tutorial, commentary, and study resources

Collaboration was first published in The English Illustrated Magazine for September 1892. It next appeared in the collection of Henry James tales The Private Life published in London by Osgood McIllvaine in 1893. The other stories included in this volume were The Wheel of Time, Lord Beaupre, The Visits, Owen Wingrave, and The Private Life.

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904)

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Collaboration – story synopsis

An un-named American artist living in Paris holds regular soirees for his friends, who are poets, musicians, and critics of various nationalities. There is rivalry and contention on nationalistic and aesthetic questions such as ‘the novel’ and ‘artistic temperament’.

The French poet Vendemer likes the music of the German composer Heidenmauer, who reciprocates by liking the Frenchman’s poems. Heidenmauer sets some of the poems to music, which impresses the author. As a result Heidenmauer then asks Vendemer to collaborate with him on an opera, an offer which he accepts. Vendemer believes that Art knows no patriotism or boundaries.

The narrator is reproached by ultra-patriotic Madame de Brindes for encouraging this collaboration. Having lost husband and relatives during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870—1871, she is inimical to all things German. Unless the collaboration is stopped, she will call off the engagement of her daughter Paula to Vendemer. She appeals to the narrator, asking him to persuade Vendemer to cancel the project – but his attempt fails.

Heidenmauer and Vendemer go to live together in Italy, short of money but fuelled by their creative enthusiasm. The engagement is called off as threatened, and yet Paula plays Heidenmauer’s compositions at the piano. The narrator sees this as the triumph of Art over prejudice.

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Principal characters

I	the un-named narrator, an American artist and bon viveur
Alfred Bonns	an American journalist and critic
Herman Heidenmauer	a Bavarian composer
Madam Marie de Brindes	a ‘poor’ anti-German Frenchwoman
Paula de Brindes	her daughter with no dowry
Felix Vendemer	a French poet, Paula’s fiancé

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Study resources

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

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

Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

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Collaboration – critical commentary

This tale is hardly more than a sketch or an anecdote. James clearly sides with the argument that ‘art knows no boundaries’. Although he was obviously sensitive to national temperaments and schools of art, about which he wrote a great deal – see French Novelists and Poets for example – James was a committed internationalist. He was after all born in the United States, educated largely in Europe, lived in England, France, and Italy for most of his adult life, and eventually took up British nationality as a symbol of solidarity during the First World War – at a time when America was maintaining its isolationist position of non-interference.

He also believed that the practice of the arts was a high and noble calling – though this story is unusual in having a musician as one of its principal characters. More usually, his artist figures are writers or painters. It is also relatively rare for him to create sympathetic characters in his work who are German.

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Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Other works by Henry James

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

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Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Covering End only ever appeared once as a long story during James’s lifetime – in the publication The Two Magics which was printed in 1898 and also contained The Turn of the Screw. James refers to the work in his notebooks as a comedy – and the work was certainly written to a commission. It had actually been written earlier, in 1895 as a play for Ellen Terry.

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

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Covering End – critical commentary

James and the theatre

Never was a story so obviously conceived as a theatre piece. James put a great deal of hopes and dreams in his attempts to become a successful dramatist. We now know that he failed miserably, being booed off stage at the opening night of Guy Domville in 1895. But he rather resourcefully converted many of his unused theatrical materials into prose fiction.

Covering End was originally written as a one act play called Summersoft in 1895 for his friend the actress Ellen Terry, but it was never performed. As a matter of fact, after he had converted the play to a story, he later went on to convert it back into a three act play called The High Bid, which was produced briefly in 1907.

Dramatic unity

The origins of this tale are nowhere more evident than in the amazing dramatic unity of the story in terms of time, location, and action. Everything takes place in the old house at Covering End; the drama unfolds in the space of a single afternoon; and the action is more or less continuous, with no temporal breaks.

All the characters are given perfectly plausible reasons for their entrances and their exits, through doors, garden windows, and the usual architectural devices of the proscenium arch theatre. and the drama flows from one character’s conversation with one person to the next in an unbroken flow.

Characters remove themselves from the ‘stage’ of the action on the pretext of taking tea, looking at other rooms, or looking for someone else to whom they wish to speak.

Comedy, melodrama, or farce?

The characters in this tale are stereotypes from boulevard melodrama. Mr Prodmore is a pompous stock villain of supercilious vainglory – although he remains unpunished and does end up with all the money. He dresses in a ridiculously exaggerated fashion; he is motivated entirely by greed and self-promotion; and he mistreats his daughter.

Clement Yule is a young and handsome hero. He is an impoverished aristocratic landowner with radical and humane principles; he never seeks to take advantage; and he is kind towards others.

Mrs Gracedew is a pantomime fairy godmother. She has travelled from Boston to view and appreciate the hous;, she seems to have limitless finances to solve Yule’s problems; she assists Cora in her romantic ambitions, and lingers to the last paragraphs before snapping up her man.

However, the aspects of boulevard comedy which audiences might accept in the theatre do not translate well into a realist prose narrative. We are expected to believe that a young aristocrat could be talked into marrying a woman who he had never met or spoken to in the early part of one afternoon, then an hour or so later after this element of the plot coming unstuck, asks another woman to marry him who had met only a few minutes before.

The conventions of Aristotelian drama are well realised, but they do not sit well with the conventions of the short (or even long) realistic story in this respect. The conversations are suffused with plenty of sub-Wildean repartee and bon mots, but it is not surprising that this story is so little known

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Covering End – study resources

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

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

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

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

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

Covering End – HTML version at Gutenberg

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

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Covering End – plot summary

Part I.   Handsome young Captain Clement Yule has inherited but never seen a venerable old English country house and estate at Covering End. But the estate is mortgaged and heavily in debts which are currently owned by Mr Prodmore, a rather obnoxious financier. Prodmore arrives at the house, followed by his daughter Cora.

Part II.   When Yule arrives Mr Prodmore proposes a business plan – that if Yule stands for parliament in the local constituency (Gossage) and marries his daughter Cora, he will cancel the estate’s debts. However, Yule is a radical and reformer, whereas the Gossage seat is solidly conservative.

Part III.   Mrs Gracedew appears and charms old retainer Chivers with her enthusiastic appreciation of the house and its age. She meets Clement Yule and proposes to show him round his own home, but a party of local sightseers arrive. She immediately adopts the role of tour guide, extolling the house’s historical and architectural virtues. The guided tour becomes virtually an auction, with Mrs Gracedew valuing the property at £50,000.

Part IV.   Yule reveals his financial predicament to Mrs Gracedew – without mentioning the element of marriage. She speaks warmly on the issue of his duty to preserve Cowering End and its traditions, and she urges him to stand for Gossage as a Tory.

Part V.   Cora speaks to Mrs Gracedew and reveals that marriage to her is also part of Mr Prodmore’s plan. Yule then returns to announce that he has accepted Mr Prodmore’s proposal.

Part VI.   Cora reappears to say that she refuses to marry Yule – because she is actually in love with another man, who happens to be very rich but has the unfortunate name of Hall Pegg. Mrs Gracedew promises to help her by talking round Mr Prodmore.

Part VII.   When Mr Prodmore reappears Mrs Gracedew asks him to give up his plans to marry Cora to Yule, and she offers to buy the house mortgages from him. He asks the price she announced earlier of £50,000, and she admits it was an exaggeration to impress the audience. When he sets off to recover Cora however, she offers to pay his price if he will forgive his daughter and let her marry Pegg. He agrees – but raises the price to £70,000.

Part VIII.   Mts Gracedew explains to Yule that he is now let off his mortgages and can ‘own’ his own home because she has bought off his debts. The house now back into its rightful ownership, she claims her work is done, but she lingers long enough for Yule to propose marriage to her – which she accepts.

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Principal characters

Covering End	an English country house and estate
Captain Clement Yule	its young and handsome radical inheritor
Chivers	an elderly servant
Mr Prodmore	a pompous and vain financier
Cora Prodmore	his daughter (22)
Mrs Gracedew	a rich American widow

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Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

---

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

Crawford’s Consistency first appeared in magazine form in Scribner’s Monthly for August 1876. Featured in the same issue were stories by popular American writer Bret Harte and Anglo-American novelist Frances Hodgson Burnett (who was born in Manchester) as well as a story The Living Mummy by Ivan Turgenev.

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Crawford’s Consistency – critical commentary

This is one of the many tales by Henry James which explores the ‘dangers’ of marriage. In fact of all the cautionary studies he produced on the subject, this is possibly the most virulent and dramatic. James gave repeated thought to the matter on his own behalf, but always came down on the side of remaining a bachelor.

Crawford is a character who has everything, but ends up with nothing. At the outset of the tale he is popular, wealthy, and single by conviction. He has rationalised his state of being, and has no reason to change.

But then he is smitten by a woman’s good looks. Elizabeth Ingram is pretty – but cold and unresponsive. Nevertheless, he is desperately in love with her surface charm – and is rewarded by being suddenly rejected, almost with no reason. Only later do we learn that the reason is financial caution on her mother’s part and preference for a wealthier suitor.

In fact it is interesting to note that she is later disfigured – so even if the marriage had gone ahead, Crawford would have ended up with the loss of the very thing he had chosen – a pretty woman.

But there is worse to come. He repeats the same mistake by giving way to an impulsive and very superficial attraction. And true to the formula, the woman who becomes Mrs Crawford is interested only in his money. He generously gives her more than half his wealth, and even when that evaporates due to the bank’s collapse, he feels obliged to give her what he has left, because he wishes to honour his original offer of support through marriage.

If these warnings again the possible dangers of marriage were not enough, James then underscores (and possibly overplays) his message by having this vulgar termagant become an alcoholic .with violent tendencies. Having already impoverished him, she then renders Crawford a cripple and makes his life a misery for another decade before expiring – leaving him with nothing but his ‘consistent’ temperament.

To quote the much-used adage, you do not need a brass plaque on your front door to realise that this reveals a profound psychological mistrust of women (to put it mildly) on James’s part. Crawford may have retained ‘consistency’ throughout his ordeals, but the lessons James offers here are that to remain single is a state of potential bliss, whereas the experience of giving way to heterosexual impulses leads to humiliation, rejection, disappointment, misery, personal injury, and financial ruin.

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Crawford’s Consistency – study resources

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

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

Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Crawford’s Consistency – Paperback edition

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

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Crawford’s Consistency – plot summary

The narrator’s friend Crawford is a wealthy, personable, and eligible bachelor who has made it a personal philosophy to avoid marriage. But when he meets the beautiful Elizabeth Ingram he falls in love with her and immediately proposes. Her strict mother thinks that Crawford isn’t really rich enough, but he is eventually accepted by the family. He immediately becomes abundantly happy, and reverses all his previous opinions on the subject of marriage.

However, when the narrator goes to present his good wishes to the Ingrams, they reveal that they have suddenly broken off the engagement. Crawford arrives and is shocked at this news. He demands to speak to Elizabeth. She tells him that she does not love him any more. Crawford is mortified by the insult and the emotional blow. There is widespread social sympathy for him, and the Ingrams go off early to spend the summer in Newport under public disapprobation.

Subsequently, Crawford meets a woman in a park to whom he is instantly attracted, even though she is rather commonplace. The narrator reflects wistfully on the frailty of human nature, which can be so inconsistent. Later in the summer he discovers that Crawford has actually married the woman, who is even more vulgar that she appeared at first. The two men remain friends, but the marriage is never discussed between them. Crawford throws a lavish party which attracts the curiosity of all his friends, but they are shocked by the obvious vulgarity of his wife.

Elizabeth Ingram meanwhile becomes engaged to a rich southern plantation owner. Then suddenly the narrator receives news that Crawford’s bank has gone into liquidation, wiping out his fortune. The signs of this collapse were visible to the initiated six months previously, and the narrator suspects that this might have been the reason for the Ingrams’ sudden decision – because Mrs Ingram keeps a close watch on the financial markets. The new Mrs Crawford is incandescent with rage and disappointment, and Crawford asks the narrator not to visit him at home any more, to spear them both embarrassment.

Crawford goes to live on one floor of a small house and gets a job as a clerk. He feels obliged to give his vulgar wife all his remaining money. The two friends meet in public at weekends. It is reported that Elizabeth Ingram gets small-pox and is horribly disfigured by the disease – at which her fiancé cancels their engagement and goes back to Alabama.

Mrs Crawford turns to drink, and Crawford has long bouts of depression. His wife then pushes him down a flight of steps, causing him to fracture his knee, which renders him lame. He endures misery and poverty for another ten years, until finally Mrs Crawford dies of delirium tremens.

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Principal characters

I	an un-named narrator, a doctor
Crawford	the narrator’s friend, the ealthy son of a cotton-broker (27)
Elizabeth Ingram	Crawford’s fiancé, a distant cousin of the narrator
Sabrina Ingram	Elizabeth’s stern mother
Peter Ingram	Elizabeth’s hen-pecked father
Mrs Crawford	a vulgar lower-class woman

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Henry James’s study

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Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

The Ambassadors (1903) Lambert Strether is sent from America to Paris to recall Chadwick Newsome, a young man who is reported to be compromising himself by an entanglement with a wicked woman. However, Strether’s mission fails when he is seduced by the social pleasures of the European capital, and he takes Newsome’s side. So a second ambassador is dispatched in the form of the more determined Sarah Pocock. She delivers an ultimatum which is resisted by the two young men, but then an accident reveals unpleasant truths to Strether, who is faced by a test of loyalty between old Europe and the new USA. This edition presents the latest scholarship on James and includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times.
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© Roy Johnson 2013

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Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

De Grey: A Romance first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly for July 1868. It was not reprinted during James’s lifetime, and next appeared in the collection Travelling Companions published in New York by Boni and Liveright in 1919.

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De Grey – critical commentary

This tale is not much more than a sentimental anecdote, told in very general terms with very little attempt to provide concrete historical detail or even a realistic setting. James was only twenty-five years old and in his apprenticeship phase, writing for popular magazines such as The Galaxy. Even he seemed to be aware of the shortcomings in his work at that time:

I write little & only tales, which I think it likely I shall continue to manufacture in a hackish manner, for that which is bread. They cannot of necessity be very good; but they shall not be very bad.

The only points of interest in this particular tale are buried deep within its chronology. Mr De Grey has been great friends with Father Herbert, but they quarrelled – possibly ‘over a woman’. There is also an implication that Mr De Grey’s life had been ‘blighted by an unhappy love affair’ with the woman in the small portrait who died thirty-four year previously. “George De Grey met and loved, September 1786, Antonietta Gambini, of Milan”. This is the same period in which De Grey travelled in Italy with his close friend Herbert, so Miss Gambini might be the woman over whom they quarrelled.

Both Paul and his father appear to be victims of the family curse: their first loves die (both Italian girls). Whilst touring Europe Paul formed a relationship with Miss L, who died in Naples – so Paul is following in the family tradition. But then Paul’s father dies within one year of marrying Paul’s mother, and Paul dies shortly before his marriage to Margaret.

It is interesting to note that if Mrs De Grey is sixty-seven and Paul is (say) in his twenties, he was conceived when she was in her early forties.. And yet Mr De Grey dies (from ‘repeated sensual excesses’) by the time he is thirty-five, and he must therefore have been much younger than his wife.

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De Grey: A Romance – Study resources

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

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

Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon US

De Grey: A Romance – see the original text

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

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De Grey: A Romance – plot summary

Mrs De Grey is a rich sixty-seven year old widow who lives a socially isolated life. Her catholic priest Father Herbert is tutor to her son Paul, who has no profession or ambition but is idolised by his mother. Whilst Paul is away touring Europe Mrs De Grey begins to feel lonely. She takes a poor girl Margaret Aldis as a companion, who blossoms under her patronage. Father Herbert is deeply smitten with the girl.

Margaret becomes enchanted by the very idea of Paul. She reads his letters to Mrs De Grey, closely watched by Father Herbert. Paul writes telling them that his engagement to an Italian girl has been broken off, and the girl later dies.

When Paul returns everyone is very impressed with his development. Paul and Margaret spend a lot of time together, talking about each other’s lives, and eventually falling in love. However, Father Herbert reveals to her that the family has a long tradition of male heirs forming relationships with women who die within a year. Margaret decides to defy the curse, throwing herself enthusiastically into preparations for the marriage.

But one day she suddenly collapses in pain. She recovers, but then Paul falls ill. She feels as if she is taking her life from him. He goes out riding and falls from his horse. Margaret finds him, and he admits that she is killing him. He dies, and she becomes distracted.

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De Grey – principal characters

Mrs De Grey	a handsome Irish woman (67)
Father Herbert	her friend, an English Catholic priest and scholar
Paul De Grey	her American son
Margaret Aldis	her young companion

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Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Other works by Henry James

Washington Square (1880) is a superb early short novel, It’s the tale of a young girl whose future happiness is being controlled by her strict authoritarian (but rather witty) father. She is rather reserved, but has a handsome young suitor. However, her father disapproves of him, seeing him as an opportunist and a fortune hunter. There is a battle of wills – all conducted within the confines of their elegant New York town house. Who wins out in the end? You will probably be surprised by the outcome. This is a masterpiece of social commentary, offering a sensitive picture of a young woman’s life.
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The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
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The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013

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Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.
Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

---

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

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