edition

Red button The Portrait of a Lady – audio book (abridged, with music)

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button The Ladder – A Henry James web site

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

The Portrait of a Lady


The Portrait of a Lady – characters
Lord Warburton English peer and landowner
Daniel Touchett Vermont banker
Ralph Touchett young invalid – Isobel’s cousin
Lydia Touchett Ralph’s sister in Florence
Isabel Archer Ralph’s (maternal) cousin
Lilian Archer Isobel’s married sister
Edith Archer Isobel’s married sister
Edmund Ludlow Lilian’s husband
Caspar Goodwood rich Boston industrialist
Henrietta Stackpole feminist and journalist
Bunchie Terrier dog
Miss Molyneux Lord Warburton’s elder sister
Mr Bantling Bachelor friend of Ralph’s
Lady Pensil Bantling’s sister
Miss Climbers friend of Henrietta Stackpole
Madame Merle friend of Mrs Touchett’s from Florence
Mr & Mrs Luce friends of Mrs Touchett’s in Paris
Edward Rosier aesthete living in Paris
Gilbert Osmond asthete living in Italy for 20 years
Pansy Osmond Osmond’s 15 year old daughter
Countess Gemini Osmond’s sister
Gardencourt Mr Touchett’s estate
Lockleigh Lord Warburton’s estate
Palazzo Crescentini Mrs Touchett’s home

The Portrait of a Lady – film version

Jane Campion 1996 – Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich

Red button See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database


The Portrait of a Lady – further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Other works by Henry James

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

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

Henry James What Masie KnewWhat Masie Knew (1897) A young girl is caught between parents who are in the middle of personal conflict, adultery, and divorce. Can she survive without becoming corrupted? It’s touch and go – and not made easier for the reader by the attentions of an older man who decides to ‘look after’ her. This comes from the beginning of James’s ‘Late Phase’, so be prepared for longer and longer sentences. In fact it’s said that whilst composing this novel, James switched from writing longhand to using dictation – and it shows if you look carefully enough – part way through the book.

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

Henry James The AmbassadorsThe Ambassadors (1903) Lambert Strether is sent from America to Paris to recall Chadwick Newsome, a young man who is reported to be compromising himself by an entanglement with a wicked woman. However, Strether’s mission fails when he is seduced by the social pleasures of the European capital, and he takes Newsome’s side. So a second ambassador is dispatched in the form of the more determined Sarah Pocock. She delivers an ultimatum which is resisted by the two young men, but then an accident reveals unpleasant truths to Strether, who is faced by a test of loyalty between old Europe and the new USA. This edition presents the latest scholarship on James and includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times.
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon UK
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon US


Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2010


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


Filed Under: Henry James Tagged With: Henry James, Literary studies, study guide, The novel, The Portrait of a Lady

The Secret Agent

February 12, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Secret Agent (1907) is a short novel and a masterpiece of sustained irony. It is based on the real incident of a bomb attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1888 and features a cast of wonderfully grotesque characters: Verloc the lazy double agent, Inspector Heat of Scotland Yard, and the Professor – an anarchist who wanders through the novel with bombs strapped round his waist and the detonator in his hand.

Joseph Conrad - portrait

Joseph Conrad

The English government and police are subject to sustained criticism, and the novel bristles with some wonderfully orchestrated effects of dramatic irony – all set in the murky atmosphere of late Victorian London. Here Conrad prefigures all the ambiguities which surround two-faced international relations, duplicitous State realpolitik, and terrorist outrage which still beset us a hundred years later. The sub-title of the novel is ‘A Simple Tale’ – which itself is deeply ironic, because the story is anything but simple.


The Secret Agent – critical commentary

Conrad is celebrated for his use of irony, and he lays it on very thick indeed inThe Secret Agent. In fact he employs several types of irony throughout the novel, much of it for grim effect.

  • comic irony
  • narrative irony
  • situational irony
  • dramatic irony
  • tragic irony

Comic irony

This occurs where there an obviously funny disparity between something intended and the result. For instance the ‘terrorists’ who group themselves around Verloc are all hopelessly inadequate beings who have very little political effect. But Conrad depicts them as comic grotesques. Michaelis is almost obscenely overweight, and he has lost the power of consecutive thought whilst in prison. The Professor is a small shabby figure who lives in abject poverty and does nothing except walk round London with an explosive device strapped to his body. Ossipon is a failed medical student who pathetically sponges off shop girls, and by the end of the novel is ‘ready to receive the leather yoke of the sandwich board’. Karl Yundt is a pathetic old man with a whispy beard who appears to do nothing of any consequence.

These are comic caricatures – and all of them are light years away from their declared aim of overthrowing society. They are all well known to government authorities and under regular supervision by the police force they profess to scorn. Moreover, they are being led by a man who betrays them – Verloc, a double agent.

Admittedly, it is a grim form of comedy – but that is very much Joseph Conrad, and many critics have observed that this is one of his more pessimistic novels.

Narrative irony

This occurs when the narrator says something about the narrative or a character which the reader knows is not true. Conrad’s characterization of Verloc uses this device all the way through the novel. We the readers know that Verloc is an overweight, lazy, incompetent, self-indulgent failure. But Conrad in his third person omniscient narrative mode gives an account of Verloc which is couched in positive terms. Conrad achieves this effect by slipping into Verloc’s own point of view – an indirect form of narrative.

He was tired. The last particle of nervous force had been expended in the wonders and agonies of this day full of surprising failures coming at the end of a harrassing month of scheming and insomnia. He was tired. A man isn’t made of stone. Hang everything! Mr Verloc reposed characteristically, clad in his outdoor garments. One side of his open overcoat was lying partly on the ground. Mr Verloc wallowed on his back. But he longed for a more perfect rest – for sleep – for a few hours of delicious forgetfulness. That would come later. Provisionally he rested. And he thought: “I wish she would give over this damned nonsense. It’s exasperating.”

Here are two (maybe three) forms of irony active at the same time. The narrative gives us Verloc’s point of view: “A man isn’t made of stone”. We know however that he is lazy, self-indulgent, and vulgar. (He spends most of his time indoor dressed for the street.) He wishes for a ‘more perfect rest’ – and he is shortly going to get it when Winnie murders him with the carving knife. And what he calls “damned nonsense” is the fact that he has just killed her beloved brother with the bomb.

Situational irony

This occurs where there is a disparity between intention and result. It could be argued that the scenes in the home of the lady protector of Michaelis offer examples of these. The guests include Michaelis, who the police regard as a dangerous terrorist; the police themselves, in the form of the Assistant Commissioner, who is supposed to be tracking down the anarchists; and Mr Vladimir from the Russian embassy, who has instigated the bomb plot in the first place.

So – the characters who are supposed to be at the opposite ends of society are in fact mingling socially. The intention is to preserve the power of the ruling class and its appearance of solidity. The result is that it deals with its own enemies. Our own society has provided plenty of similar examples – from Lord Profumo mixing with Russian spies and prostitutes at Cliveden in 1963, to Tony Blair cozying up to Muammar Gaddafi and Rupert Murdoch.

Some people might argue that these are examples of dramatic irony: but in fact all the characters in the un-named lady’s house know what is going on in these scenes. They keep up a polite diplomatic front of being sociable, even though some of them are sworn enemies.

Dramatic irony

This occurs when the reader knows something that a character does not. There is a superb example of this at the end of the novel when Winnie is fleeing the scene of her crime and she bumps into Ossipon. Her state of distress leads him to believe that it is caused by the bomb explosion at Greenwich, which he believes has resulted in Verloc’s death. He is only too keen to take advantage of an attractive woman in her bereaved state.

What he does not realise is that her distress is caused by the death of Verloc – but because she has just murdered him. We as readers know that, but Ossipon does not – and when he discovers Verloc’s body with the meat cleaver sticking out of it, he vomits all over the floor. This is another example of what might be called double irony (see below).

Tragic irony

This is a form of dramatic irony which occurs when a character’s actions lead to tragic consequences, contrary to the characters desire or intentions. For instance in the dramatic finale to the novel Winnie wishes to escape from the scene of her crime. She entrusts herself and all the money she has got into the hands of Ossipon. But unknown to her he is a persistent user of women, and even worse, he has categorised her as a ‘degenerate … of a murdering type’ likely to cause him trouble. So he steals her money and abandons her – which leads to her suicide.

In fact it could be argued that there is a sort of double irony operating here – because although Ossipon’s belief in Lombroso’s crackpot theories of phrenology are obviously not shared by Conrad, it is in fact true that Winnie has been a dangerous woman with a knife, and she has committed a murder.


The Secret Agent – study resources

The Secret Agent The Secret Agent – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon UK

The Secret Agent The Secret Agent – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon US

The Secret Agent The Secret Agent – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Secret Agent The Secret Agent – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Secret Agent The Secret Agent – Modern Library – Amazon UK

The Secret Agent The Secret Agent – Modern Library – Amazon US

The Secret Agent The Secret Agent – Master Guide (Palgrave) – Amazon UK

The Secret Agent The Secret Agent – 1996 film adaptation on DVD – Amazon UK

The Secret Agent Sabotage – Hitchcok’s 1936 film adaptation – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Red button Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Red button Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Red button The Secret Agent – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Red button The Secret Agent – audioBook at LibriVox

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button The Joseph Conrad Society

Red button Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Joseph Conrad at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

The Secret Agent


The Secret Agent – plot summary

The novel is set in London in 1886. Adolf Verloc runs a shop which sells pornographic material, stationery, and contraceptives. This is a cover for his activity as a secret agent. He lives there with his young wife Winnie, his ailing mother-in-law, and his young brother-in-law, Stevie. The boy has a mental disability which causes him to be very excitable. Verloc’s wife looks after Stevie, treating him more as a son than as a brother. Verloc’s contacts are a group of anarchists of which Comrade Ossipon, Michaelis, Carl Yundt, and ‘The Professor’ are the most prominent. Although largely ineffectual as terrorists, their actions are known to the police. The group produce anarchist literature in the form of pamphlets entitled FP, an abbreviation for The Future of the Proletariat.

Joseph Conrad The Secret AgentVerloc is summoned to a foreign embassy in Knightsbridge (strongly implied to be Russian) where he is employed as a secret agent. Mr. Vladimir, the First Secretary in the embassy reproaches him for filing reports which they regard as useless. He instructs him to carry out some bomb outrage as an agent provocateur to provoke the English establishment into authoritarian repression of what they regard as wishy-washy liberals. He suggests the destruction of Greenwich Observatory as an attack on rationality and science.

Verloc later meets his friends, who discuss politics and law, and the theories of various forms of resistance to the State. Stevie, Verloc’s young brother-in-law, overhears the conversation, which greatly disturbs him.

Comrade Ossipon later meets The Professor, who describes the nature of the bomb which he carries in his coat at all times: it allows him to press a button which will blow him up in twenty seconds, and those nearest to him. After The Professor leaves the meeting, he stumbles into Chief Inspector Heat. He is a policeman working on the case regarding a recent explosion at Greenwich, where one man was killed. Heat informs The Professor that he is not a suspect in the case, but that he is being monitored because of his terrorist inclinations and anarchist background.

Knowing that Michaelis has recently moved to the countryside to write his memoirs, the Chief Inspector informs the Assistant Commissioner that he has a contact, Verloc, who may be able to assist in the case. The Assistant Commissioner later speaks to his superior, Sir Ethelred, about his intentions to solve the case alone, rather than relying on the effort of Chief Inspector Heat.

On Verloc’s return from a business trip to the continent, his wife tells him of the high regard that Stevie has for him and she implores her husband to spend more time with Stevie. Verloc eventually agrees to go for a walk with Stevie. After this walk, Mrs. Verloc notes that her husband’s relationship with her brother has improved. Verloc then tells his wife that he has taken Stevie to go and visit Michaelis, and that Stevie would stay with him in the countryside for a few days.

As Verloc is talking to his wife about the possibility of emigrating to the continent, he is paid a visit by the Assistant Commissioner. Shortly thereafter, Chief Inspector Heat arrives in order to speak with Verloc, without knowing that the Assistant Commissioner had left with Verloc earlier that evening. The Chief Inspector tells Mrs. Verloc that he had recovered an overcoat at the scene of the bombing which had the shop’s address written on a label. Mrs. Verloc confirms that it was Stevie’s overcoat, and that she had written the address. On Verloc’s return, he realises that his wife knows her brother has been killed by Verloc’s bomb, and confesses what truly happened. A stunned Mrs. Verloc gradually goes mad, ultimately attacking her husband with a knife, stabbing him to death.

After the murder, Mrs. Verloc flees her home, where she chances upon Comrade Ossipon, and begs him to help her. Ossipon assists her, but also confesses his romantic feelings for her. Planning on running away with her, he aids her in taking a boat to the continent. However, her instability and the revelation of her murder increasingly worries him, and he abandons her. He later discovers she disappeared, leaving behind her wedding ring, presumably drowned.


The Secret Agent – film version

Sylvia Sydney and Oscar Homulka star in Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation, which he re-named Sabotage. This was possibly to distinguish it from his other film Secret Agent which was released in the same year – 1936.

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1936 adaptation Sabotage

Red button See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database


Principal characters
Adolf Verloc Anglo-French shopkeeper, anarchist, and double agent (40+)
Winnie Verloc his young wife
– Winnie’s mother – an old woman who wears a black wig
Stevie Winnie’s mentally-retarded young brother
Chief Inspector Heat detective working on the Greenwich bombing attack
The Assistant Comissioner in charge of the Special Crime Department
Annie the assistant Commissioner’s wife, who is a friend of Michaelis’s patroness
A distinguished lady upper-class patroness of Michaelis
Sir Ethelred Secretary for State (Home Secretary) to whom the Commissioner reports
‘Toodles’ Sir Ethelred’s (unpaid) private secretary
Privy Councillor Wurmt attache at a foreign embassy (Russia)
Mr Vladimir First Secretary at a foreign embassy (Russia)
Baron Scott-Wartheim Verloc’s former employer at the embassy
Alexander Ossipon
aka ‘Tom’ and ‘The Doctor’
anarchist, former medical student (no degree) who writes propoaganda leaflets
Karl Yundt old anarchist
The Professor former teach of chemistry who carries a live bomb at all times
Michaelis fat, ex-prisoner, vulgar-Marxist
Mrs Neale Winnie’s cleaner

Joseph Conrad – biography


Complete Critical Guide to Joseph ConradThe Complete Critical Guide to Joseph Conrad is a good introduction to Conrad criticism. It includes a potted biography, an outline of the stories and novels, and pointers towards the main critical writings – from the early comments by his contemporaries to critics of the present day. Also includes a thorough bibliography which covers biography, criticism in books and articles, plus pointers towards specialist Conrad journals. These guides are very popular. Recommended.


Further reading

Red button Amar Acheraiou Joseph Conrad and the Reader, London: Macmillan, 2009.

Red button Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Red button Muriel Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, New Yoprk: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010

Red button Hillel M. Daleski , Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession, London: Faber, 1977

Red button Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Red button Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985

Red button John Dozier Gordon, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940

Red button Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958

Red button Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, London: Continuum, 2007.

Red button Owen Knowles, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990

Red button Jakob Lothe, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008

Red button Gustav Morf, The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad, New York: Astra, 1976

Red button Ross Murfin, Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1985

Red button Jeffery Myers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Cooper Square Publishers, 2001.

Red button Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007.

Red button George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Mercer University Press, 2005.

Red button John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Red button James Phelan, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Red button Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966

Red button Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues), London: Macmillan, 2006.

Red button J.H. Stape, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

Red button John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Arrow Books, 2008.

Red button Peter Villiers, Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner, Seafarer Books, 2006.

Red button Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980

Red button Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work), London: Northcote House, 1994.


Other novels by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad Heart of DarknessHeart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

Oxford World Classics offers the best editions of Conrad’s work. They are largely based on the most accurate versions of the texts; and they feature introductory essays, a biography, explanatory notes, textual variants, a bibliography of further reading, and in some cases missing or deleted chapters. They are also terrifically good value.

Joseph Conrad NostromoNostromo (1904) is Conrad’s ‘big’ political novel – into which he packs all of his major subjects and themes. It is set in the imaginary Latin-American country of Costaguana – and features a stolen hoard of silver, desperate acts of courage, characters trembling on the brink of moral panic. The political background encompasses nationalist revolution and the Imperialism of foreign intervention. Silver is the pivot of the whole story – revealing the courage of some and the corruption and destruction of others. Conrad’s narration is as usual complex and oblique. He begins half way through the events of the revolution, and proceeds by way of flashbacks and glimpses into the future.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010


Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad - tutorials Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Red button Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad - eBooks Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad - further reading Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad - adaptations Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Joseph Conrad - etexts Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

Joseph Conrad - journal The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

Conrad US journal The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Joseph Conrad - concordance Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.


More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
More on Joseph Conrad tales


Filed Under: Joseph Conrad Tagged With: Joseph Conrad, Literary studies, Modernism, study guide, The novel, The Secret Agent

The Trial

January 27, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, video, resource materials

The Trial is Kafka’s one indisputably successful novel – a haunting and original study in existential anxiety, paranoia, and persecution. Joseph K is accused one day of being guilty – but not told what crime he has committed. He wrestles hopelessly with legal officials and a nightmare-like court which acts on arbitrary rules, striving to find justice. In the end he fails, only to be killed ‘like a dog’. Kafka gave expression to modern anxiety three decades before most people even started feeling it. This is a novel which stands outside literary norms – a superb achievement of literary modernism. Be prepared for black humour as well as mind-bending contradictions and deeply etched literary expressionism.

Franz Kafka - portrait

Franz Kafka


The Trial – plot summary

Joseph K is a senior bank clerk who lives in lodgings. On his thirtieth birthday he is unexpectedly arrested by two unidentified agents for an unspecified crime. The agents do not name the authority for which they are acting. He is not taken away, however, but left at home to await instructions from the Committee of Affairs.

K goes to visit the magistrate, but instead is forced to have a meeting with an attendant’s wife. Looking at the Magistrate’s books, he discovers a cache of pornography.

He returns home to find Fräulein Montag, a lodger from another room, moving in with Fräulein Bürstner. He suspects that this is to prevent him from pursuing his affair with the latter woman. Yet another lodger, Captain Lanz, appears to be in league with Montag.

Later, in a store room at his own bank, K discovers the two agents who arrested him being whipped by a flogger for asking K. for bribes, as a result of complaints K. previously made about them to the Magistrate. K. tries to argue with the flogger, saying that the men need not be whipped, but the flogger cannot be swayed. The next day he returns to the store room and is shocked to find everything as he had found it the day before, including the Whipper and the two agents.

The TrialK is visited by his uncle, who is a friend of a lawyer. The uncle seems distressed by K’s predicament. At first sympathetic, he becomes concerned K is underestimating the seriousness of the case. The uncle introduces K to an advocate, who is attended by Leni, a nurse, who K’s uncle suspects is the advocate’s mistress. K. has a sexual encounter with Leni, whilst his uncle is talking with the Advocate and the Chief Clerk of the Court, much to his uncle’s anger, and to the detriment of his case.

K visits the advocate and finds him to be a capricious and unhelpful character. He returns to his bank but finds that his colleagues are trying to undermine him.

K is advised by one of his bank clients to visit Titorelli, a court painter, for advice. Titorelli has no official connections, yet seems to have a deep understanding of the process. K learns that, to Titorelli’s knowledge, not a single defendant has ever been acquitted. He sets out what K’s options are, but they all consist merely of delaying tactics to stretch out his case as long as possible before the inevitable ‘Guilty’ verdict.

K decides to take control of his own life and visits his advocate with the intention of dismissing him. At the advocate’s office he meets a downtrodden individual, Block, a client who offers K some insight from a client’s perspective. Block’s case has continued for five years and he appears to have been virtually enslaved by his dependence on the advocate’s meaningless and circular advice. The advocate mocks Block in front of K for his dog-like subservience.

The TrialK is asked to tour an Italian client around local places of cultural interest, but the Italian client short of time asks K. to tour him around only the cathedral, setting a time to meet there. When the client doesn’t show up, K explores the cathedral which is empty except for an old woman and a church official. K decides to leave as a priest K notices seems to be preparing to give a sermon from a small second pulpit, lest it begin and K be compelled to stay for its entirety. Instead of giving a sermon, the priest calls out K’s name, although K has never known the priest. The priest works for the court, and tells K a fable, (which has been published separately as ‘Before the Law’) that is meant to explain his situation, but instead causes confusion, and implies that K’s fate is hopeless.

Over the course of the year, the stress of the case weighs on K He begins a gradual decline from confident to a nervous state similar to that of the client Block, and those of other broken defendants he meets in the explosively hot law offices. At the bank, he is humiliated by his inability to handle an important client as he is constantly exhausted from worry.

On the last day of K’s thirtieth year, two men arrive to execute him. He offers little resistance, suggesting that he has realised this as being inevitable for some time. They lead him to a quarry where he is expected to kill himself, but he cannot. The two men then execute him by plunging a knife into his heart.


Study resources

Red button The Trial – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Red button The Trial – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Red button The Trial – Penguin Modern Classics – Amazon UK

Red button The Trial – Penguin Modern Classics – Amazon US

Red button The Trial – Dover Thrift – Amazon UK

Red button The Trial – Dover Thrift – Amazon US

Red button The Trial – Everyman’s Library Classics – Amazon UK

Red button The Trial – Everyman’s Library Classics – Amazon US

Red button The Trial – eBook formats at Project Gutenburg

Red button The Trial – Orson Welles’ 1967 film version – Amazon UK

Red button The Trial – Cliffs Notes – Amazon UK

Red button The Trial – audioBook at Project Gutenberg

Red button The Trial – book review

Red button The Trial – as a graphic novel

Red button Kafka: A Short Introduction – book review

Red button The Trial – 1992 film version by Harold Pinter

Henry James The Cambridge Companion to Kafka – Amazon UK


Principal characters
Joseph K a senior bank clerk
Fraulein Burstner a boarder in the same house as K
Fraulein Montag a friend of Fraulein Burstner
Frau Grubach proprietress of the house where K lives
Uncle Karl K’s uncle and former guardian
Herr Huld a pompous and pretentious lawyer
Leni Herr Huld’s seductive nurse
Vice-President K’s rival at the bank
President the manager of the bank
Rudi Block an accused man, former grain-dealer
Titorelli a court painter

Kafka’s writing

Franz Kafka - manuscript page

a page of Kafka’s manuscript


Franz Kafka: An Illustrated LifeFranz Kafka: Illustrated Life This is a photographic biography that offers an intimate portrait in an attractive format. A lively text is accompanied by over 100 evocative images, many in colour and some previously unpublished. They depict the author’s world – family, friends, and artistic circle in old Prague – together with original book jackets, letters, and other ephemera. This is an excellent starting point for beginners which captures fin de siecle Europe beautifully.

Franz Kafka greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Franz Kafka greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US


The Trial – film version

Orson Welles wrote and directed (and acted in) a magnificent film version of The Trial in 1962. It’s a faithful dramatisation of the novel which captures perfectly the brooding, nightmarish world of the original. Much of it was filmed in the old French government buildings of the Quai d’Orsay before it was transformed into the present museum.

A young Anthony Perkins gives a superb, haunting performance as the angst-ridden protagonist, Joseph K. The rest of the cast features female icons from the 1960s including Jeanne Moreau, Elsa Martinelli, and Romy Schneider. Welles’ favourite actor Akim Tamiroff is also on hand, and Welles himself plays the Advocate. This is a film which is very faithful to the original novel. It begins with Orson Wells providing voice-over to a comic-book version of the parable ‘Before the Law’.


Film version cast list
Anthony Perkins Joseph K
Jeanne Moreau Fraulein Burstner
Romy Schneider Leni
Elsa Martinelli Hilda
Orson Welles The Advocate
Akim Tamiroff Bloch
Madeleine Robinson Frau Grubach

Red button See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database


Photomontage

Kafka, family photos, and old Prague


Further reading

Red button Jeremy Adler, Franz Kafka (Overlook Illustrated Lives), Gerald Duckworth, 2004.

Red button Mark Anderson. Kafka’s Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siecle, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992

Red button Louis Begley, The Tremendous Words I have Inside my Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay, Atlas Illustrated editions, 2008.

Red button Harold Bloom, Franz Kafka: Modern Critical Essays, New York: Chelsea House, 1986.

Red button Harold Bloom, Franz Kafka (Bloom’s Major Novelists), Chelsea House Publishers, 2003.

Red button Elizabeth Boa, Kafka: Gender, Class, and Race in the Letters and Fictions, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Red button Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, Da Capo Press, 1995.

Red button Max Brod (ed), The Diaries of Franz Kafka, Schoken Books, 1988.

Red button Elias Canetti, Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice, Schocken Books, 1989.

Red button Stanley Corngold, Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, Princeton University Press, 2006.

Red button W.J. Dodd (ed), Kafka: The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle, London: Longman, 1995.

Red button Carolin Duttlinger, Kafka and Photography, Oxford: Oxford Universit Press, 2007.

Red button Angel Flores (ed), The Kafka Debate, New York: Gordian Press, 1977.

Red button Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka (Critical Lives), Reaktion Books, 2007.

Red button Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient, London: Routledge, 1995.

Red button Ronald Gray, Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice Hall, 1962.

Red button Ronald Hayman, A Biography of Kafka, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001.

Red button Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, Exact Change, 1998.

Red button Franz Kafka, The Trial (Complete Audiobooks), Naxos Audiobooks, 2007.

Red button David Zane Mairowitz, Introducing Kafka, Icon Books, 2007.

Red button Julian Preece (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Red button Ronald Spiers, and Beatrice Sandberg, Franz Kafka, London: Macmillan, 1997.

Red button Walter H. Sokel, The Myth of Power and the Self: Essays on Franz Kafka, Wayne State University Press, 2001.

Red button Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2004.

Red button Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature, Clarendon Press, 1987.

Red button James Rolleston (ed), A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka, Camden House, 2006.

Red button Michael Wood, Franz Kafka (Writers and Their Work), Northcote House, 1998.

 


Mont Blanc pen - Kafka edition

Mont Blanc – special Franz Kafka edition


Other works by Franz Kafka

MetamorphosisMetamorphosis (1915) is truly one of Kafka’s masterpieces – a stunning parable which lends itself to psychological, sociological, or existential interpretations. It’s the tale of a man who wakes up one morning and finds himself transformed into a giant insect. His family are horrified, gradually disown him, and he dies of neglect, with a rotting apple lodged in his side. Franz Kafka is one of the most important and influential fiction writers of the early twentieth century. He was a novelist and writer of short stories whose works came to be regarded as one of the major achievements of twentieth century literature.

Franz Kafka Metamorphosis Buy the book at Amazon UK
Franz Kafka Metamorphosis Buy the book at Amazon US

 

The Man who DisappearedAmerika (also known as The Man who Disappeared) is Kafka’s first attempt at a novel. He is renowned for documenting the horrors of modern life, but Kafka also had a lighter and amusing side. This is incomplete, like so much else he wrote. It’s the story of Karl Rossmann who after an embarrassing sexual misadventure is expelled from his European home and goes to live in an imaginary United States (which of course Kafka had never visited). In fact it’s a reverse ‘Rags to Riches’ story, because Karl starts his engagement with the American Dream quite successfully – but by the end of the novel he is destitute. The story is deeply symbolic – as usual – and an interesting supplement to the central texts. The first chapter is frequently anthologised as ‘The Stoker’.
Franz Kafka The Man who Disappeared Buy the book at Amazon UK
Franz Kafka The Man who Disappeared Buy the book at Amazon US


Franz Kafka – web links

Kafka Franz Kafka at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews and study guides on the major works, video presentations and documentaries, adaptations for cinema and television, and links to Kafka archives.

Franz Kafka web links Franz Kafka at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats – in both English and German.

Franz Kafka web links Franz Kafka at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, survey of the stories and novels, publishing history, translations, critical interpretation, and extensive bibliographies.

Franz Kafka web links Franz Kafka at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production features, box office, film reviews, and even quizzes.

Franz Kafka video Kafka in Love
Video photomontage featuring portraits of Kafka, his friends and family, and locations in Prague – with a rather schmaltzy soundtrack in Yiddish and English.

Franz Kafka web links Kafka-Metamorphosis
A public Wiki dedicated to Kafka and his work, featuring the short stories, interpretations, and further web links.

Franz Kafka web links Kafka Society of America
Academic group with annual meetings and publications. Also features links to other Kafka-related sites

Franz Kafka web links Oxford Kafka Research Centre
Academic group based at Oxford University that tracks current research and meetings. [Doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2012.]

Franz Kafka web links The Kafka Project
Critical editions and translations of Kafka’s work in several languages, plus articles, literary criticism, bibliographies.

Franz Kafka Tribute to Franz Kafka
Individual fan site (created by ‘Herzogbr’) featuring a collection of texts, reviews, and enthusiast essays. Badly in need of updating, but contains some interesting gems.

Kafka photos Finding Kafka in Prague
Quirky compilation of photos locating Kafka in his home town – with surrealist additions and weird sound track.

Red button Who Owns Kafka?
Essay by Judith Butler from the London Review of Books on the contentious issues of ownership of Kafka’s manuscripts where they are currently held in Israel – complete with podcast.

Red button The Kafka Archive – latest news
Guardian newspaper report on the suitcase full of Kafka and Max Brod’s papers released by Israeli library.

Red button Franz Kafka: an illustrated life
Book review of a charming short biography with some unusual period photos of Kafka and Prague.

© Roy Johnson 2010


More on Franz Kafka
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Filed Under: Franz Kafka Tagged With: Franz Kafka, Literary studies, Modernism, study guide, The novel, The Trial

The Turn of the Screw

February 19, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Turn of the Screw (1898) is a classic ghost story which has defied conclusive interpretation ever since it was first published. A governess in a remote country house is in charge of two children who appear to be haunted by former employees, who are now supposed to be dead. But are they? The story is drenched in complexities – including the central issue of the reliability of the person who is telling the tale. This can be seen as a subtle, self-conscious exploration of the traditional theme of the haunted house, filled with echoes of sexual and social unease. Or is it simply, “the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read”?

Henry James portrait

Henry James – by John Singer Sargeant


The Turn of the Screw – critical commentary

The film versions and the opera are explicit interpretations of the novella – because both of them make physically manifest the figures of Peter Quint and Miss Jessell. The text of the novella offers no such manifestations. These two characters do not appear in the story at all: they are only described by the governess and discussed by her with others.

At no time does anyone else see the figures the governess claims to have observed. She is always alone at such moments as her sightings occur. There is no evidence in the text that anybody else sees the figures the governess claims to see.

The governess ‘discusses’ Peter Quint and Miss Jessel with Mrs Grose, but in an oblique and ambiguous manner whereby she elicits confirmation of her impressions from the housekeeper, who has known Quint and Jessel as former employees and is gullible enough to share the views of the governess.

Because the narrative is delivered entirely from the point of view of the governess, readers only have her opinions and impressions on which to make judgements. She convinces herself for instance that the two children are devoted to her, but a close reading of their rections to her reveal a growing irritation and hostility. She becomes psychologically oppressive to them, and eventually frightens Miles to death.

And because she never reveals the content of the letter which was sent to the house, we never learn why Miles has been expelled from his school.

Narrative structure

The novella appears to be that of a classic ‘framed narrative’ – which is normally a ‘story within a story’. It is introduced as a tale told by one guest (Douglas) to others at a weekend house party. It is one of the others (un-named) who presents the story. However, once the narrative begins, these intermediary narrators never reappear.

The story also comes to the reader via an extraordinarily oblique route. It is introduced by one (outer) narrator who is part of a group assembled for a weekend house party. He describes a fellow guest (Douglas) reading the manuscript of someone else’s story.

The governess has written down her account of events and given the manuscript to Douglas. Some time later Douglas gives the outer narrator the original manuscript, and the narrator makes a copy of it. It is the copy which forms the main part of the narrative. No reason is given why the outer narrator didn’t present the original text.


The Turn of the Screw – study resources

The Turn of the Screw The Turn of the Screw – Oxford Worlds Classics – Amazon UK

The Turn of the Screw The Turn of the Screw – Oxford Worlds Classics – Amazon US

The Turn of the Screw The Turn of the Screw – Dover Thrift – Amazon UK

The Turn of the Screw The Turn of the Screw – Dover Thrift – Amazon US

The Turn of the Screw The Turn of the Screw – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Turn of the Screw The Turn of the Screw – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Turn of the Screw The Turn of the Screw – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Turn of the Screw The Turn of the Screw – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Turn of the Screw The Turn of the Screw – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Turn of the Screw The Turn of the Screw – the preface to the 1908 New York edition

The Turn of the Screw www.turnofthescrew.com – a history of critical interpretations.

The Turn of the Screw The Turn of the Screw – Text, Contexts, Criticism – at Amazon UK

The Turn of the Screw The Turn of the Screw – A Reader’s Guide – at Amazon UK

The Turn of the Screw The Turn of the Screw – The Collier’s Weekly Version

Red button Henry James – biographical notes

Red button The Turn of the Screw – a book review

Red button The Turn of the Screw – audioBook version at LibriVox

Red button The Turn of the Screw – unabridged audioBook version

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, web links, study resources

The Turn of the Screw


The Turn of the Screw – plot summary

The plot summary that follows is deliberately brief – because it is difficult to give an account of the narrative without at the same time offering an interpretation of its deeper possible meanings.

The Turn of the ScrewAn unnamed narrator listens to a male friend reading a manuscript written by a former governess whom the friend claims to have known and who is now dead. The manuscript tells the story of how the young governess is hired by a man who has found himself responsible for his niece and nephew after the death of their parents. He lives in London and has no interest in raising the children. The boy, Miles, is attending a boarding school whilst his sister, Flora, is living at the country home in Essex. She is currently being cared for by the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose. The governess’s new employer gives her full charge of the children and explicitly states that she is not to bother him with communications of any sort. The governess travels to her new employer’s country house and begins her duties.

Miles soon returns from school for the summer just after a letter from the headmaster stating that he has been expelled. Miles never speaks of the matter, and the governess is hesitant to raise the issue. She fears that there is some horrid secret behind the expulsion, but is too charmed by the adorable young boy to want to press the issue.

Shortly after, the governess begins to see around the grounds of the estate the figures of a man and woman whom she does not recognize. These figures come and go at will without ever being seen or challenged by other members of the household, and they seem to the governess to be supernatural.

She learns from Mrs. Grose that her predecessor, Miss Jessel, and Miss Jessel’s illicit lover Peter Quint both died under curious circumstances. Prior to their death, they spent most of their time with Flora and Miles, and this fact takes on grim significance for the governess when she becomes convinced that the two children are secretly aware of the presence of the ghosts.

Later, Flora runs away from the house while Miles plays music for the Governess. They notice and go to find her. The governess and Mrs. Grose find her in a clearing in the wood, and the governess is convinced that she has been talking to Miss Jessel. When Flora is forced to admit this, she demands to never see the governess again. Mrs. Grose takes Flora away to her uncle, leaving the governess with Miles.

That night, they are finally talking of Miles’ expulsion when the governess sees the ghost of Quint at the window. The governess shields Miles, who screams at her as he attempts to see the ghost. The governess tells him that he is no longer under the control of the ghost, and finds that Miles has died in her arms.


Principal characters
Narrator an unnamed outer narrator
Douglas possessor of the original manuscript, who introduces the story to fellow guests
The uncle unnamed guardian of two young children
The governess unnamed young woman, who has written the original account of events
Mrs Grose the housekeeper at Bly
Miles a young schoolboy
Flora his sister
Peter Quint a former valet
Miss Jessel a former schoolmistress

The Turn of the Screw – film version

The Innocents – 1961 adaptation by Jack Clayton (dir)

There are several film versions of the story – of which Jack Clayton’s 1961 version starring Deborah Carr is perhaps the most widely admired. The story was adapted for the screen by William Archibald and Truman Capote, with additional scenes by novelist and playwright John Mortimer, and the version was re-named The Innocents – the title alone of which is a form of ‘interpretation’.

Red button See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database


Literary criticism

Red button Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago University Press, 1983.

Red button Robert Kinbrough, Henry James: ‘The Turn of the Screw’, New York: Norton Critical editions, 1966.

Red button T.J. Lustig, Henry James and the Ghostly, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Red button Shlomith Rimmon, The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James, University of Chicago Press, 1977.

Red button John Carlos Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.

Red button Gerald Willen (ed), A Casebook on Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’, New York, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969.

Red button Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers, New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1976.


Henry James's study

Henry James’s study


Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Ghost stories by Henry James

Red button The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)

Red button The Ghostly Rental (1876)

Red button Sir Edmund Orme (1891)

Red button The Private Life (1892)

Red button Owen Wingrave (1892)

Red button The Friends of the Friends (1896)

Red button The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Red button The Real Right Thing (1899)

Red button The Third Person (1900)

Red button The Jolly Corner (1908)


Other works by Henry James

Henry James The Aspern PapersThe Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon US

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

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


Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2010


More on Henry James
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Filed Under: Henry James, James - Tales, The Novella Tagged With: English literature, Henry James, Literary studies, study guide, The Novella, The Turn of the Screw

The Wings of the Dove

February 24, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, resources, video, further reading

The Wings of the Dove (1902) is one of James’s late, great masterpieces. Quite apart from the famous baroque prose style, it features many of his recurrent themes. American innocence pitched against European cunning. The plot is a complex love triangle which strains at the limits of what is morally acceptable. Even for modern readers, the scheming and motivations will seem quite shocking.

The heroine Kate Croy is in love with a man who hasn’t enough money to offer her a fashionable marriage. She thinks she can enhance her lover’s financial prospects by pushing him into the arms of a rich American heiress who is dying – but she doesn’t count on the unexpected results.

The setting is a Venice that includes the usual correlatives of disease and death. And a social depth which is more-than-usually concerned with issues of money, social status, and class mobility. Be prepared for long and complex sentences which strain many readers’ patience.

The Wings of the Dove

Venice


The Wings of the Dove – plot summary

Kate Croy and Merton Densher are two engaged Londoners who desperately want to marry but have very little money. Kate is constantly put upon by family troubles, and is now living with her domineering aunt, Maud Lowder. Into their world comes Milly Theale, an enormously rich young American woman who had previously met and fallen in love with Densher, though she didn’t reveal her feelings. Her travelling companion and confidante, Mrs. Stringham, is an old friend of Maud’s. Kate and Aunt Maud welcome Milly to London, and the American heiress enjoys great social success.

The Wings of the DoveWith Kate as a companion, Milly goes to see an eminent physician, Sir Luke Strett, because she’s afraid that she is suffering from an incurable disease. The doctor is noncommittal but Milly fears the worst. Kate suspects that Milly is deathly ill. After the trip to America where he had met Milly, Densher returns to find the heiress in London. Kate wants Densher to pay as much attention as possible to Milly, though at first he doesn’t quite know why. Kate has been careful to conceal from Milly (and everybody else) that she and Densher are engaged.

With the threat of serious illness hanging over her, Milly decides to travel to Venice with Mrs. Stringham. Aunt Maud, Kate and Densher follow her. At a party Milly gives in her Venice palazzo (the older Palazzo Barbaro, called “Palazzo Leporelli” in the novel), Kate finally reveals her complete plan to Densher: he is to marry Milly so that, after her presumably soon-to-occur death, Densher will inherit the money they can marry on. Densher had suspected this was Kate’s idea, and he demands that she consummate their affair before he’ll go along with her plan.

Aunt Maud and Kate return to London while Densher remains with Milly. Unfortunately, the dying girl learns from a former suitor of Kate’s about the plot to get her money. She “turns her face to the wall” and grows very ill. Densher sees her one last time before he leaves for London, where he eventually receives news of Milly’s death.

Milly does leave him a large amount of money despite everything. But Densher won’t touch the money, and he won’t marry Kate unless she also refuses the bequest. Conversely, if Kate chooses the money instead of him, Densher offers to make the bequest over to her in full. The lovers part on the novel’s final page with a cryptic exclamation from Kate: “We shall never be again as we were!”


Study resources

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – 1997 film adaptation on DVD

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – eBook version at Project Gutenberg

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – authoritative text

The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove – audioBook at LibriVox

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James – biographical notes

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

The Wings of the Dove


Principal characters
Kate Croy a talented but scheming young woman
Merton Densher a Fleet Street journalist with aspirations
Milly Theale an American orphan and heiress
Aunt Maude Lowder Kate’s aunt, who maintains her – at a price
Susan Stringham a Vermont widow and companion to Milly
Lord Mark a fortune-hunting aristocrat who Maude ‘intends’ for Kate

The Wings of the Dove – film version

1997 film adaptation

This is a lush and beautiful film version of the novel from director Iain Softley. His London scenes are successful, but the film really comes alive visually in Venice, though it has to be said that the explicit sexual content is somwhat at odds with Jame’s original text, where everything is implied and suggested rather than made overt. Helena Bonham Carter gives a typically pouting and sexy performance as the emotionally scheming Kate Croy, and Alison Elliot is convincingly consumptive as the heiress Milly Theale. Even the costumes were nominated for an Academy award in this outstanding production which captures faithfully the spirit of the original novel.

Red button See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database


Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Other works by Henry James

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

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

 

Henry James What Masie KnewWhat Masie Knew (1897) A young girl is caught between parents who are in the middle of personal conflict, adultery, and divorce. Can she survive without becoming corrupted? It’s touch and go – and not made easier for the reader by the attentions of an older man who decides to ‘look after’ her. This comes from the beginning of James’s ‘Late Phase’, so be prepared for longer and longer sentences. In fact it’s said that whilst composing this novel, James switched from writing longhand to using dictation – and it shows if you look carefully enough – part way through the book.

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

 

Henry James The AmbassadorsThe Ambassadors (1903) Lambert Strether is sent from America to Paris to recall Chadwick Newsome, a young man who is reported to be compromising himself by an entanglement with a wicked woman. However, Strether’s mission fails when he is seduced by the social pleasures of the European capital, and he takes Newsome’s side. So a second ambassador is dispatched in the form of the more determined Sarah Pocock. She delivers an ultimatum which is resisted by the two young men, but then an accident reveals unpleasant truths to Strether, who is faced by a test of loyalty between old Europe and the new USA. This edition presents the latest scholarship on James and includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times.
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon UK
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon US


Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2010


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


Filed Under: Henry James Tagged With: English literature, Henry James, Literary studies, study guide, The novel, The Wings of the Dove

To the Lighthouse

January 29, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, criticism, resource materials

To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of Virginia Woolf’s 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 triptych 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 - portrait

Virginia Woolf


To the Lighthouse – plot summary

Part I: The Window
The novel is set in the Ramsays’ summer home in the Hebrides, on the Isle of Skye. [*] Part I begins just before the start of World War I. Mrs Ramsay assures her six year old son James that they should be able to visit a lighthouse across the bay next day. This prediction is denied by Mr Ramsay, who voices his certainty that the weather will not be clear. This attitude creates a certain tension between Mr and Mrs Ramsay, and also between Mr Ramsay and James. The incident is referred to on various occasions throughout the chapter.

Virginia Woolf To the LighthouseThe Ramsays have been joined at the house by a number of friends and colleagues. Lily Briscoe is a young painter attempting a portrayal of Mrs. Ramsay and her son James. She finds herself plagued by doubts throughout the novel, doubts largely fed by the statements of Charles Tansley, another guest, claiming that women can neither paint nor write. Tansley himself is an admirer of Mr Ramsay and his philosophical treatises. During the course of the afternoon, another guest Paul Rayley proposes to Minta Doyle, Lily begins her painting, Mrs. Ramsay soothes the resentful James, and Mr. Ramsay frets over his shortcomings as a philosopher, periodically turning to Mrs. Ramsay for comfort.

The section closes with a large dinner party which is fraught with minor tensions. Mr Ramsay nearly snaps at Augustus Carmichael, a visiting poet, when he asks for a second serving of soup. Mrs Ramsay, who is striving for the perfect dinner party is herself out of sorts when Paul and Minta arrive late to dinner, as Minta lost her grandmother’s brooch on the beach.

[* This Scottish location is completely unconvincing. The setting is clearly modelled on St Ives in Cornwall where Woolf spent all her childhood summer holidays.]

Part II: Time Passes
The second section is a lyrical interlude which gives a sense of time passing, absence, and death. During this period World War I breaks out in Europe. Mrs Ramsay passes away, her daughter Prue dies from complications of childbirth, and her son Andrew is killed in the war. Mr Ramsay is left adrift without his wife to praise and comfort him during his bouts of fear and his anguish regarding the longevity of his philosophical work.

The house itself is neglected during this period, and falls into a state of disrepair. Ten years pass before the family and their friends return for another holiday. Mrs McNab, the housekeeper, employs a few other women to help set the house in order.

Part III: The Lighthouse
Mr Ramsay finally plans on taking the long-delayed trip to the lighthouse with his son James and daughter Cam(illa). The trip almost does not happen, as the children are not ready, but they eventually set off. En route, the children resent their father for forcing them to come along. But James keeps the sailing boat steady, and rather than receiving the harsh words he has come to expect from his father, he hears praise, providing a rare moment of empathy between father and son; Cam’s attitude towards her father has changed as well.

Whilst they visit the lighthouse, Lily attempts to complete her long-unfinished painting. She reconsiders her memory of Mrs Ramsay, grateful for her help in pushing Lily to continue with her art, yet at the same time she struggles to free herself from the tacit control Mrs Ramsay had over other aspects of her life. Upon finishing the painting and seeing that it satisfies her, she realizes that the execution of her vision is more important to her than the idea of leaving some sort of legacy in her work – a lesson Mr Ramsay has yet to learn.


Study resources

Red button To the Lighthouse – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Red button To the Lighthouse – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Red button To the Lighthouse – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Orlando The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Red button To the Lighthouse – eBook edition

Red button To the Lighthouse – 1983 dramatisation on DVD – Amazon UK

Red button To the Lighthouse – audio book (unabridged) – Amazon UK

Red button To the Lighthouse: A Reader’s Guide – critical study – Amazon UK

Red button To the Lighthouse – York Notes (Advanced) – Amazon UK

Red button To the Lighthouse – Macmillan Master Guides – Amazon UK

Red button To the Lighthouse – Penguin Critical Guide – Amazon UK

Red button To the Lighthouse – Palgrave Master Guides – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Red button Selected Essays – by Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK


Virginia Woolf – biography

part of biographical documentary


Principal characters
Mr Ramsay a prominent metaphysical philosopher
Mrs Ramsay his dutiful, beautiful, and loving wife
James Ramsay their youngest son
Lily Briscoe a young and single painter
Paul Rayley a young friend of the Ramsays
Minta Doyle a friend of the Ramsays who marries Paul
Charles Tansley a young philosophy pupil of Mr Ramsay’s
William Bankes a botanist and old friend of the Ramsays
Augustus Carmichael opium-using poet visitor
Mrs McNab the Ramsay’s elderly housekeeper
Andrew Ramsay the eldest son, who is killed during the war
Jasper Ramsay one of the Ramsay’s sons
Roger Ramsay one of the Ramsay’s sons
Prue Ramsay the eldest daughter, who dies in childbirth
Rose Ramsay one of the Ramsay’s daughters
Nancy Ramsay one of the Ramsay’s daughters
Cam(illa) Ramsay the youngest Ramsay daughter

To the Lighthouse – first edition

To the Lighthouse - first edition
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

“Advance sales totaled over 1,600 copies, more than twice the number for Mrs Dalloway. Virginia’s mood at the time expressed itself in her gaily ironic joke with Vita Sackville-West. When Vita returned from her second trip to Persia, she found a copy of To the Lighthouse waiting for her, inscribed by Virginia, “In my opinion the best novel I have ever written”. It was a bound dummy copy, with blank pages. Leonard Woolf, anticipating both an artistic and a commercial success for To the Lighthouse, ordered 3,000 copies printed by R. & R. Clark (a thousand more than Mrs Dalloway) and quickly ordered another 1,000 copies in a second impression. The novel outsold her previous fiction. The American publisher of Hogarth Press books, Harcourt Brace, printed 4,000 copies initially (almost twice the number of copies for Mrs Dalloway). American readers had begun to take notice of Woolf’s novels.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

Red button More illustrated Hogarth Press first editions


Mont Blanc pen - Virginia Woolf edition

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition


Further reading

Red button Beja, Morris, ed. To the Lighthouse: A Casebook. London: Macmillan, 1991.

Red button Davies, Stevie. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, London: Penguin Books, 1989.

Red button de Gay, Jane. ‘Behind the Purple Triangle: Art and Iconography in To the Lighthouse.’ Woolf Studies Annual 5 (1999): 1-23.

Red button Hyman, Virginia R. To the Lighthouse and Beyond: Transformations in the Narratives of Virginia Woolf. New York: P. Lang, 1988.

Red button Ingram, Penelope. ‘One Drifts Apart’: To the Lighthouse as Art of Response’. Philosophy and Literature 23, no. 1 (1999): 78-95.

Red button Kato, Megumi. ‘The Politics/Poetics of Motherhood in To the Lighthouse’ In Virginia Woolf and Communities, ed. Laura Davis and Jeanette McVicker. New York: Pace University Press, 1999.

Red button Kelley, Alice van Buren. To the Lighthouse: The Marriage of Life and Art. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987.

Red button Knox-Shaw, Peter. ‘To the Lighthouse: The Novel as Elegy’. English Studies in Africa: A Journal of the Humanities 29, no. 1 (1986): 31-52.

Red button Leaska, Mitchell Alexander. Virginia Woolf’s Lighthouse : A Study in Critical Method. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970.

Red button Raitt, Suzanne. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.1990.

Red button Ruddick, Lisa Cole. The Seen and the Unseen: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1977.

Red button Vogler, Thomas A., ed. Twentieth-Century Interpretations of To the Lighthouse: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970.


Writing

Virginia Woolf's handwriting

“I feel certain that I am going mad again”


Virginia Woolf – podcast

A eulogy on words


Other works by Virginia Woolf

Woolf - OrlandoOrlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon US

Kew GardensKew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens 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


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 the novels The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, and the collection of stories Monday or Tuesday 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

Red button Virginia Woolf – a timeline in phtographs
A collection of well and lesser-known photographs documenting Woolf’s life from early childhood, through youth, marriage, and fame – plus some first edition book jackets – to a soundtrack by Philip Glass. They capture her elegant appearance, the big hats, and her obsessive smoking. No captions or dates, but well worth watching.

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.

© Roy Johnson 2010


More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group


Filed Under: Virginia Woolf Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, study guide, The novel, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

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