The Short Story Archives - Page 14 of 31

Journey Back to the Source

January 19, 2015 by Roy Johnson

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

Journey Back to the Source (Viaje al semilla) was written in 1944, but first published in 1963 in Havana, Cuba as part of the collection entitled The War of Time – Guerra del tiempo (1963). This was a group of stories all told in radically different styles, first published in English by Victor Gollancz in 1970 and translated from the original Spanish by the Bloomsbury Group diarist Frances Partridge.

Journey Back to the Source – critical commentary

The principal conceit of this tale is that it is a narrative in which time goes backwards. The main story starts with the death of Don Marcial and finishes with his birth. With one or two minor exceptions, Carpentier delivers this chronological illusion very successfully. Candles don’t burn, but regain their full size; a piano becomes a clavichord; Don Marcial gets younger and younger, until the very furniture in his house dwarfs him as a child.

In the penultimate section of the story this reversal of time accelerates very rapidly. Don Marcial as an infant re-enters his mother’s body; furniture reverts to trees in the forest; and then all animal and plant life returns to its origins.

But in fact the composition of the story is a little more complex than this conceit would suggest. The life-history-in-reverse is bookended by two brief sections in conventional chronological sequence, describing first the demolition of Don Marcial’s house after his death, and later the flat plot of land on which it once stood. The story is an amusing meditation on time and causality – but it is situated within a rational framework of normal temporality.

It is worth noting (particularly because it is so little acknowledged) that it was Carpentier who coined the term ‘magical realism’ (lo real maravilloso) in which the concrete, real world becomes suffused with fantasy elements, myths, dreams, and a fractured sense of time and logic. This story is a good example of the literary genre. For a more extended example of its kind, see his 1940 novel, The Kingdom of this World (El reino de este mundo).

Journey Back to the Source – study resources

Journey Back to the Source is one of five stories contained in the collection The War of Time. The other four stories are Right of Sanctuary (1967), The Road to Santiago (1948), Like the Night (1947), and The Wise Men (1967).

Journey Back to the Source – at Amazon UK – (text in English)

Viaje al semilla – at Amazon UK – (Text in Spanish)

Journey Back to the Source – at Amazon US – (Text in English)

Viaje al semilla – at Amazon US – (Text in Spanish)

Journey Back to the Source – plot summary

Part 1. An old Negro sits in a garden where he watches an ancient house in the process of being demolished.

Part 2. In a reversal of time, the house is re-assembled, and the man enters the house where Don Marcial, its owner, is lying on his death bed.

Part 3. Don Marcial gradually recovers and retracts the dying confession he has made to his priest. His mistress gets out of bed, gets dressed, and leaves the house. He stands before the mirror and doesn’t feel well. He is oppressed by the legal documentation involved in the sale of his house.

Part 4. He has taken a mistress following a period of mourning after the death of his wife. Relatives and friends gather to mark her passing. The house and its contents grow younger.

Part 5. Don Marcial and the Marquesa get to know each other in the early days of their marriage. They move back into the city from their country estate and get married. Friends take their presents back home and Don Marcial lives in his house alone as a bachelor.

Part 6. He feels under the weather after celebrating his minority with friends. They get dressed up in old clothes from the attic and hold a musical party where he flirts with a young girl. Earlier, along with his male friends, he has visited a dance hall.

Part 7. Don Marcial only does moderately well in his college examinations, and then learns less and less at school. When he leaves the seminary he enters a period of spiritual doubt and emotional crisis.

Part 8. The furniture in his house grows taller. He begins to play with toy soldiers, and takes to sitting on the floor and hiding under the clavichord.

Part 9. He is given extra pastries one day, then sees servants carrying a coffin into the house. He visits his father who is ill in bed. He then recalls his father’s former talents and sexual misdeeds with a servant.

Part 10. The infant Don Marciale has a close relationship with the household servant Melchor, with whom he shares secrets.

Part 11. When Melchor is not there, his closest friends are the household dogs, with whom he shares his life. He begins using baby-talk.

Part 12. He forgets his own name, and before his christening exists in a world of touch alone. Then the natural world around him turns back to its roots and origins, leaving a blank where his house once stood.

Part 13. The next day the demolition crew return to find the house has gone, and time progressing in its normal manner.

Alejo Carpentier

Alejo Carpentier web links

Carpentier at Wikipedia
Background, biography, magical realism, major works, literary style, further reading

Carpentier at Amazon UK
Novels, criticism, and interviews – in Spanish and English

The Kingdom of this World
Lecture by Rod Marsh – University of Cambridge

Carpentier at Internet Movie Database
Films and TV movies made from his novels

Carpentier in Depth
Spanish video documentary and interview with Carpentier (1977)

More on Alejo Carpentier
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

Julia Bride

June 9, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Julia Bride first appeared in Harper’s Magazine in March-April 1908. It is collected in Volume XII of The Complete Tales of Henry James (Rupert Hart-Davis) 1964.

The Metropolitan Museum – Frank Waller (1842-1923)

Julia Bride – critical commentary

The woman question

Readers of this story will not fail to recognise its similarity to Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth which was published three years earlier. Henry James was great friend and admirer of his fellow American writer, and her heroine Lily Bart faces very similar problems to those of Julia Bride. However, Wharton takes her heroine’s situation to a further extreme than James. Lily Bart is actually reduced to working for her living, and is so unused to it she becomes a drug addict. This is something James seems almost to hint at in his remarks to his ‘Preface’ to the New York Edition of his Collected Works:

Julia is ‘foreshortened’, I admit, to within an inch of her life; but I judge her life still saved and yet at the same time the equal desideratum, its depicted full fusion with other lives that remain undepicted, not lost.

This seems to be Henry James’s way of saying that this is a short story – not the more fully developed novella or the full length novel that Edith Wharton brought off so successfully. He cannot pretend to encompass the full resolution of Julia Bride’s situation or those of the people who surround her. So technically, the story ends in an unresolved state.

But there seems to be very little alternative to seeing her story as a tragedy with a fairly conclusive ending. After all, it is very unlikely that a young woman with such a disreputable family background, no money, and six failed engagements behind her would ever find success in the upper echelons of old-fashioned and hidebound American society.

Julia is caught in the pincer movement of the new possibilities of social fluidity, class mobility, and personal freedoms offered by American society, and the rigid ethics, snobbery, and financially-based social codes that America had imported from Europe.

New social movements such as divorce and re-marriage are available under the freedoms of an open, democratic, and republican society which has freed itself from the organizational shackles of its European forebears. It is even possible to become engaged more than once. But the deeper ideological undercurrents of this society are deeply enmeshed in capital accumulation and preserving status via intermarriage amongst an elite class.

As is commonly remarked amongst commentators on this story, Julia will always be a Bride, but it is unlikely she will ever get married.

Public places

It is worth noting that the main events of the story are enacted in very public places. The narrative begins in the Metropolitan Museum and its denouement takes place in Central Park. Julia is able to talk to Basil French and then Mr Pitman without putting her reputation at risk, because they are in public view in the museum. She then arranges to meet Murray Brush in the Park for similar reasons.

At the end of the nineteenth century and even the beginning of the twentieth, young unmarried people had to be very circumspect about who they met, and in what circumstances. This was particularly true for women. A hidden irony in this story is that Julia has already compromised herself socially by having six previous engagements.

Even visits to family homes had to be carefully orchestrated so as not to give rise to any social comment, and of course the visit itself would be carefully monitored for both content and duration. This explains the frequency with which broughams and cabs outside someone’s front door are featured in stories and novels of the period. The livery of the vehicle would be a clear indication of ownership. It was a society in which everybody knew everybody else’s business, and social reputations were held in very high esteem – albeit often at a theoretical level.

Of course all this only pertained to the very small social elite which constituted the upper class and the aristocracy of a given European or American society. This is one of the things which makes novels a rich form of social history – because they include a record of the manners and morals of this part of society at the time, the details and social nuances of which are not easily obtainable elsewhere.

Julia Bride – study resources

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

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

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

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

Julia Bride – Digireads reprint – Amazon UK

Julia Bride – eBook at Project Gutenberg

Julia Bride – read the story on line

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

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

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Julia Bride – plot summary

Part I. Julia Bride is being courted by Basil French, the son of a wealthy but very traditional New York family. They meet in the Metropolitan Museum then part leaving her worried. He wants to know more about her background, and she is reluctant to let him know that her mother has been divorced twice (and is soon likely to be so for a third time). Moreover Julia herself has been engaged six times. In the museum she meets Mr Pitman, her mother’s second husband, with whom she has remained friendly.

Part II. She hopes he might be able to help her out of her social dilemma, but in fact he wants her to help him in a similar but contradictory manner. He asks her to plead his innocence with Mrs Drack, a wealthy widow who he hopes to marry. Julia in her turn wants Pitman to eradicate in the eyes of Basil French both her mother’s guilt in her divorce, and her own six previous engagements – largely by telling lies. Julia feels kindly disposed to Pitman, and ends up singing his praises to Mrs Drack. At Pitman’s suggestion Julia then contacts Murray Brush, the most recent of her ex-fiancées and asks him to announce publicly that their relationship was only ever one of close friendship. She hopes this will effectively wipe her slate clean so far as Basil French is concerned.

Part III. Brush readily agrees, and for good measure announces that he is going to be married to Mary Lindeck. He wants Julia to meet her and promises that she will help in their endeavour. But as this apparently successful meeting continues, Julia begins to feel that Murray is agreeing to her plan in the hope of meeting the much richer Frenches with a view to socially advancing himself and his wife to be. Julia is devastated by this realisation, feels that she is doomed to failure, and is left in a tragically sentimental admiration of Basil French – a man who can have such an effect of others, and whom she will never gain.

Principal characters

Julia Bride	a beautiful single young American girl with a chequered past
Mrs Connery	her mother (47) who has been divorced twice
Mr Pitman	the second of her mother’s husbands
Basil French	the rich young son of a wealthy traditional family
Mr Connery	Julia’s mother’s third husband – ‘irrepressibly vulgar’
Mrs David E. Drack	a wealthy and overweight widow
Murray Brush	Julia’s most recent ex-financé
Mary Lindeck	Murray Brush’s fiancée

Henry James and Edith Wharton go motoring

Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karain: A Memory

October 4, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, characters, and study resources

Karain: A Memory was written in February-April 1897 and published in the November 1897 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine. Its first appearance in book form was as part of Tales of Unrest published by in 1898, which was Conrad’s first collection of stories. The other stories in the book were The Idiots, An Outpost of Progress, The Return, and The Lagoon.

Karain: A Memory – plot summary

Part I. An un-named narrator describes the first visit of his schooner to the small fiefdom of Karain in an isolated part of the Malayan archipelago. Karain is a colourful and confident leader who the narrator likens to an actor. He is surrounded by loyal followers, and he buys illegally-traded guns and ammunition from the narrator.

Part II. At night Karain visits the schooner, always with an armed attendant at his back. He asks the narrator questions about Queen Victoria and tells him about his own mother who was a local ruler: he is her son from a second marriage. Once he was attacked by natives from beyond the nearby mountains but he killed most of the attackers and the rest never came back. He dispenses justice amongst his `people’, is much revered, and enjoys huge banquets.

Part III. The narrator visits him for two years, perceives him to be planning a war, and tries to warn him about forces beyond his own domain; but he fails to understand such concepts. On the occasion of his last visit the chief’s old henchman has died and Karain himself is ill. The trade in munitions takes place, then there is a tropical storm.

Karain suddenly appears on the schooner, having swum to the ship after escaping from his stockade. He fears that some invisible spirit is pursuing him, and he wants the crew to take him away.

Part IV. Karain relates how a Dutchman set up home in the locality of his friend Pata Malara. Then Malara`s sister joins the Dutchman, bringing dishonour onto her family. When the Dutchman leaves with the sister, Malara decides to follow and strike vengeance. Karain decides to go with him out of loyalty to his friend. They sail to Java and go on an extended and fruitless search which lasts for two years or more.

Karain falls in love with the image of Malara`s sister who they are hunting down. Eventually they find them both, whereupon Malara wants to kill his sister to avenge the family`s honour. He gives Karain a gun to shoot the Dutchman, but instead Karain shoots his friend Malara.

Part V. Karain runs away and survives in a forest, but he is visited by the ghost of Malara. He moves on and meets an old man who becomes his henchman, protecting him from `the dead’. But now that old man has died Karain has become vulnerable again to spirits. He thinks he will be safe amongst people who do not believe in the spirit world. He wants them to provide him with a weapon or charm against his demon.

Part VI. Hollis produces a box containing a sixpence which bears Queen Victoria`s head. He makes it into a charm, then they present it to Karain and convince him it will keep the spirit at bay. Karain goes back to his people.

The story ends with the narrator meeting Jackson in London some years later, and they recall Karain amidst the bustle of the capital city.

Study resources

Tales of Unrest – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

Tales of Unrest – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

Tales of Unrest – 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

Karain: A Memory – principal characters

—	an un-named narrator
Karain	a war lord of three coastal villages, originally from Les Celebes
Pata Malara	Karain’s friend
Hollis	a young mate
Jackson	an old guitar-playing sailor

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

Katherine Mansfield critical essays

August 14, 2011 by Roy Johnson

modernism, psychoanalysis, and autobiography

Katherine Mansfield – Critical Essays is a collection of conference papers given to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Katherine Mansfield’s arrival in London from New Zealand in 1908, and the start of her career as a writer. They are arranged in groups dealing with biographical readings, modernism, psychoanalytic interpretations, and autobiography. Biographist Vincent O’Sullivan attempts to explain why Mansfield was so impressed by the mystics Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, and so influenced by Lewis Wallace’s Cosmic Anatomy – but his comments tell us more about the details of her last years than they do about the nature or the quality of her writing. Another essay does something similar by tracing her relationship with John Middleton Murry and the use they made of fragments of biography in the fictions they both produced.

Some essays go into endless detail blurring the boundaries between biography and fiction, ignoring the distinctions which should be made between the two. On the whole, they end up by saying very little of value about either. Considering that most of the authors are senior academics, it’s amazing that so little effort is made to be rigorous about these matters – though I suppose it proves the powerful attraction that biographical ‘evidence’ still exerts on critics, even though they might profess themselves post-modern.

Sarah Sandley is on much firmer grounds looking at Mansfield’s fondness for the cinema, and even tracing the films she was likely to have seen. She then offers fairly clear evidence from the texts to argue that she used filmic techniques in her approach to narrative.

As an aside, it is interesting to note how many of these essays revert to consideration of the same story – ‘Je ne parle pas francais’ – which anybody embarking on this volume would do well to re-read before looking at the separate studies.

There’s a brave contribution that tries to establish links between Mansfield’s writing and her interest in music. She was an accomplished cellist, and it’s true that her compositions often have a conscious structure which can be likened to a musical form. But the convincing evidence is never produced. Mansfield writes about music and has characters who are musicians – but that’s all. It’s only possible to say that one artistic form may be likened to another. Any more than that is rather like Goethe saying ‘Architecture is frozen music’: it’s a striking phrase, but it doesn’t yield analytic insights or go anywhere.

A section of psychoanalytic readings is the signal for an intensification of theoretical jargon and fashionable name-dropping – but most of the contributions remain unconvincing.

Fortunately, the last group of essays dealing with the relationship between autobiography and fiction are on much stronger ground. Mansfield left a substantial account of her life and feelings behind in her journals, letters, and notebooks, never concealing the fact that many of her stories were based on episodes from her own life.

Janet Wilson has an interesting piece which looks at Mansfield’s conflicted feelings over her status as a colonial settler and the sympathies for natives she felt – particularly in her erotic relationship with her friend, the half-Maori girl Martha Grace Mahupuku.

Angela Smith makes an insightful and largely persuasive case for Mansfield’s appreciation of Charles Dickens – a taste she held at a time when Dickens was considered passé in most literary circles.

There’s an article by Anna Jackson on the ‘poetics’ of the notebooks and letters, and the collection ends with an essay by the Mansfield scholar and novelist C.K. Stead recounting the difficulty of establishing properly edited texts of her work.

These later pieces seem to rescue the collection from the blight of literary criticism in its current manifestation as a mechanism for generating career-enhancing fodder for the next round of the Research Assessment Exercise.

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Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson (eds), Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp.241, ISBN: 023027773X

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

Kerfol

June 15, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

Kerfol first appeared in the Scribner’s Magazine number 59 for March 1916. The story was included in the collection Xingu and Other Stories published in New York by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1916. It is one of the many ghost stories Edith Wharton wrote and was also included in the collection Ghosts published in 1937.

cover design by Parish Maxfield

Kerfol – critical commentary

The principal feature of interest in this story is the manner in which the narrative is unfolded. The un-named narrator is encouraged to buy the old Brittany chateau, and visits a perfectly credible if slightly romantic old building with a moat, high walls, a garden and a tower. The only strange element is the absence of human habitation and the presence of so many unusually quiet dogs.

This introductory episode is then contrasted with and expanded upon in the reconstruction of the murder trial which the narrator makes from old court records. These events reveal the passionate drama of the imprisoned beauty (Anne) her cruel husband (Yves) and her would-be lover (Hervé). who is a relative and namesake of the friend of the narrator in the fictional ‘present’.

The ghosts of the story are not those of former human beings, but dogs seeking vengeance on the man who has strangled them to terrorise his wife. This is a reasonable variation on the Gothic horror story which has lingered from its heyday in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to its fashionable revival at the begriming of the twentieth.

Edith Wharton wrote a number of ghost stories, and like her friend Henry James who did the same, she tried to create inventive variations on the plots and themes of this genre. Kerfol has a number of standard elements – the old deserted chateau, a wicked ‘King’, his beautiful young wife, and the would-be swain (all figures out of medieval romance) but to make the ghosts a pack of avenging dogs is something of a novelty, even if the outcome so far as Anne is concerned provides the tale with a conventionally grim ending and tragic victim.

Kerfol – study resources

The Works of Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Works of Edith Wharton – Amazon US

The New York Stories – NYRB – Amazon UK

The New York Stories – NYRB – Amazon US

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Descent of Man and Other Stories – Project Gutenberg

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Kerfol – plot summary

Part I. At the suggestion of his friend Lanvirain, an un-named narrator goes to visit an old semi-fortified mansion in Brittany. He is impressed by its age and the sense of history it exudes. No guardian or owners appear, but he is met by a pack of assorted dogs which are mysteriously quiet. When he returns to his friend’s house that night, Mrs Lanvirain tells him that the dogs are the ‘ghosts of Kerfol’.

Part II. Next day Lanvirain lends him an old book containing the history of Kerfol, which the narrator then transcribes to reconstruct the historic events that constitute the remainder of the story.

Part III. Some time during the seventeenth century, the lord of Kerfol, widower Yves de Cornault takes a new young wife Anne. The marriage is childless but successful. He is very strict with her, but showers her with valuables. After one trip away on business, he brings her a little brown dog.

When de Cornault is suddenly found mutilated and dead in the mansion, suspicion falls on his young wife, because she is discovered in the same place, covered in blood.

There is a trial, throughout which she maintains her innocence. But she is prepared to admit that on the night of the murder she had an assignation with Hervé de Lanvirain. She also claims that her husband had strangled her pet dog.

She met Lanrivain whilst on a religious visit, and he offered her his sympathy and support. When he leaves for a foreign journey, she gives him the dog’s collar as a memento. Her husband returns to the mansion and strangles the dog with the same collar. She obtains another dog, but he strangles that one too. The same thing happens to further dogs.

She then receives a secret message from Lanvirain and that night goes to meet him. When her husband suddenly appears at the top of the stairs, she claims he was attacked and mauled to death by a pack of dogs.

At the trial she is not convicted, but put in the care of her husband’s family. They shut her up in the dungeon at Kerfol where she dies many years later, having gone mad.

Kerfol – Principal characters

I	an un-named narrator
Hervé de Lanvirain	his friend
Yves de Cornault	despotic lord of Kerfol
Anne de Cornault	his pretty and much younger wife
Hervé de Lanvirain	her would-be lover

Edith Wharton’s writing

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.

Edith 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

Kew Gardens

March 26, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Kew Gardens was written in 1917 and first appeared in a handbound edition of twenty-four pages Virginia Woolf published herself at the Hogarth Press. Her partner in this kitchen table enterprise, husband Leonard Woolf, describes the genesis of the edition.

In 1918 we printed two small books: Poems by T.S. Eliot and Kew Gardens by Virginia. Of Kew Gardens we printed about 170 copies (the total sold of the first edition was 148). We published it on 12 May 1919 at 2s. When we started printing and publishing with our Publication No. 1, we did not send out any review copies, but in the case of Prelude [by Katherine Mansfield], Tom’s Poems, and Kew Gardens we sent review copies to The Times Literary Supplement. By 31 May we had sold forty-nine copies of Kew Gardens. On Tuesday 27 May, we went to Asham and stayed there for a week, returning to Richmond on 3 June. In the previous week a review of Kew Gardens had appeared in the Literary Supplement giving it tremendous praise. When we opened the door of Hogarth House, we found the hall covered with envelopes and postcards containing orders from booksellers all over the country. It was impossible for us to start printing enough copies to meet these orders, so we went to a printer, Richard Madely, and got him to print a second edition of 500 copies, which cost us £8 9s. 6d. It was sold by the end of 1920 and we did not reprint.

It was the Woolf’s first artistic and commercial success as publishers, and gave them the confidence to back their own literary judgement(s) in the stream of publications which followed. The story was eventually collected with her other experimental short prose pieces written between 1917 and 1925, available as The Haunted House. The first edition of Kew Gardens had text only on the right-hand pages, which were hand trimmed by Virginia Woolf herself with a pen knife. Surviving copies of this first edition now trade at £2,000 or more.

Kew Gardens – a flower bed

Kew Gardens – critical commentary

Meaning

One of the features of literary modernism embraced by Virginia Woolf was that of the author’s absence from the text. What this means is that along with writers such as James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and others she believed that authors should not intrude into their own work, advising and guiding the reader, but should stay outside it, letting the story speak for itself. Thus, we are not given any obvious clues about what to think of the characters or the events, but must make up our own minds about what they ‘mean’. This idea goes back to the French novelist Flaubert.

This absence of authorial guidance is one factor which makes for difficulty of interpretation. Another in this case is that we are only presented with fragments or snatches of events upon which to base our judgement. We do not have time to get to know the characters (certainly not in this story) before they move off out of it again.

Woolf is also one of many modernist writers who took an interest in revealing how people deceive themselves and act in what is called bad faith – that is, not admitting the truth about themselves or their relationship with others. But this issue, combined with the lack of authorial comment, means that we may only have the character’s word to go by, and that character may not be a reliable witness or commentator.

Understanding

All four couples mentioned in the story seem lacking in purpose or objective, and this casts them in a somewhat negative light. This is particularly so when contrasted with the almost heroic manner in which the movements of the snail are described.

Simon and his wife Eleanor are introduced by pointing to a physical gap (of about ‘six inches’) between them. He is ‘strolling carelessly’ whilst she is walking ‘with greater purpose’, which draws attention to the differences in their attitudes. Eleanor is also the one keeping an eye on their children. The point thatWoolf seems to be making here is that they are not in harmony with each other – as the subsequent narrative confirms.

In fact the very next sentence reinforces the idea that he is excluding himself from their joint enterprise. He keeps his distance in front of her ‘purposely’ even if he is unconscious of doing so. That is, he is not aware of the consequences of his own actions.

We are then presented with his reverie concerning a similarly hot summer day fifteen years earlier on which he ‘begged’ Lily to marry him. He focuses his attention on a dragonfly whose irregular movements echo those of the butterflies with which the people in the Gardens have just been compared and those at the end of the story which are likened to a ‘shattered marble column’. These subtle repetitions of image are the sort of poetic devices Woolf introduced into prose as a substitute for conventional linearity of plot or story.

Simon also focuses on Lily’s shoe buckle, and we note that she moves her foot ‘impatiently’. Woolf does not tell us what Lily is thinking: the narrative is related from Simon’s point of view. But we guess from this that she is not comfortable with his solicitations. She is another woman with whom Simon is not in harmony.

He then transfers his hopes onto the dragonfly alighting on a red flower, which in its turn echoes the flowers which have been described at the beginning of the story. Simon even thinks ‘there, on that leaf’ in the present time of the narrative, and which will be mentioned again at tits end.

But the dragonfly does not alight, Lily refuses him, and he reflects that this is a good thing (‘happily not’) because otherwise he would not be with his wife and children now. This is a rationalisation, or worse, bad faith. And just in case we are in any doubt, his subsequent actions are confirmation.

First of all he informs his wife that he has just been thinking about another woman – which is either gauche or completely tactless, Certainly Eleanor greets his announcement with silence, from which it is reasonable to assume that she is offended. Then he makes matters worse by referring to her as ‘the woman I might have married’. The term might is ambiguous here, but it seems that he means the woman he could have married – when in fact we know that she turned him down. Simon is creating a lie.

Woolf is offering this character sketch as an example of the sort of selfishness and self-deception she often perceives in people, especially in men. It is also telling that Simon’s memory of the past is contrasted by Eleanor’s – which turns out to be a kiss on the back of the neck – given her by ‘an old grey-haired woman with a wart on her nose, the mother of all my kisses, all my life’.

Woolf is pointing to the distance between the two people in this particular couple – which is paralleled by similar failures in communication between the two old men, the two women, and the young couple who are the last to walk by the flower bed.

Structure

Virginia Woolf minimises the elements of plot or narrative in this story, but she strengthens other elements by way of compensation. In Kew Gardens there is a very strong element of pattern, repetition, and shape which strengthen the aesthetic harmony of the piece.

The four couples who pass by the flower bed constitute a pattern. They are different in kind (a married pair, a young and old man, two elderly ladies, and a courting couple) yet they all share the same characteristic – a failure of communication.

Simon and Eleanor’s thoughts are pointed in completely opposite directions; the older man is deranged and cannot communicate sensibly with his escort William; the two women talk streams of rubbish, and one of them even stops listening to the other; and the young couple are too immersed by their ‘courtship’ of each other to communicate freely. Thus the underlying theme of communication breakdown reinforces the structure of the composition.

In addition, the subject of the story oscillates between the flower bed and the people walking past, and in each case there is a small transitional link carrying the narrative from one to the other. There is also a marked contrast between the two subjects. The human beings are fairly desultory and without purpose, but the snail is described in terms which stress its purposefulness. ‘It appears to have a definite goal’ and it ‘considers every possible method of reaching its goal’.

Finally, the story begins and ends with a description of the flowers and their petals. The first paragraph ends: ‘Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above’ whilst the final paragraph of the story concludes ‘and the petals of myriads of flowers flashed their colours into the air’.

Literary impressionism

Virginia Woolf was very interested in painting (her sister Vanessa Bell designed the covers for her publications) and in her writing she often attempts to capture the sense of life through atmosphere, light, and shade. For that reason her work is often compared to that of the Impressionist school of painters such as Monet, Pissaro, and Renoir.

It is fairly obvious in Kew Gardens that she is trying to create the ambiance of a hot day in summer by describing both the vegetation in the Gardens and the people strolling through them. In fact at one point she even depicts the dappled effects of light and shade which was a favourite technique of the Impressionists. As Eleanor and Simon walk away from the flower bed with their children, they

looked half transparent as the sunlight and shade swam over their backs in large trembling irregular patches.

This effect reinforces the very transitory nature of the visitations made by the four pairs of people – the married couple, the two men, two elderly women, and the courting couple. They walk past the flower bed just for a moment, and then pass onIf Kew Gardens has a story in the conventional sense, then that is all it is – four couple walk past a flower bed one summer afternoon.

But in fact that is only one half of the story. The other half is what goes on in the flower bed itself. And you might notice that the insect and plant life is described both in scrupulous detail and in a manner which is in some senses sharply contrasted with the human life in the story.

Kew Gardens – 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

A Haunted House and Other Short Stories – Kindle edition

A Haunted House and Other Short Stories – Hogarth reprint – AMazon UK

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

Kew Gardens – an alternative reading

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens – story synopsis

The story opens with a description of an oval flower bed in Kew Gardens on a hot day during July. The colourful flowers and vegetation are evoked in very fine detail.

A man and his wife walk past the flower bed with their children. Each of them is lost in reveries about the past. He thinks about a woman he might have married: she remembers being kissed by an old lady.

The story returns to ground level, where amidst the plants a snail is making slow progress in its movements through the vegetation.

A young man appears escorting an elderly man who is talking incessantly and walking with disturbed, uneasy movements. He is clearly deranged,

They are followed by two elderly women who are gossiping meaninglessly to each other, one of them not listening to the other, and then they move on.

Meanwhile the snail is making some progress in its journey through the undergrowth, all of which is seen from the snail’s point of view.

The last people to pass by the flower bed are a courting couple who are flirting with each other, and preparing to have tea together, vaguely conscious of immanence in life.

Finally the narrative returns to the flower bed, which is visited by a bird and then a swarm of butterflies, and the point of view gradually rises to evoke the busy life of London as a whole.

Virginia Woolf podcast

A eulogy to words

Principal characters

—	a snail
Simon	Eleanor’s husband
Eleanor	Simon’s wife
William	a young man
—	a demented elderly man
—	two elderly women
—	a youth in his prime
Trissie	his girl friend

first edition 1917

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Between the Acts (1941) is her last novel, in which she returns to a less demanding literary style. Despite being written immediately before her suicide, she combines a playful wittiness with her satirical critique of English upper middle-class life. The story is set in the summer of 1939 on the day of the annual village fete at Pointz Hall. It describes a country pageant on English history written by Miss La Trobe, and its effects on the people who watch it. Most of the audience misunderstand it in various ways, but the implication is that it is a work of art which temporarily creates order amidst the chaos of human life. There’s lots of social comedy, some amusing reflections on English weather, and meteorological metaphors and imagery run cleverly throughout the book.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction contains all the classic short stories such as The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, and The String Quartet – but also the shorter fragments and experimental pieces such as Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. These ‘sketches’ (as she called them) were used to practice the techniques she used in her longer fictions. Nearly fifty pieces written over the course of Woolf’s writing career are arranged chronologically to offer insights into her development as a writer. This is one for connoisseurs – well presented and edited in a scholarly manner.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

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

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

La Veneziana

July 18, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

La Veneziana (1924) is a wry variation on the type of story made popular by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Theophile Gautier, in which the distinctions between fantasy and reality become blurred. Nabokov had already used this strategy earlier the same year in The Thunderstorm and he would use it again in his 1938 story The Visit to the Museum. He never seems completely at ease in this literary genre, but La Veneziana is rescued by having a credible (and amusing) realistic basis on which the smaller element of fantasy is based.

The story was written in September 1924, and remained unpublished and untranslated during Nabokov’s lifetime. It was eventually translated by the author’s son Dmitri Nabokov for the collection Collected Stories Vladimir Nabokov published in New York by Alfred A, Knopf in 1995.

La Veneziana – critical commentary

Translation

The story was written in 1924, but was never published in Nabokov’s own lifetime. It first appeared in 1995 as part of the collection The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov published in New York by Alfred A. Knopf in a translation by Dmitri Nabokov. However, it is difficult to believe that the translation is one that Nabokov would have entirely approved.

The prose style is far too florid, over-developed, and encrusted with the sort of baroque vocabulary (olivaster, umbral, levigate) that only emerged in his later works. It also has the occasional lapse into cliché (“coming apart at the seams”) and clumsy un-idiomatic English (“goggled his eyes”) which spoil the fluidity of his otherwise supple prose style.

Since so much tampering and polishing to improve effects went on with texts in the Nabokov family (by father, mother, and son) one can only suspect that Dmitri embellished his father’s work prior to its first publication. Without access to the original manuscript (and a knowledge of Russian) it is difficult to prove, but it seems to me that the current text does not genuinely represent Nabokov’s literary style of the early 1920s when he was first establishing himself as a writer of short stories for newspapers and magazines.

Narrative

There are nevertheless some fine touches in the story. It captures flawlessly the enervating tedium and conventionality of the English country house weekend, with its rituals of fixed meal times, tennis games on the lawn, and reading twenty year old copies of the Vetinary Herald on a wet afternoon.

There are also some early twists of narrative strategy which are unlikely to be later additions by an over-enthusiastic filial hand. Nabokov addresses his readers directly, and even includes teasing comments about their interpretive abilities.

He also comments with authorial hauteur on his own rhetorical devices – setting up in mid-story a night watchman who sees a light on in the castle after midnight. Every convention in fictional narrative suggests that he will therefore uncover what is going on and reveal the culprit. But Nabokov has him not only ignore the anomaly, but go back to bed and miss the exit of the family Rolls Royce motor car, which is also being appropriated for Frank’s elopement.

Thus the pleasant, innocuous old fellow, like some guardian angel, momentarily traverses this narrative and rapidly vanishes into the misty domains whence he was evoked by a whim of the pen.

The painting in the story is clearly modelled on the portrait of Dorotea by Sebastiano del Piombo. Simpson’s contemplation of the portrait is an accurate description of the original:

Her dark eyes gazed into his without the sparkle, the rosy fabric of her blouse set off with an unhabitual warmth the dark-hued beauty of her neck and the delicate creases under her ear. A gently mocking smile was frozen at the right corner of her expectantly joined lips. Her long fingers, spread in twos, stretched towards her shoulder, from which the fur and velvet were about to fall.

Nabokov draws three levels of suggestive parallels between Maureen and the portrait. The reason for the similarity between them is that Frank has painted the fake and is enamoured of the picture restorer’s wife.

Maureen’s gestures repeatedly echo those in the painting: “Maureen gave a sidelong smile as she adjusted the strap on her bared shoulder”. And Nabokov draws our attention to the clearly erotic symbolism of Dorotea’s gesture: “her long fingers paused on their way to her fur wrap, to the slipping crimson folds”. You do not need a brass plaque on your door to appreciate the significance of splayed fingers, fur, and ‘crimson folds’.

Fantasy

The playful fantasy of stepping into a painting is maintained cleverly throughout. Simpson is a naive visionary, given to ‘auditory hallucinations’ and clearly out of his depth in the milieu of the story. He is deeply enamoured of Maureen, but she is beyond his reach socially and emotionally, so he is forced to pursue her image into the painting rather than in the castle grounds.

Having ‘entered’ the painting, he feels that he becomes trapped there: “he gave a jerk and got stuck, feeling his blood and flesh and clothing turning into paint, growing into the varnish, drying on the canvas”.

Next morning, when McGore restores the canvas, he tosses the old rags (soaked with the paint of Simpson’s image) into the garden – which is rather neatly where Simpson awakens. Switching back into realism rather than fantasy, the story reveals that Simpson had fallen asleep in the garden the night before.

The end of the story offers a completely rational explanation of how the events came about – with the exception of the lemon – “Thus the dry, wrinkled fruit the gardener happened to find remains the only riddle of this whole tale” – which is Nabokov’s playful manner of tying the story back to its literary origins.

La Veneziana – plot synopsis

A group of five people are assembled at an English country estate for a weekend party. The Colonel its owner is an art collector; Frank is his talented and glamorous son; Mr McGore is an art connoisseur accompanied by his attractive and much younger wife Maureen; and Simpson is a gauche but visionary young university friend of Frank’s. They play tennis; Frank flirts with Maureen, and the Colonel admires his recently acquired Venetian masterpiece by Sebastiano del Piombo.

Simpson is deeply attracted to Maureen, and struck by her similarity to the woman Dorotea in the painting. McGore explains to him that it is possible, with sufficient empathy and effort of will, to temporarily enter the world of a painting.

The Colonel reproaches his son for the dalliance with Maureen, which makes Frank believe that Simpson has betrayed him. Simpson is upset by the coldness that develops between them, but late at night he makes the imaginative effort required to enter the painting and join Dorothea, who gives him a lemon from her basket.

Next morning the Colonel discovers that Simpson’s figure has mysteriously appeared in the painting – the explanation for which is that Frank has painted it there, and indeed has produced the entire painting itself as a fake, the sale proceeds from which he has shared with McGore, giving him enough to run off with Maureen. Simpson is found asleep in the garden – but he does have with him a lemon.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK

Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

More on Vladimir Nabokov
More on literary studies
Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories

Lady Barbarina

March 16, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Lady Barbarina was written in Boston in 1883 and first appeared in Century Magazine in May—July 1884. The original publication of this story has the title as Lady Barberina, but when James came to discuss the story in his famous prefaces for the New York edition of his collected works, it became Lady Barbarina. Its first appearance in book form was in the collection of stories Tales of Three Cities published in Boston by Osgood and in London by Macmillan in 1884.

Rotten Row – Hyde Park – 19th century

Lady Barbarina – critical commentary

Theme

This is one in a long line of James’s ‘International’ stories – tales which are based on the differences between American and European cultures. In many of them an attractive American woman will arrive in Europe and captivate an Italian prince (The Golden Bowl) or an English gentleman (The Wings of the Dove). But this tale reverses the pattern: a rich and successful American man in London is captivated by the sheer ‘Englishness’ of an aristocratic woman who has very little to commend her except her good looks and her heritage.

That is Jackson Lemon’s tragedy. He is blinded by his own Anglomania, and ends up hopelessly uprooted from his native America, saddled with a bloodless wife who doesn’t really love him, and supporting his feckless brother-in-law – a rogue fellow American whose only positive feature is a fine moustache.

Jackson Lemon even has a noble profession. He has trained and practised as a doctor – but he has also inherited his father’s wealth (gained via manufacture). The English aristocrats however even look down on this activity – as if it is demeaning to have any profession at all. Yet they are greedy enough for his wealth to insist on a settlement for their daughter – a guaranteed source of income in the event of any problems, which underlines the financial basis of marriage in the upper class as a means of consolidating wealth.

Yet it has to be said that James treats this subject quite lightly. Jackson Lemon’s open and slightly naive attitude to the English aristocracy is mildly satirised, and the horrendously snobbish, cold, and imperious attitudes of the Cantervilles are illustrated but in the end prevail. They are the ones short of money, and yet Lemon finishes up subsidising them by maintaining their two daughters and son-in-law.

Structure.

The most striking feature of this tale is its amazingly rushed ending. The story begins at a remarkably leisurely pace – with detailed conversations and atmospheric mise en scenes stretching out page after page. Inconsequential characters such as the Freers occupy much of the dramatic interest, and Lemon’s hesitations and advances are tracked minutely as he pays court to Lady Barbarina

There is a hiatus at the centre of the story during which the first six months of Jackson’s marriage to Lady Barbarina are omitted from the narrative – but this serves to reinforce the dramatic impact of its disappointing outcome.

The second part of the story begins by documenting Lady Barbarina’s dissatisfactions with America, and opens up the sub-plot of Lady Agatha’s enthusiastic embracing of American freedoms. But then no sooner has she eloped with Longstraw than the story is wrapped up as if James had lost interest in his characters and story – or maybe reached the number of words required by the publisher.

Literally within the last page of the story the Jackson Lemons return to London, Lady Barbarina has a little girl, Jackson starts travelling across to the continent to escape his unsatisfactory marriage, and Lady Agatha returns from California with her husband who is a great social success. This is all too much narrative weight for the story to bear.

Lady Barberina – study resources

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

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

Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon US

Lady Barbarina – CreateSpace edition

Lady Barbarina – Kindle edition

Lady Barbarina – eBook formats at Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Lady Barbarina – plot summary

Elderly Americans Dexter Freer and his wife sit in Hyde Park, discussing the marriage prospects of their fellow countryman Jackson Lemon with a young doctor Sydney Feeder. Jackson Lemon is a very rich non-practising doctor who has been courting Lady Barbarina, the second eldest daughter of an English Marquis. It is thought that despite Lemon’s wealth, his status as a professional will count against him with the aristocracy, even though they themselves are thought not to be particularly wealthy.

Jackson is questioned by Lady Lucretia Beauchemin about his intentions regarding her younger sister Barbarina. She is seeking clarity: he remains non-commital. He realises that English society expects him to reveal his intentions or to desist in his attentions towards Barbarina – but he values his freedom as a democratic American to act as he wishes.

He finds Barbarina physically attractive, but wonders if she will fit in with New York City life. He goes to a late night society dance and discusses American and English marriage customs with Barbarina. He is frustrated by English conventions on social contact, but eventually openly declares his love for her.

Next day he asks her father for permission to marry her, revealing both his wealth and his origins. Lord Canterville asks his wife’s opinions on the matter. She is concerned that her daughter would live in America. There is conflict between Jackson’s open, independent, and free approach to social conventions, and Lady Canterville’s old-fashioned and snobbish conventions.

The Canterville’s accept Jackson’s proposal, but they demand via solicitors that he make a ‘settlement’ (an income) on her – a suggestion that offends him. When he refuses they restrict access to his bride-to-be. They also object to the fact that his wealth is new money, and therefore in their eyes unstable.

When he discusses the matter with his American friend Mrs Freer, she advises him to get out of the engagement because Lady Barbarina’s aristocratic attitudes will never be compatible with life in New York City. Dexter Freer on the other hand encourages him to defy convention. Following this, Jackson decides to give in to the demands of the Cantervilles, because he thinks that making settlements is beneath his dignity.

Six months later the marriage is already in trouble. Lady Barbarina is bored in New York and wishes she were back in England. Her sister Agatha however, who has been sent to accompany her by the Cantervilles, perceives all the advantages of life in America. She forms an attachment to Mrs Lemon and has an admirer in the Californian Hermann Longstraw – of whom Jackson Lemon disapproves. Mrs Lemon is very concerned about her son’s marriage.

Lemon wants his wife to establish a European-style salon in New York, but quite apart from her natural idleness Lady Barbarina thinks that her social rival Mrs Vanderdecken will usurp her. Lady Agatha meanwhile continues to enjoy her newfound freedom and independence. But when Longstraw asks to marry Agatha, Lady Barbarina seizes this as an excuse and insists that she must immediately take her sister back to England.

But Agatha precipitates matters by eloping to California with Longstraw. The scandal of this reckless marriage reaches all the newspapers and the news is relayed to England. At this, Lady Canterville demands that Barbarina return home. Lemon is forced to return to live in England, where he ends up with his cold and unimaginative wife and supporting his improvident brother and sister-in-law.

Principal characters

Dexter Freer	elderly American socialite visiting London
Mrs Freer	his wife
Marquis of Canterville	an impoverished English aristocrat
Lady Barbarina	his younger daughter
Lady Agatha	younger sister to Lady Barbarina
Lady Lucretia Beauchemin	his eldest daughter
Pasterns	‘the seat of the Cantervilles’
Dr Sydney Feeder	an American medic from Cincinnati
Dr Jackson Lemon	a small, rich, New York non-practising medic who has inherited
Lady Marmaduke	social godmother to Jackson Lemon, a friend of Lady Beauchemin
Herman Longstraw	a Californian with an impressive moustache
Mrs Vanderdecken	a New York social hostess and rival to Lady Barbarina
Mrs Chew	a friend of Mrs Vanderdecken

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Other works by Henry James

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

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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.

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Late Victorian Gothic Tales

May 14, 2011 by Roy Johnson

mystery, weirdness, supernatural, and horror

For reasons much debated amongst literary historians, there was a revival of the Gothic horror story at the end of the nineteenth century. Within the space of just a few years we have Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), H.G.Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The horror story was also a popular ingredient of the popular mass-circulation magazines which were launched around this time. Robert Luckhurst’s collection Late Victorian Gothic Tales is drawn from these sources, and it aims to show the range of stories by mixing examples from well-established authors with no less chilling takes from lesser-known writers.

Henry James believed that a horror story should not rely on the traditional trappings of midnight spookiness in ruined abbeys and graveyards for its effect. He thought that the mysterious and the macabre we all the more effective for taking place in the full light of day. His story here – Sir Edmund Orme – has a ghost who appears on the Parade at Brighton on a sunny afternoon. And true to James’s ever-inventive spirit, even though the ghost is of somebody long ago dead (as a result of a gruesome suicide) it turns out to be a force for good. It is a ghost of ‘retributive justice’ which appears to check that an injustice is not repeated.

Oscar Wilde performs the miraculous feat of making a horror story funny. His Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime offers an amusing critique of palm-reading (Cheiromancy as it was known then) which was in vogue at the turn of the century. Lord Arthur singularly fails to act out his destiny, which is to commit murder, despite sending a poisoned bon-bon to Lady Clementina and an exploding clock to the dean of Chichester.

In what he himself described as an ‘unpleasant story’, Rudyard Kipling manages to combine drunkenness, torture, and a contemporary case of a man turning into a rabid animal under the curse of a leper. This was one of his earliest Plain Tales from the Hills which made him famous as an author of Empire.

Arthur Conan Doyle follows a similar pattern in both stories that represent his contribution to the supernatural – his personal belief in which actually contributed to a decline in his literary reputation He has one story of an oblique form of sexual mutilation, and another in which an Egyptian mummy attempts to murder a series of Oxford undergraduates.

What’s clear from this collection is that Gothic horror is a formula sufficiently adaptable to work effectively in any circumstances. Ruined castles, vampires, and coffins in subterranean vaults are not the real essentials. They might help create atmospheric effects, but the basics elements of horror remain existential anxieties – such as predestination, the burden of inheritance, fighting uncontrollable forces , and the threat of death.

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Roger Luckhurst (ed), Late Victorian Gothic Tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.326, ISBN: 0199538875

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Longstaff’s Marriage

May 12, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Longstaff’s Marriage first appeared in magazine form in Scribner’s Monthly for August 1878. Stories by popular writers Bret Harte and Edward Egglestone appeared in the same issue, It was then reprinted in book form amongst The Madonna of the Future and Other Stories the following year.

Longstaff’s Marriage – critical commentary

The principal feature of this story is the structural symmetry and the ironic reversals of the two ‘deathbed’ scenes. In the first the proud and beautiful Diana seems to have everything to gain when Longstaff makes his appeal to her, but she rejects his offer indignantly.

We are then asked to believe in two outcomes from this episode. The first is that the shock of this rejection somehow gives Longstaff the jolt he needs to restore his own health. Since we have no medical information about his state of being during his period of decline, this is very hard to judge.

The other is that at the same time Diana somehow retrospectively falls in love with Longstaff – even though she does not see him for more than two years. This is something of a stretch, but just about plausible.

But then comes another symmetrical twist which stretches credulity – to breaking point. Diana herself develops a wasting ailment which would be acceptable if she were simply pining away for love of Longstaff and might be restored on resumption of contact with him. Her proposal to him is acceptable enough as the neat plot twist – but she really is on her death bed and dies shortly afterwards.

This seems like a gain for plot structure at the expense of plausibility. The architecture of the story is firm enough, but its content is not satisfactory.

Longstaff’s Marriage – study resources

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

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

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

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

Longstaff’s Marriage – Kindle edition

Longstaff’s Marriage – Paperback edition [£4.49]

Longstaff’s Marriage – eBook versions at Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Longstaff’s Marriage – plot summary

Diana Belfield has inherited money and divided it with her cousin Agatha Gosling. The two women travel to Europe and are in Nice for the winter season. Agatha is much given to fantasising about their fellow residents, and they see Reginald Longstaff on the promenade regularly, she assumes that he is in love with Diana.

Longstaff introduces himself to Agatha and reveals that he is dying and very much in love with Diana. He asks Agatha not to reveal this to Diana until after his death.

Agatha keeps her promise, but some time later Longstaff’s servant asks Agatha to bring Diana to Longstaff’s sick bed, where he is thought to be dying. When they go there, he makes a moving appeal to Diana, asking her to marry him. Diana insists that she finds the idea appalling and suggests that they leave Nice immediately.

Their subsequent travels deteriorate in quality, so they decide to go back to America.Two years later Diana writes to Agatha to say that she is engaged – but then breaks it off. Diana then summons Agatha to say that she is dying and wants to go back to Europe. Diana is eager to travel widely before she dies, and they end up in Rome, where they meet Longstaff again.

Diana reveals to Agatha that she has been in love with Longstaff ever since refusing his offer of marriage, and she now believes he has recovered because of the hurt she inflicted on him. The implication is that she in her turn is now ‘dying of love’.

Agatha is sent in search of Longstaff, and when he visits the dying Diana it is she who proposes to him. The next day they are married, and shortly afterwards she dies.

Principal characters

Diana Belfield	a tall, attractive, proud, American heiress
Agatha Gosling	her cousin
Reginald Longstaff	a young Englishman from an old, high-toned family

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

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

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What Masie Knew (1897) A young girl is caught between parents who are in the middle of personal conflict, adultery, and divorce. Can she survive without becoming corrupted? It’s touch and go – and not made easier for the reader by the attentions of an older man who decides to ‘look after’ her. This comes from the beginning of James’s ‘Late Phase’, so be prepared for longer and longer sentences. In fact it’s said that whilst composing this novel, James switched from writing longhand to using dictation – and it shows if you look carefully enough – part way through the book.
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The Ambassadors (1903) Lambert Strether is sent from America to Paris to recall Chadwick Newsome, a young man who is reported to be compromising himself by an entanglement with a wicked woman. However, Strether’s mission fails when he is seduced by the social pleasures of the European capital, and he takes Newsome’s side. So a second ambassador is dispatched in the form of the more determined Sarah Pocock. She delivers an ultimatum which is resisted by the two young men, but then an accident reveals unpleasant truths to Strether, who is faced by a test of loyalty between old Europe and the new USA. This edition presents the latest scholarship on James and includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times.
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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

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mystery, weirdness, supernatural, and horror

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Longstaff’s Marriage – critical commentary

Longstaff’s Marriage – study resources

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Principal characters

Further reading

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

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