The Short Story Archives - Page 13 of 31

His Father’s Son

July 2, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

His Father’s Son first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine issue number 45 for June 1909. The story was subsequently included in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction, Of Men and Ghosts published in 1910.

Old New Yotk

His Father’s Son – critical comments

From the late nineteenth century onwards there was a widely accepted convention that short (and even longer) stories ought to finish with something of a twist in the tale. In the most extreme cases, this became known as the ‘whiplash ending’. All the information provided by the story up to its conclusion was suddenly reversed or overturned – either by a sudden twist of fate, or by new information which had hitherto been concealed from the reader.

Modernist writers from Anton Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce onwards felt that this was a cheap and unsatisfactory literary device. They created narratives that would stand alone as satisfactory constructs without any element of surprise or dramatic revelation. But the device continued to be popular, particularly amongst writers of second rank or lower. Edith Wharton certainly resorts to this plot strategy from time to time in her stories, but in His Fathers Son she gives the surprise ending a double twist which goes some way to justifying its deployment.

Mason Grew is set up as a figure of mild pathos – the unfulfilled widower and man of commerce who is living out his youthful romantic aspirations via a son who appears to show no filial gratitude or appreciation. The doting patent is a common enough figure, both in life and in literature. And to the sad differences between them there is added the son’s higher social status, acquired at his father’s expense. The father is a manufacturer, and the son is a lawyer who mixes with wealthy New York socialites. How therefore to account for Ronald’s sensitive and artistic nature? The answer is – as Ronald himself thinks – in the long-hidden secret of his parentage. He is the love child of Fortuné Dolbrowski, whose letters to his mother Addie give proof of this idea.

That is twist number one – and there are hints enough in the story to encourage its credibility. But Wharton caps this revelation with a second more interesting twist. The correspondence with the great pianist was entirely the creation of Ronald’s father, Mason Grew, who seized a rare opportunity to exercise his own romanticism. Thus Ronald has inherited his romantic enthusiasms and disposition not from the pianist, but from his father, whose sensibility has been concealed beneath the trappings of manufacture and commerce.

His Father’s Son – study resources

The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon UK

The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon US

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Tales of Men and Ghosts – Project Gutenberg

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

His Father’s Son – story synopsis

Part I. Following his wife’s death, Mason Grew moves from Connecticut to Brooklyn, so as to be near his son who is a New York lawyer. He tolerates Ronald’s lack of filial love by hiding behind a brash and over-confident exterior. As a practical businessman he nevertheless has romantic social ambitions which he lives out via Ronald, who is ashamed of his father’s lowly origins and success as a manufacturer of suspender buckles.

Part II. As Ronald has risen in society he has fulfilled his father’s own dreams of what might have been. Drew even secretly visits the theatre where he can observe his son mixing with wealthy socialites. When he receives a telegram from Ronald, his father thinks back over his humdrum past with his unexceptional wife Addie, and how they once went to a concert given by a famous pianist Dolbrowski.

Part III. Ronald is engaged to a rich girl Daisy and has come to tell his father that he can no longer accept his money because a cache of love letters from Dolbrowski to his mother have made him realise that he is the pianist’s natural son. Grew then puts Ronald straight by revealing that he wrote Addie’s letters to the pianist. He did it so that he could ‘breathe the same air’ as the great romantic, and this slender pleasure gave him the strength to continue in business for the sake of his son.

Principal characters

Mason Grew	a practical businessman with romantic feelings
Ronald Grew	his son, a New York lawyer
Addie Grew	his dead wife
Fortuné Dolbrowski	a concert pianist

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

Other works by Edith Wharton

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

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

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Edith Wharton – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
More on short stories

Honeymoon

December 24, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

Honeymoon was probably written in Paris and first appeared in the Nation and Athenaeum on 29 April 1922. The setting is not specified but seems to be the south of France, and the two characters in the story are ‘abroad’ which suggests that they are probably from New Zealand. In the workbooks for her writing Katherine Mansfield classified many of her stories by the designation L. or N.Z. according to their setting of London or New Zealand.

Honeymoon – critical commentary

George is like many of the male figures in Mansfield’s stories – a catalogue of gaucheness and insensitivity. He summons cabs in a peremptory manner which worries Fanny; he speaks French badly; thinks living in a villa would be ‘deadly’ unless surrounded by other people; deals badly with the restaurant manager; is xenophobic; and congratulates himself on his rudeness.

Whilst Fanny wants to stay at their ‘little table’ and feels that ‘nothing matter[s] except love’, George suddenly wants to go back to their hotel – the clear implication being that since he feels a flush of physical well-being, he intends to have sex with her.

The story is related largely from Fanny’s point of view, so we are presented with a rather negative character sketch of a male as perceived by a female – which is one reason why Katherine Mansfield is admired by feminists. Much of this presentation is made by understatement and implication, so none of her criticism is explicit. Indeed, Fanny is full of admiration for this man she has married – which is why it is important to register distinctions between Fanny’s views and those of the Mansfield-as-narrator.

‘Here you are, sir. Here you will be very nice,’ coaxed the manager, taking the vase off the table , and putting it down again as if it were a fresh little bouquet out of the air. But George refused to sit down immediately. He saw through these fellows; he wasn’t going to be done. These chaps were always out to rush you. So he put his hands in his pockets, and said to Fanny, very calmly, ‘This all right for you? Anywhere else you’d prefer? How about over there?’ And he nodded to a table right over the other side.

What it was to be a man of the world! Fanny admired him deeply, but all she wanted to do was sit down and look like everybody else.

George is gauche and immediately in conflict with the manager. He congratulates himself on his antagonistic view of the interchange, and his suggestion for alternative seating puts everyone into an awkward position. Fanny naively perceives his behaviour as masterful – and yet her instinct is for a simpler, calmer resolution to the episode.

Thus we are provided with three points of view in this one brief scene: the narrator’s perceptive image of the manager’s gesture; George’s self-congratulatory egoism; and (simultaneously) Fanny’s naive admiration of her new husband at the same time as her instinct for a more sensitive response to the situation.

Honeymoon – study resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honeymoon – plot summary

A young couple, George and Fanny, are on their honeymoon on the Mediterranean coast. George is a forceful and positive character, whilst Fanny is rather hesitant and uncertain about herself.

After shopping they decide to go for tea to a hotel-restaurant on the sea front. George patronises their cab driver, and Fanny feels a sense of trepidation at the freedom afforded her by her state of being as a newlywed.

At the restaurant George resists the manager’s attempts to control them, and Fanny admires his masculinity but wonders if he wants to understand her at a deep level.

Meanwhile a small group of musicians begin playing whilst they take their tea. Then the group is joined by an old man in faded clothes who sings in Spanish with passion and fervour.

Fanny is moved by the experience and wonders existentially about the cruelty and suffering in life; but George reacts differently, feeling optimistic and physically stimulated.

George suggests that they go back to their hotel at once, before the man can start singing again – so they leave.

Katherine Mansfield – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

Il Conde

September 18, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Il Conde first appeared in Cassell’s Magazine in London (1908) and Hampton’s Magazine in New York (1909). It was later collected in A Set of Six, published in 1908 (UK) and 1915 (US). The other stories in this collection of Joseph Conrad’s work were The Informer, An Anarchist, Gaspar Ruiz, The Duel, and The Brute.

“Vedi Napoli e poi mori”

Il Conde – critical commentary

In his prefatory notes to A Set of Six Conrad outlines the genesis of his stories, putting his emphasis on the fact that they are based on true incidents:

In all of them the facts are inherently true, by which I mean that they are not only possible but that they have actually happened. For instance, the last story in the volume, the one I call Pathetic, whose first title is Il Conde (misspelt by-the-by) is an almost verbatim transcript of the tale told me by a very charming old gentleman whom I met in Italy.

It is curious (with over a hundred years’ hindsight) that he should think that the ‘real’ origins of the tale lend credibility (and even artistic merit) to what is not much more than an anecdote. It is indeed rather shocking if an elderly and cultivated man is held up at knife point and robbed by a university student from a wealthy family who is also connected to a Mafia-style gang. But since nothing further is made of this confrontation (and contradiction) it’s not clear what point is being made. The elderly man is so shocked he returns to somewhere in middle Europe – but that is all. Conrad goes on to say that the tale concerns a ‘problem’ – but then admits that he’s not sure what it is:

Anybody can see that it is something more than a verbatim report, but where he left off and where I began must be left to the acute discrimination of the reader who may be interested in the problem. I don’t mean to say that the problem is worth the trouble. What I am certain of, however, is that it is not to be solved, for I am not at all clear about it myself by this time.

The tale is an anecdote, a character sketch, an evocation of time and place, but not much more. It lacks the biting irony of An Outpost of Progress or the terrible themes of Falk and Amy Foster. We cannot expect every one of Conrad’s tales to be equally powerful, and it is fairly clear that his greatest literary strength lay as a novelist and a writer of novellas, not as an artist of the shorter literary forms.

Il Conde – study resources

A Set of Six – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

A Set of Six – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

A Set of Six – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Il Conde – plot summary

An un-named narrator describes the Count he meets at his hotel in Naples. He is a cultivated, rich, and sympathetic character, yet the narrator does not know his name or where he is from. The narrator leaves for ten days to look after a friend who is ill. When he returns the Count tells him about an unpleasant experience.

The Count goes after dinner to listen to music played in a public garden. Afterwards he strolls on a darkened boulevard, where a man robs him at knife point. He gives him his money and watch, but refuses to give him his rings.

Afterwards, the Count retreats to a cafe, where he sees his attacker again at a nearby table. He asks a cigarette vendor for information and is told that the young man is a university student from a very good family and the head of a Camorra (Mafia-style gang). The young man threatens to pursue him further, so the Count decides to leave Naples, even though he believes that its climate is necessary for his health. The narrator sees him off on a train bound for Vienna.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

Principal characters

I	the un-named narrator
Il Conde	a cultivated traveller
—	a young man

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

The 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.
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Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
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Heart 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’.
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Joseph Conrad links

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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
Joseph Conrad complete tales

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

April 3, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938) is a collection of short stories which propelled Delmore Schwartz into literary prominence at the age of only twenty-five. He was a young Jewish writer from Brooklyn, New York who went on to become a prominent figure in the literary and intellectual life of the city.

Most people will know about him from the fictionalised portrait that forms the basis of Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift (1975). This invention charts the rise and fall of their friendship, and the tragedy of Schwartz’ descent into madness, alcoholism, and an early death in 1966.

The title story In Dreams Begin Responsibilities appeared in the very first issue of the influential magazine Partisan Review. It is based on the disastrous marriage of his parents who divorced when Schwartz was only nine.

In the story a young man recounts the courtship of his mother and father – as if he were watching the event projected as a silent film in a movie theatre. His eager father takes his mother to Coney Island for the day in order to make a marriage proposal. At first the event goes well and they are both very happy; but then his father becomes irritated and impatient – at which point the boy in the cinema bursts out with a passionate note of warning:

“Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.”

it transpires that the story is being presented by the son at an older age. The narrative gains much of its force from what has passed in between the childhood ‘memory’ and the narrative present, which is not directly related. The story suggests that what started out as a positive relationship eventually resulted in a failed marriage that has left one of its offspring traumatised.

This petulant outburst achieves its dramatic effect because the story is being related simultaneously on three separate time planes:

the father’s courtship of the mother
the boy’s experience of the picture show
the son’s revelation at twenty-one

There are also two further levels of meaning in the story – both of which suggest the influence of Franz Kafka, whom Schwartz had read. The first is that the narrator, having made his premonitory warning against the marriage of his parents, is reproached by the usher who shows him out of the ‘cinema’. The usher’s admonition completely undercuts the assurance of the boy’s outrage:

“What are you doing? Don’t you know that you can’t do whatever you want to do? Why should a young man like you, with your whole life before you, get hysterical like this? Why can’t you think of what you’re doing?”

The second level of meaning which also strongly echoes Kafka, is that no matter that the boy’s retrospective warning against his parents’ marriage (which he perceives as a disaster), it is also an example of a child’s primordial fear of its parents’ sexuality. Kafka’s stories and literary fragments are packed with similar scenes.

Schwartz’ precocious skill was to compress all these levels of chronology and meaning into one quite short story. He wrote it in one weekend when he was only twenty-one

America! America! is a sketch of immigrant family life = their hopes, aspirations, and failures. The Baumanns carry the culture of the Old Country with them, but they have high expectations of the new Utopia. Unfortunately, in the years of the 1930s depression, it cannot live up to them:

The expectations of these human beings who had come in their youth to the new world had not been fulfilled in the least. They had above all expected to be rich, and they had come with a very different image of what their new life was to be.

The character through whose eyes the events unfold is Shenandoah Fish. He sees the weaknesses and failures of the American Dream, but realises that he is part of the collective experience:

His separation was actual enough, but there existed also an unbreakable unity. As the air was full of the radio’s unseen voices, so the life he breathed in was full of these lives and the age in which they had acted and suffered.

The collection also contains one or two stories offering satirical views of life amongst young New York intellectuals. These are coded sketches of the fashionable people with whom Schwartz was mixing in the late 1930s and 1940s. However, without editorial explanations they are unlikely to be identified by most readers today.

In The World is a Wedding Schwartz captures the language and attitudes of a whole group – second generation Jewish immigrants who have been educated in the Brave New World to which their families brought them for a better life. They have the comforts that their parents have worked hard for, but they do not want to work in the shop or continue the family traditions.

They have even had time to develop pretensions. A young bohemian parades his know-it-all attitudes to a middle-aged first generation woman. The woman’s son then remarks “You have just seen a genius” – to which his mother replies “How much money does he make?” The answer to this (which is not given) is nothing – because he doesn’t have a job.

Delmore Schwartz never fulfilled his early promise, and his final years were truly tragic, but this collection of early and mid-period stories illustrate why so many people rated him so highly. He seems to have paved the way for the next generation of Jewish writers such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. And the collection is worth it for the title story alone.

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Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, London: Souvenir Press, 2014, pp.202, ISBN: 0285636693

Twentieth century literature
More on short stories

In the Cage

April 30, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

In the Cage first appeared in book form in both England and America in 1898. It was later revised and included in the complete New York edition of James’s work in 1909. The tale is quite unusual in James’s oeuvre in that it takes its subject matter from the daily life of a working-class woman. The milieu is also novel, because the events of the narrative are set in one corner of a grocer’s shop – albeit located in Mayfair.

In the Cage – critical commentary

Story? Novella? Novel?

At almost thirty-three thousand words, In the Cage is too long to be classed as a short story. It strays beyond the limits of this genre both in terms of length and subject matter. Of course James never claimed that any of his shorter fictions were short stories in the sense that this term is now used. The collective title he used for his shorter works was Tales – which turned out to be very well chosen, since this term does not carry any fixed expectations in terms of form or content.

The issue of categorisation depends very much on the interpretation given to the content of the piece. If it is regarded as an innocent and brief interlude during the summer months of a young woman’s life, it would be quite legitimate to classify it as a long short-story. She indulges in an imaginative romance, but then settles for a safe if predictable marriage.

But if the issues of modern telegraphy, transmitting messages, the different expectations and behaviour between working and liesured classes, and the educative process of the young woman’s lesson in realism are taken into account – a case could be made for it being a short novel. These are large enough issues to warrant classification in the heavier and more serious genre.

However, in even a short novel we would normally expect a more even-handed and fully rounded account of the principal characters. In the Cage provides characterisation for only the young woman, her friend Mrs Jordan, and her fiancé Mr Mudge. We really know very little about Captain Everard and almost nothing about Lady Bradeen except through the imagination of the young woman or the social gossip of Mrs Jordan. This is not the substance we expect of the realist novel, no matter how foreshortened.

That leaves the possibility of classifying the work as a novella. The tale certainly has a number of the ingredients we expect to find in the genre that James particularly admired – what he called “the beautiful and blessed nouvelle“. . Novellas are like simplified and densely compressed novels, with few characters and an intensely concentrated subject which usually has universal significance.

Narrative interest in this tale is focussed on the educative experience of one character – the young woman telegraphist. The location (apart from one brief holiday excursion) is largely her commercial environment in Mayfair and the pressure she is under from social conditions at work and home. Her professional skills working with contemporary technology are a fitting symbol for communications between the classes which form the backbone to the narrative. And it could be argued that her final decision to realistically accept her fate as the wife-to-be of a grocer is a universal theme.

On all these grounds In the Cage qualifies as a novella. But there are some problems with this interpretation which fits the tale to this genre.

Problems

Foremost is the issue of inevitability. The novella (and even the novel) does require a certain degree of persuadable, logical, inevitable outcome from the premises it has laid forward. It also has to be said that most novellas have a very serious, and often a tragic outcome: one thinks of classics in the genre, such as Benito Cereno, Death in Venice, and even James’s own The Turn of the Screw, which was written in the same year.

The problem with In the Cage is that the young lady, for the majority of the narrative, is a hopelessly romantic fantasist – imputing all sorts of characteristics and motives to her customers without any supporting intelligence. James deliberately satirises this attitude, as he does the comparable snobbery and pretention of Mrs Jordan. What he does not really supply is sufficient evidence for her change of heart when she decides to settle for marriage to Mr Mudge.

Quite apart from his semi-comic name, Mr Mudge has been characterised throughout the tale as a well-intentioned man but a monumental bore of Dickensian proportions. He represents a realistic marriage prospect for a young woman of the telegraphist’s position in society – but since we have been made aware of his shortcomings largely from her point of view throughout the narrative, her conversion to accepting him at its end doesn’t seem altogether persuasive. Neither is such a resolution the substance of the novella, which normally deals in serious issues. The future for Mr and Mrs Mudge in Chalk Farm is nothing more than the prospect of a life of unremitting Pooterism, The Diary of a Nobody having been published only a few years earlier in 1888). This sort of bathetic outcome is not normally the substance of a novella.

On these grounds, it might be safer to simply leave In the Cage categorised as the completely amorphous Tale, a long story of sorts (which is more or less the same thing), or a very short novel. It is interesting to note that it is placed in all these categories by members of the book trade such as Amazon and AbeBooks.

In the Cage – study resources

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

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

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

Complete Stories 18—18 – Library of America – Amazon US

In the Cage – Kindle edition

In the Cage – eBook versions at Gutenberg

In the Cage – audioBook versions at LibriVox

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

In the Cage – plot summary

Part I. An un-named young woman works as a telegraphist in the post office within a grocer’s store in Mayfair. She has become engaged (without much enthusiasm) to Mr Mudge, a grocer, and she lives in rather poor circumstances with her mother and her elder sister.

Part II. Her fiancé wants her to move to an ‘outer suburb’ (Chalk Farm) so as to be nearer to him, and to save money. But she prefers to stay in Mayfair, the social life of which gives her scope for her imagination.

Part III. She despatches telegrams and cryptic messages, and she fantasises about the lives of her customers – particularly a ‘handsome lady’ who might be called Mary or Cissie.

Part IV. She interprets the lives of her customers from the contents of their telegrams – particularly a man who comes in with the handsome lady, who she assumes to be the ‘Everard’ mentioned in some messages.

Part V. She is very conscious of class differences and the profligate way her (largely upper-class) customers spend their money (judging by the length of their messages – which are priced per word). She feels powerful in knowing people’s secrets and she generalizes that her women customers are on the whole in pursuit of her men.

Part VI. Her friend Mrs Jordan invites her to join her flower-arranging enterprise, which she enjoys because it brings her into contact with upper class society.

Part VII. She is tempted by the idea, because she wants to meet people from the upper class. Mrs Jordan claims to be on intimate terms with her clients, but it is clear that she is exaggerating any such connections.

Part VIII. The two women begin to compete over who has the closer connections with fashionable society. The young woman also begins to have doubts about her engagement to Mr Mudge.

Part IX. She has mixed feelings about Mr Mudge, who is boring and predictable, yet she respects his simplicity and honesty. She can see his limitations, and she aspires to ‘greater’ (more romantic) things.

Part X. She tells Mr Mudge that she is appalled by the rich people who are her customers, but it is clear that she feels a snobbish pleasure at ‘mixing’ with upper class society. He too is attracted to the idea of rubbing shoulders with the well-to-do.

Part XI. Meanwhile,, she continues to inflate the significance of her (non) ‘relationship’ with Captain Everard. She invents excuses for querying his written notes, but sees them as having been planted there deliberately for that purpose.

Part XII. She imagines that Captain Everard would like to share his problems with her and confide in her about his love affairs. She goes to the building at Park Chambers where he lives and fantasises about meeting him.

Part XIII. The handsome lady returns, and she helps her to correct a mistake in her telegram, which reveals her knowledge of the lady’s affairs.

Part XIV. When the summer arrives Mr Mudge wants to plan a holiday together. She is bored by the excessive details of his preparation, and starts walking past Park Chambers every night. On one occasion she does meet him there.

Part XV. They walk into Hyde Park and sit on a bench together, talking. He reveals that he knows she has been taking a ‘special interest’ in him, which makes her cry.

Part XVI. Thinking that she is unlikely to meet him again, she tells him the whole truth of the interest she has taken in him, but that she will be leaving to work elsewhere. He asks her to stay and ‘help’ him.

Part XVII. She admits to him that she enjoys knowing about people’s private lives and says she will do anything for hi. He implores with her to stay working in the post office, and she leaves him saying that she will never give him up.

Part XVIII. She goes on holiday to Bournemouth with her mother and Mr Mudge, where he is more boring than ever, but she retreats from him into a private world of the imagination. However, he announces that having been given a rise at work, he is now ready to marry.

Part XIX. She relates her recent experiences in the Park with Captain Everard to Mr Mudge, and explains how she wants to protect him from danger. She also wants Mr Mudge to wait longer before they marry – at which Mudge is (understandably) miffed.

Part XX. Some weeks later Captain Everard returns to the post office. She feels that something is wrong, and possibly reaching a dramatic climax. Everard lingers in the shop, but they do not get a chance to speak to each other.

Part XXI. The same thing happens again later. She persuades herself that Everard is somehow trying to help her. She also interprets all his telegrams as signs of danger of some kind.

Part XXII. She thinks her services as Everard’s protector will come to an end, and she will be obliged to accept Mr Mudge. However, the very next day Everard arrives with an urgent telegram. Next day he comes back again saying he wants to recover a telegram sent some time ago.

Part XXIII. She procrastinates in trying to locate the telegram for him, but in the end supplies the information he needs. She has memorised it, because of her interest in his correspondence.

Part XXIV. During the late summer low season Mrs Jordan continues to boast about her connections with high society. She invites the young woman back to her humble rooms in Maida Vale. She is engaged to marry Mr Drake.

Part XXV. Mrs Jordan reveals that Mr Drake is due to be engaged (as a butler) by Lady Bradeen – who is a correspondent of Captain Everard’s via his telegrams. Lady Bradeen is due to marry Captain Everard, following quickly on the death of her husband. The two women ‘compare’ impressions of Lady Bradeen – who neither of them know.

Part XXVI. The two women then compare their own marriage prospects comeptatively. The young woman realises that they are both doomed to live in obscurity. Nevertheless, compared to Mrs Jordan, she feels fortunate.

Part XXVII. Mrs Jordan then reveals that Captain Everard has no money at all, but lots of debts, and was involved in a social scandal from which Lady Bradeen saved him – but forced him to marry her as the price for doing so.

The young woman departs, more glad than ever to have the prospect of her own home and marriage to Mr Mudge.

Other works by Henry James

The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
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The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
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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.
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Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

The 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

In the Orchard

September 6, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and full text

In the Orchard was written in 1923 – between the composition of Jacob’s Room (1922) and Mrs Dalloway (1925). It was first published in the magazine The Criterion in April 1923 – edited by he friend and fellow Bloomsbury Group member T.S. Eliot.

Virginia Woolf – by Vanessa Bell

In the Orchard – critical commentary

Structure

The story is in three parts, each one starting with the same words ‘Miranda slept in the orchard’. The external events alluded to remain the same in each section, but the images and leitmotifs, and to some extent the perspective changes in each section – which are only signaled by extra space between paragraphs.

Content

Part One – In this section the dominant motifs are sounds – the cries of the children learning multiplication tables; the church organ where Hymns Ancient and Modern are being played; the church bells when women are being churched; and the squeak of the weather vane on the church tower as the wind changes direction. These elements are also are also discussed on a vertical axis in relationship to each other.

Part Two – In this section the content is largely Miranda’s thoughts about herself in relationship to the world – on a cliff or in relationship to the sea. She perceives these elements as connected. But they are interspersed with some of the same elements from Part One – the children in school, the cry of the drunken man, the Hymns Ancient and Modern.

Part Three – In this section there is an almost geometric account of the orchard space itself, with the apple-trees growing out of the ground, birds flitting across between its walls, and an emphasis on the relationship between the earth and the air.

The elements of this piece are distinctly rural – an orchard, a village church, apple trees, the herding of cattle – though it has to be said that Virginia Woolf went on to produce the same effects in the urban landscape of Mrs Dalloway.

Biography

It should be noted that at a biographical level of commentary, all of the elements of this story would be available when sitting in the garden at Monk’s House, where Virginia Woolf was living at the time. The garden of the House is adjacent to both the church and the local school, and the whole area is surrounded by the working environment of farming and livestock production.

Style and experimentation

Virginia Woolf was very close to a number of painters who were members of the Bloomsbury Group – primarily her sister Vanessa Bell and Bell’s lover Duncan Grant, but also the painter and art theorist Roger Fry whose biography she wrote.

They were all interested in escaping the demand for descriptive detail in painting, and rendering only what Roger Fry called ‘essential form’. That is, they wanted to render only the basic visual elements of a composition. It was a step towards what we now call ‘abstraction’. In the Orchard is fairly clearly an experiment in doing something similar with prose, rather than paint.

In Woolf’s case she removes the normal substance of prose fiction – the element of a human being involved in some form of drama – and substitutes a combination of visual imagery, of philosophic reflections, and grammatical constructs which tie these elements together. This experimental story is an exercise in what might be called literary cubism – the same scene is viewed from different perspectives. It also has elements of what many people would probably wish to call ‘impressionism’ – the fleeting evocation of sounds, light, colours, and wind to create a sense of the flux of everyday existence.

When the breeze blew, her purple dress rippled like a flower attached to a stalk; the grasses nodded; and the white butterfly came blowing this way and tat just above her face.

The changing subject – the flitting from visual image to aural echo, and on to geographic context – from light and shade to chimes, and on to clouds or the waves of the sea – is a literary device she used in major works from Jacob’s Room (1922) to Between the Acts (1941). She made it her own – like a signature style.

The only other prominent modernist writer who used it (but at a far slower tempo) was Marcel Proust, and interestingly enough he was doing it at the same time in the volumes of A la recherche du temps perdus he published between 1913 and 1927 and which Virginia Woolf read with great enthusiasm.

Woolf also moves fluently between narrative modes – from third person omniscient to (briefly) first person, and then back again

and then she smiled and let her body sink all its weight in to the enormous earth which rises, she thought, to carry me on its back as if I were a leaf, or a queen (here the children said the multiplication table) …

The human element of fiction

There does appear to be a human subject in the narrative – Miranda in the orchard. But she is asleep (or may not be) and she has no more importance than the other elements of the narrative except as an object to which the focus of attention keeps returning.

It is a successful exercise, a sketch, a literary experiment to place alongside Monday or Tuesday or Kew Gardens. But it does emphasise the fact that the essence of fictional narratives (as distinct from word-painting and lyrical descriptions) is that we expect to find some sort of human drama enacted, no matter how simple or understated.

The nearest we get to this here is Miranda (provided that she is not asleep) enjoys a sort of epiphany when linking together the elements of her sense experiences and feeling a one-ness with the world around her. But it has to be said that the epiphany is more of the author’s making than enacted properly in Miranda’s consciousness. Woolf as author is making these connections between the earth, the air, the wind, the orchard, and even the cabbages. She does not persuade us that Miranda is conscious of them.

In the Orchard – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

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

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

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

In the Orchard – the text

Miranda slept in the orchard, lying in a long chair beneath the apple tree. Her book had fallen into the grass, and her finger still seemed to point at the sentence ‘Ce pays est vraiment un des coins du monde ou le rire des filles eclate le mieux. …’ as if she had fallen asleep just there. The opals on her finger flushed green, flushed rosy, and again flushed orange as the sun, oozing through the apple-trees, filled them. Then, when the breeze blew, her purple dress rippled like a flower attached to a stalk; the grasses nodded; and the white butterfly came blowing this way and that just above her face.

Four feet in the air above her head the apples hung. Suddenly there was a shrill clamour as if they were gongs of cracked brass beaten violently, irregularly, and brutally. It was only the school-children saying the multiplication table in unison, stopped by the teacher, scolded, and beginning to say the multiplication table over again. But this clamour passed four feet above Miranda’s head, went through the apple boughs, and, striking against the cowman’s little boy who was picking blackberries in the hedge when he should have been at school, made him tear his thumb on the thorns.

Next there was a solitary cry — sad, human, brutal. Old Parsley was, indeed, blind drunk.

Then the very topmost leaves of the apple-tree, flat like little fish against the blue, thirty feet above the earth, chimed with a pensive and lugubrious note. It was the organ in the church playing one of Hymns Ancient and Modern. The sound floated out and was cut into atoms by a flock of field-fares flying at an enormous speed — somewhere or other. Miranda lay asleep thirty feet beneath.

Then above the apple-tree and the pear-tree two hundred feet above Miranda lying asleep in the orchard bells thudded, intermittent, sullen, didactic, for six poor women of the parish were being churched and the Rector was returning thanks to heaven.

And above that with a sharp squeak the golden feather of the church tower turned from south to east. The wind changed. Above everything else it droned, above the woods, the meadows, the hills, miles above Miranda lying in the orchard asleep. It swept on, eyeless, brainless, meeting nothing that could stand against it, until, wheeling the other way, it turned south again. Miles below, in a space as big as the eye of a needle, Miranda stood upright and cried ‘Oh I shall be late for tea!’.

Miranda slept in the orchard — or perhaps she was not asleep, for her lips moved slightly, as if she were saying ‘Ce pays est vraiment un des coins du monde … ou le rire des filles … eclate … eclate … eclate’, and then she smiled and let her body sink all its weight in to the enormous earth which rises, she thought, to carry me on its back as if I were a leaf, or a queen (here the children said the multiplication table), or, Miranda went on, I might be lying on the top of a cliff with the gulls screaming above me. The higher they fly, she continued, as the teacher scolded the children and rapped Jimmy over the knuckles till they bled, the deeper they look into the sea — into the sea she repeated, and her fingers relaxed and her lips closed gently as if she were floating on the sea, and then, when the shout of the drunken man sounded overhead, she drew breath with an extraordinary ecstasy, for she thought she had heard life itself crying out from a rough tongue in a scarlet mouth, from the wind, from the bells, from the curved green leaves of the cabbages.

Naturally she was being married when the organ played the tune from Hymns Ancient and Modern, and, when the bells rang after the six poor women had been churched, the sullen intermittent thud made her think that the very earth shook with the hoofs of the horse that was galloping towards her (‘Ah, I have only to wait!’ she sighed), and it seemed to her that everything had already begun moving, crying, riding, flying around her, across her, towards her in a pattern.

Mary is chopping the wood, she thought; Pearman is herding the cows; the carts are coming up from the meadows; the rider — and she traced out the lines that the men, the carts, the birds, and the rider made over the countryside until they all seemed driven out, round, and across by the beat of her own heart.

Miles up in the air the wind changed; the golden feather of the church tower squeaked; and Miranda jumped up and cried ‘Oh I shall be late for tea!’

Miranda slept in the orchard, or was she asleep or was she not asleep? Her purple dress stretched between the two apple-trees. There were twenty-four apple-trees/in the orchard, some slanting slightly, others growing straight with a rush up the trunk which spread wide into branches and formed into red or yellow drops. Each apple-tree had sufficient space. The sky exactly fitted the leaves. When the breeze blew, the line of the boughs against the wall slanted slightly and then returned. A wagtail flew diagonally from one corner to another. Cautiously hopping, a thrush advanced towards a fallen apple; from the other wall a sparrow fluttered just above the grass. The uprush of the trees was tied down by these movements; the whole was compacted by the orchard walls. For miles beneath the earth was clamped together; rippled on the surface with wavering air; and across the corner of the orchard the blue-green was slit by a purple streak. The wind changing, one bunch of apples was tossed so high that it blotted out two cows in the meadow (‘Oh, I shall be late for tea!’ cried Miranda), and the apples hung straight across the wall again.

Writing – I

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition

Other works by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
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Orlando (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’.
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Kew 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.
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Virginia 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..
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Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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 at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Jersey Villas

August 21, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Jersey Villas was first published in Cosmopolitan Magazine in July—August 1892. Its next appearance in book form was as part of the collection The Real Thing and Other Stories, published by Macmilla in New York and London the following year in 1893. When it appeared in book form it was given a different title – Sir Dominick Ferrand.

It is one of a number of tales which James wrote on the theme of private papers and letters, the practice of biography, and the rights of an individual to privacy, even after death. James created a bonfire of his own personal papers in the fear of what writers and critics might find out about his private life after his demise. Of course we now know that he had a lot more to hide than was hitherto thought.

A davenport desk

Jersey Villas – critical commentary

The story is composed of two dramatic elements. The first is Peter Baron’s discovery of the letters in his writing desk, and his dilemma regarding what to do with them – to publish them, sell them, or hand them over to his editor Mr Locket. The second element is his developing romantic relationship with Mrs Ryves, which is reinforced by his writing a successful libretto for her musical composition.

For the first-time reader there is a dramatic tension (or mystery) in how these two elements are going to be related. James seems to be hinting at some mystical or intuitive connection between Mrs Ryves and Baron’s dealings with the letters. She is agitated or distressed whenever he tries to make a decision about them. There is also something of a mystery about her claims to be leaving Jersey Villas, followed by her failure to do so.

Her connection with the letters and her indecision about staying or leaving the Villas is easily explained at a later stage. She is the illegitimate daughter of Sir Dominick Ferrand, and the revelation of his private mis-doings will (or might) adversely affect her. She senses that Baron has discovered something and visits him on a ‘sudden fancy’ to check. Then as soon as he has told her about breaking the seals, she leaves the Villas and goes to Dover, where she is ‘looking at the Calais boat’ whilst in discussion with him. In other words, she is planning her escape to ‘Europe’ (which was considered a different world in the nineteenth century).

All the hints and development within the plot suggest that her erratic behaviour is the result of her knowing that Baron has her father’s letters. This explains why she is so keen that he burn them, and once she is secure in the knowledge that he has done so, she can relax and form a relationship with him.

But this interpretation of the story, which is certainly invited by the events of the story, rests on two or three flaws, and it is distinctly possible that James is playing fast and loose with his famous ambiguity and evasiveness in this instance. To begin with, at no point does Mrs Ryves know who has written the letters. There is no writing on the outside of the letters, and they are in packets that are sealed. She even tells Baron that she doesn’t want to know who wrote them.

It might be argued that she recognises the letters, or even that the davenport Baron bought originally belonged to her father. But there is also nothing in the text to support either of these two explanations – and she she is not raised in her paternal home, so it is very unlikely that any form of ‘recognition’ takes place.

Jersey Villas – study resources

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

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

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

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

Jersey Villas – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Jersey Villas – plot summary

Part I. Aspiring writer Peter Baron has been summoned by Mr Locket, the editor of The Promiscuous Review, to make changes to a story he has submitted. That morning he has made the acquaintence of Mrs Ryves, a fellow lodger of Mrs Bundy at Jersey Villas, a suburban lodging house. After his meeting with the editor, he walks down the Kings Road, dreaming of refurbishing his humble rooms. On the strength of his submitted story, he buys a small second-hand davenport, which he hopes could inspire his literary creation.

Part II. Baron befriends Mrs Ryves and her son, and he writes lyrics for the songs she composes as an amateur pianist, guiltily conscious that he ought to be correcting his story for the magazine. He discovers that the davenport has a false back, where he finds packets of old letters. When Mrs Ryves calls, claiming she has been worried about him, he decides to tell her about his discovery. She urges him to keep the letters, and claims that she felt an instinct to ‘save’ the papers. And yet she also suggests that he burn them.

Part III. Ten days later Baron visits Mr Locket and tells him he has new materials on Sir Dominick Farrand, an eminent stateman. He insists that they are genuine and not forgeries. Locket does not think the public will be much interested in him now that he is dead. Baron insists that he was a complex person, and that the letters reveal some dubious political dealings, as he had received money from people to whom he had awarded contracts. They also reveal evidence of an extra-marital affair. Baron and Locket circle round each other inconclusively over what is to be done.

Part IV. When Mrs Ryves goes to Dover, Baron asks Mrs Bundy for information about her, but gets very little information. So he goes to Dover, where he meets Mrs Ryves with her son Sydney and Miss Teagle, a governess to Sydney. He reproaches Mrs Ryves for disappearing as soon as he made his discovery known to her. She claims that the papers ‘haunt’ her. He cannot understand why she is bothered about them at all. He wants to ask her to marry him, but realises that he has nothing to offer her.

Part V. Next day Mr Locket turns up and ‘borrows’ the letters, which makes Baron anxious about his motives. Mrs Ryves writes from Dover about their musical collaboration. Then Locket summons him and offers £100 for the letters. Baron is conflicted over his options: he is badly in debt and needs the money, but he can see Locket profiteering from his advantageous position as influential editor.

Part VI. When Baron returns to Jersey Villas he finds Mrs Ryves who claims she is packing to leave, but doesn’t appear to be doing so. He takes her out to dinner and the theatre, and later tries to improve his chances with her, but she puts him off.

Part VII. Mr Locket turns up again next morning with an offer increased to £300, whilst meanwhile Mrs Ryves is leaving the Villas. Baron tries to plea bargain with Locket for his fiction to be accepted as part of the deal. Locket at first refuses, then gives in. But on reflection, Baron feels that it would be wrong to make money out of exposing someone’s reputation to disgrace, and he burns the letters.

Mrs Ryves returns to say that a music publisher has accepted their joint composition and wants more of the same. They share the £50 fee and at Dover return to the question of their future. She reveals that she is a ‘poor girl’ with no money, family, or friends. She ultimately rveals that she is the illegitimate daughter of Sir Dominick Ferrand. After a probationary period, they marry, have success in music publishing, and Baron even manages to get some of his fiction published in magazines.

Jersey Villas – principal characters

Peter Baron	an aspiring young writer
Mr Locket	editor of The Promiscuous Review
Mrs Ryves	a poor widow and pianist
Sydney	her young son
Mrs Bundy	landlady at Jersey Villas
Miss Teagle	governess to Sydney

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.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Henry James – The Complete Tales
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John Delavoy

March 27, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

John Delavoy was first published in Cosmopolis magazine for January—February in 1898. It is one of the many stories Henry James wrote towards the end of the century that are concerned with literary life, critical reputations, the relationship between authors and biography, and the actual profession of ‘letters’ in its commercial workings. (Others include The Aspern Papers (1888), The Coxon Fund (1894), The Death of the Lion (1894), The Figure in the Carpet (1896), and The Abasement of the Northmores (1900),

James was intensely concerned with his own literary reputation, which had taken a powerful knock when he was booed off stage when taking the author’s bow at the first night of his play Guy Domville in 1895. He took great care in revising his own work, and both rewrote his own novels and composed powerfully defensive prefaces to them when they were published in the twenty-four volume New York edition of his selected works in 1910. John Delavoy deals with the relationship between author and magazine editor, where financial and aesthetic objectives sometimes produced dramatic collisions.

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

John Delavoy – critical commentary

The narrative

The story at its outset seems destined to be relayed via the account of yet another of Henry James’s unreliable narrators. It begins with not one but two false identifications in the theatre. The narrator’s companion mistakes Beston for Lord Yarrocombe, and then the narrator himself assumes Miss Delavoy to be Delavoy’s wife, when she is in fact his sister.

Moreover, the narrator is full of false confidence and self-importance. Speaking of his own article, he describes it as

a summary of the subject, deeply interesting and treated, as I thought, with extraordinary art, of the work to which I gave the highest place in my author’s array.

And yet in the end he does not turn out to be unreliable. His rival the editor Beston is revealed as vulgar and unprincipled. He wishes to profit from Delavoy’s reputation as a novelist, but will not allow any examination of what he is famous for – his work – on the grounds that ‘relations between the sexes’ has no place in his magazine The Cynosure. The narrator (and Miss Delavoy) are presented as those who truly value the novelist’s work

James’s inspiration for this story sprang out of a similar conflict he had endured after writing an article on Alexander Dumas. A publisher turned it down on the grounds that the content of Dumas’s work was not acceptable. James records his own reaction and the germs for his inspiration in his Notebooks:

Oh the whole thing does open up as a donnée! Their hope that one would have given a ‘personal’ account of a distinguished man, a mere brief, reserved, simply intelligible statement of the subject matter [of] whose work is too scandalous to print. They want to seem to deal with him because he is famous—and he is famous because he wrote certain things which they won’t for the world have intelligibly mentioned. So they desire the supreme though clap-trap tribute of an intimate picture, without even the courage of saying on what ground they desire any mention of him at all.

So James settled the historical score against short-sighted magazine editors, yet curiously enough he didn’t match the achievement of his far more sombre tales. There is no ironic distance between narrator and the narrative he delivers. We are forced to take what he says at face value, and are led into accepting the story as a mildly amusing spat between upholders of aesthetic value and managers of the literary marketplace.

A secondary theme

It’s interesting to note that the themes of authorship, biography, and reputation are also linked with a recurrent preoccupation of James’s at the time – the question of whether to marry or not. In stories such as The Beast in the Jungle, Owen Wingrave, and The Altar of the Dead the decision to avoid marriage is seen as leading to emotional bankruptcy and even death. These powerful tales are generally regarded as amongst the highest achievements of James as an author of short stories.

James Delavoy is altogether lighter in tone, and we are given every reason to believe that the conclusion of the narrative is to be taken as a positive outcome which has resulted in marriage. The narrator reports ‘we had achived the union that—at least for resistance or endurance—is supposed to be strength’ He and Miss Delavoy are united in their admiration for the novelist’s work, and have that as intellectual comfort in the face of Beston’s empty triumph on The Cynosure with his crass pursuit of readership and cheap publicity.

Yet comparison with stories offering more sombre variations on the same theme reveals their amazing strength, John Delavoy is not nearly so aesthetically satisfying as Owen Wingrave, or The Beast in the Jungle. The conclusion to the story is amazingly rushed – as if James had lost interest in his subject and was eager to get it out of the way.

In fact the pencil sketch over which they have expended so much emotional energy is first described by the narrator ‘as a flower in the coat of a bridegroom’. Defenders of James’s achievement in this story might well wish to quote this as a clever pre-echo of the outcome, or even a sub-conscious wish on the part of the narrator.

James never did marry, but he certainly gave the matter a lot of thought. In this story he gives artistic expression to a heterosexual relationship with a positive if conventional outcome. But as an artistic resolution it does not seem persuasive or satisfying – as if he couldn’t really quite believe in it himself.

John Delavoy – study resources

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

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

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

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

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

Selected Tales – Penguin Classics edition – Amazon UK

John Delavoy – print on demand reissue – Amazon UK

John Delavoy – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

John Delavoy – plot summary

An un-named narrator has written a literary appreciation of John Delavoy, a novelist who has recently died. At the first night performance of an unsuccessful play he sees Miss Delavoy, the novelist’s sister who is in morning for her brother. She is accompanied by Mr Beston, the editor of The Cynosure a literary magazine.

When the narrator visits Beston he persuades him to accept an article on Delavoy to make the public aware of his greatness. Beston is reluctant, but agrees on condition that Miss Delavoy approves it first – which she does.

Publication is delayed however, and Miss Delavoy is upset on the narrator’s behalf. She has drawn a sketch of Delavoy, the only known portrait, which is offered to Beston as an inducement to adorn the article and speed up publication.

But when the essay is set in galley proofs, Beston rejects it as unacceptable on the grounds that it is ‘indecent’ because it deals with ‘relations between the sexes’. He wants Miss Delavoy to write instead a personal memoir of her brother which will include lightweight gossip for his readers.

Miss Delavoy and the narrator are both outraged at this suggestion. She asks the narrator to be present at a meeting with Beston where she insists that he print the article. She also threatens to withdraw permission to use the portrait.

But Beston puts the interests of his circulation figures above all else, refuses to give in, and obviously has no appreciation of John Delavoy at all. The narrator tries to recover the portrait from him, but fails.

The portrait appears in the magazine, accompanied by a couple of pages of lightweight comment, and proves to be a big success. The narrator publishes his original article elsewhere – to little effect – but by way of compensation it is strongly implied that he marries Miss Delavoy.

Principal characters

I	the un-named narrator, a writer and literary critic
Windon	an unsuccessful dramatist
John Delavoy	an ‘immense novelist’ who has recently died
Miss Delavoy	his sister
Mr Beston	editor of The Cynosure, a literary magazine

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

&copy Roy Johnson 2012

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jorge Luis Borges biography

December 6, 2010 by Roy Johnson

essayist, librarian, master of the modern short story

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) – full name Jorge Francisco Isodoro Luis Borges Acevedo – was born in Buenos Aires Argentina into an educated middle-class family. His father was a lawyer and a teacher of psychology who was part Spanish, part Portuguese, and half English. His mother was Uruguayan of Spanish descent. They lived in a lower-class suburb famous for its cabarets, brothels, knife fights and the tango.

He grew up in a house speaking both English and Spanish (as a child he thought they were the same language) and was he taught at home until he was eleven years old. The family lived in a large house with over one thousand volumes in English in its library. Despite the raffish nature of the neighbourhood, Borges reflected later in life that the two principal features of his childhood were his father’s library and a large garden – both of which feature prominently in his writing.

When he was only nine years old Borges translated Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince into Spanish, and it was published in a local journal. His friends all thought it was the work of his father.

In 1914 the family moved to Geneva, Switzerland where his father was seeking treatment for his failing eyesight. Borges attended school, learned French, read Carlyle in English, and began to study philosophy in German. The family travelled to Spain, and because of political unrest in Argentina at the time, decided to stay in Switzerland during the war.

Jorge Luis Borges received his baccalauréate from the College de Geneve in 1918. The family stayed in Europe after the war, living in Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid. Whilst in Spain Borges became attracted to the avant garde Ultraist literary movement inspired by Appolinaire and Marinetti. He also published his first poems.

In 1921 the family returned to Buenos Aires, where Borges published his first collection of poems Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923) a sixty-four page booklet paid for by his father and with a cover designed by his sister Norah. There was no profit made from this enterprise: he simply gave the book away to anybody who was interested. He produced journalism, essays, and book reviews, and contributed to the avant-garde review Martin Fierro.

The family returned to Switzerland in 1923 so that his father could resume treatment for his eyes, and when they returned to Argentina the following year, Borges discovered that he had developed a reputation as poet on the strength of his first book. In 1929 his book Cuaderno San Martin won a Municipal Prize, the prize money for which he spent on a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica.

In 1931 Borges began publishing in the literary journal Sur established by Victoria Ocampo, which helped him to establish his literary reputation. He wrote works including parodies of detective stories with another Argentinean writer Adolfo Bioy Casares under the name H. Bustos Domecq. He also began to explore existential themes in his work, drawing a great deal of his inspiration not from his own personal life, but from his experience of literature.

He was appointed editor at the literary supplement of newspaper Critica in 1933 where he published works that were a blend of non-fictional essays and short stories. These were later collected under the title of A Universal History of Infamy (1936). The collection explored two types of writing. The first used a combination of the essay and the short story to tell what were really true stories. The second were literary spoofs or forgeries – texts which he passed off as translations of little-known works, but which were in fact his own inventions.

In 1935 he published the prototype of what is now considered a typical ‘Borgesian’ short story – ‘The Approach to Mu’tasim – a review of an imaginary novel. He had been influenced by his reading of Thomas Carlyle’s Sator Resartus, a book comprised of reflections on the work and life of an imaginary German philosopher. It is a mark of Borges preference for shorter literary genres (and what he jokingly called his ‘laziness’) that rather than creating complete imaginary works, he thought it was more inventive to conjure up their existence by writing reviews of them as if they actually existed.

Between 1936 and 1939 he wrote a weekly column for El Hogar, and in 1939 found work as an assistant in the Buenos Aires Municipal Library. His duties were so light he could complete them in the first hour. He spent the rest of the day in the basement, writing and translating the work of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner into Spanish. His first volume of short stories The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) collected work he had previously published in Sur.

His eyesight began to fade in the late 1930s and, unable to support himself as a writer, he began giving public lectures. He lived with his widowed mother, who became his personal secretary. Although he relied a great deal on his imaginative responses to literature, he never learned to read Braille. He became completely blind by the late 1950s.

When Juan Peron came to power in 1946 Borges was ‘promoted’ to the job of Inspector of Rabbits and Poultry in the Public Markets, a post from which he immediately resigned. He was elected to the presidency of the Argentine Writer’s Society in 1950 and given the job of director of the National Library in 1955, even though he was by that time completely blind.

Some of his work was translated into English during the 1940s and 1950s, but his international reputation dates from the early 1960s when he was awarded the International Publisher’s Prize, the Prix Formentor – which he shared with Samuel Beckett. He was appointed for a year to the Chair of literature at the University of Texas at Austin, and went on to give lecture tours in America and Europe.

Two major anthologies of his work were published in 1962 – Ficciones and Layrinths – which further enhanced his international reputation. In 1967 Borges embarked on a five year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni which helped to make his work better known in the English-speaking world.

Then in 1967 Jorge Luis Borges married an old friend Elsa Astete Millan who had become a widow, but the marriage only lasted three years. Borges went back to his mother, with whom he lived until her death at the age of almost one hundred. He travelled extensively on lecture tours, and published further collections of his work – The Book of Sand, Dr Brodie’s report, and The Book of Imaginary Beings.

In 1986, a few months before his death, he married his literary assistant Maria Kodama, who thereby gained control of his literary estate and the considerable income from it. Despite international protests, she rescinded all publishing rights for the existing collections of his work and commissioned new translations.

More on Jorge Luis Borges
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Joseph Conrad prose style

March 18, 2014 by Roy Johnson

how to start analysing prose style

Joseph Conrad was famous for his prose style – yet English was his third language, the first two being Polish and French. He was not unlike the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who began writing in his native Russian, then switched to French, and finally started writing in English when he emigrated to America in 1940. Both of these authors are widely regarded as great prose stylists and masters of the English language.

Nevertheless, it is not unusual for some readers to complain about the difficulties they feel in grappling with Conrad’s style when encountering his writing for the first time. It’s true that his writing is not the clearest and easiest to understand: in fact a liking for his style is something of an acquired taste. But it is possible to come to terms with the difficulties he presents (the long, complex sentences and abstract language) with concentration, thoughtful reflection, and practice.

The tutorial notes that follow are one way of diffusing these problems by analysing some technical aspects of Conrad’s prose style. They are in no way rigorous or systematic: there are other types of close reading and analysis which can throw light on aspects of a writer’s prose style (see the examples listed below).

The extract which follows is from the opening pages of Conrad’s early story An Outpost of Progress, first published in 1897. It deals with two European characters who have recently arrived at a trading station somewhere in central Africa. If you wish to read the complete story in conjunction with these tutorial notes, it is available free at Project Gutenberg.

An Outpost of Progress

First edition – J.M.Dent & Sons 1912

Sample text

The two men watched the steamer round the bend, then, ascending arm in arm the slope of the bank, returned to the station. They had been in this vast and dark country only a very short time, and as yet always in the midst of other white men, under the eye and guidance of their superiors. And now, dull as they were to the subtle influences of surroundings, they felt themselves very much alone, when suddenly left unassisted to face the wilderness; a wilderness rendered more strange, more incomprehensible by the mysterious glimpses of the vigorous life it contained. They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one’s kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one’s thoughts, of one’s sensations—to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike.

Joseph Conrad prose style – analysis

Sentence length
Some of the sentences here are quite long – particularly the last. This is because he is expressing quite complex ideas or generating a very charged atmosphere. But they are not all long: the first, which deals with an action by characters, is much shorter.

Narrative mode
Conrad adopts the common third person omniscient narrative mode. That is, he tells us what his characters do, how they feel, and what they think. But you might notice that statements such as the one begriming ‘Few men realise’ is of a different kind than, say, ‘The two men watched’. Conrad stops telling the story for a moment and is offering us his opinion. In fact everything else up to the end of the paragraph is Conrad’s own general view of the world. He suddenly becomes what is called an ‘intrusive narrator’ at this point. He intervenes in his own narrative to comment on the story and offer his philosophic reflections on life in general.

It’s easy to overlook this distinction when engaged with the drama of the narrative, but it has an important bearing on our interpretation of the story. That’s because these intrusions into the story help him to project a particular view of the world – which add up to an ideology.

Language
You will probably notice that he uses a number of terms which will cause most people to think ‘Now what exactly does he mean by that?’ These are expressions such as ‘irresistible force’, ‘unmitigated savagery’, ‘negation of the habitual’, and ‘discomposing intrusion’. What make these difficult to grasp at first is that he is switching from the very concrete and specific descriptions of the two men and the trading station to an abstract and very general consideration of their moral condition.

This is almost the language of philosophy. The terms ‘force’, ‘savagery’, ‘habitual’, and ‘intrusion’ are all abstract nouns. We are not necessarily conscious of this whilst reading the text, but they take us away from the ‘story’ and force us to consider rather large scale social reflections.

In fact the combination of rather unusual and powerful adjective qualifying an abstract noun – ‘unmitigated savagery, ‘profound trouble’ – is a ‘trade mark’ of Conrad’s prose style. You will see many other examples in almost all his stories and novels.

Prose rhythm
In prose writing, rhythm is easier to feel than to define. You do not need to go into all the technical detail of stress analysis as you might with poetry, but it should be possible to sense that Conrad puts a lot of rhythmic emphasis into what he writes, using a number of literary devices more commonly found in poetry:

alliteration
repetition
balanced clauses

Alliteration
‘The courage, the composure, the confidence’ is a fairly obvious example of alliteration, with an insistent stress falling on the initial letter c in each of these words. Notice too that they are all abstract nouns.

Repetition
The expression ‘with primitive nature and primitive man’ combines both alliteration (in the initial letter p) with repetition of the word ‘primitive’ itself. You might also note that his use of the second ‘primitive’ here throws the emphasis onto the word that follows it – ‘man’. There are plenty of other examples of the same thing in this paragraph: ‘more strange, more incomprehensible’ and ‘every great and every insignificant’ are just two.

Repetition is just one of the rhetorical devices at work here: and rhetoric is ‘the art of speakers or writers to persuade, inform, or motivate their audience’.

Balanced clauses
The rather long sentences in this passage also contain a different kind of repetition – that is, clauses which are similar to each other in grammatical construction. These are sometimes called ‘balanced clauses’. The final sentence begins with the phrase ‘To the sentiment of being alone’, and in order to ‘tug’ us through the fairly lengthy reflection that follows Conrad repeats the initial ‘to’ and the construction of the clause of which it is a part. So we have, ‘To the sentiment of being … to the clear perception … to the negation of the habitual’.

Finally, look at the construction of the sentence that begins ‘Few men realise that their life’. Conrad wants to explain what he has in mind by using the term ‘life’, so he inserts two clauses which expand the notion. But in doing so, and whilst we are so to speak ‘waiting’ for the end of the sentence, his terms of expansion are nicely balanced: ‘the very essence of their character’ (with its emphasis falling on ‘essence’ and ‘character’, is paralleled by the following clause ‘their capabilities and their audacities’ with the emphasis falling again on two abstract nouns.

The abstraction forces readers into a quasi-philosophical mode of thinking about ‘life’. What exactly does he mean by people’s ‘capabilities’ and ‘audacities’? His answers will come from the events of the narrative itself – which show his two characters to be lazy, stupid, and moral cowards. This appears to ‘prove’ or at least justify his judgements about human beings and society in general – which is part of any writer’s conscious or unconscious objective.

Studying Fiction is an introduction to the basic concepts and the language you will need for studying prose fiction. It explains the elements of literary analysis one at a time, then shows you how to apply them. The guidance is carefully graded, starting from simple issues of language then progressing to more complex issues. The single volume contains stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Katherine Mansfield, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and Charles Dickens. All of them are excellent tales in their own right. The guidance notes on this page were written by the same author.
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Close reading exercises

Sample close reading of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House

Sample close reading of Katherine Mansfield’s The Voyage

Sample close reading of Virginia Woolf’s Monday or Tuesday

Other novels by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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His Father’s Son – study resources

His Father’s Son – story synopsis

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Further reading

Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton – web links

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Honeymoon – critical commentary

Honeymoon – study resources

Honeymoon – plot summary

Katherine Mansfield – web links

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Il Conde – critical commentary

Il Conde – study resources

Il Conde – plot summary

Joseph Conrad – video biography

Principal characters

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Further reading

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad links

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

In the Cage – critical commentary

In the Cage – study resources

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Further reading

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Henry James – web links

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In the Orchard – critical commentary

In the Orchard – study resources

In the Orchard – the text

Writing – I

Further reading

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf – web links

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Jersey Villas – critical commentary

Jersey Villas – study resources

Jersey Villas – plot summary

Jersey Villas – principal characters

Further reading

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

John Delavoy – critical commentary

John Delavoy – study resources

John Delavoy – plot summary

Principal characters

Further reading

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

essayist, librarian, master of the modern short story

how to start analysing prose style

Sample text

Joseph Conrad prose style – analysis

Close reading exercises

Other novels by Joseph Conrad

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