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Pandora

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Pandora (1884) is a story which combines three topics which regularly fascinated Henry James and are present in many of his tales and novels. Foremost is the relationship between Europe and America – his ‘International’ theme. Next comes the ‘new woman’ who emerged in America towards the end of the nineteenth century and behaved in a socially more liberated manner. And third is the social and moral tensions which arise in cases of class mobility – though James doesn’t always discuss this issue explicitly.

Transatlantic steamer

Nineteenth century transatlantic steamer

Its textual history throws an interesting light onto the publishing of fiction in the late nineteenth century. It first appeared in two instalments of the New York Sun on 1 and 8 June 1884. That’s a week between each part of the story – rather like a television drama today. It was then reprinted twice in book form, collected with other Henry James stories. This is a form of publication almost unthinkable today. Then, when James was honoured with the multi-volume New York edition of his collected works, it appeared again, heavily revised.

Pandora – critical commentary

The ‘new woman’

James presents Pandora as an example of the ‘new type’ of woman, the ‘self-made girl’ – but she is in fact a product of upward social mobility – an arriviste. She comes from a family in trade, not people of inherited wealth or ‘old money’ upper-class society to which she aspires. She is intent on prising the family away from their provincial origins of Utica in upper New York state, of which Mrs Dangerfield observes “You can’t have a social position in Utica any more than you can have an opera box”. In fact she adds that Pandora (by Mrs Dangerfield’s own standards) does not even have a ‘social position’. Yet she is on the way to acquiring one.

It is interesting to note that her fiancé Bellamy is also originally from the same upstate town, and he too started out in ‘some kind of business’ with not enough income to offer her marriage. They have been engaged since Pandora was sixteen. But he too has managed to climb upwards socially with his appointment to a diplomatic position in government.

To reinforce the argument that this is a class mobility issue, there is a strong suggestion that Bellamy has secured his appointment via Pandora’s influence during her conversation with the president of the ‘the world’s largest country’ [James’s words]. At the social gathering where she meets the president she takes her leave of him by saying “Well now, remember, I consider it a promise”.

Narrative structure

The story is neatly divided into two parts – each of which reflects the other. In the first part Vogelstein gets to know Pandora whilst on board a ship. When it docks she is due to be met by her fiancé Bellamy, but he is unavailable. In the second part they are again on board a river boat, but this time Bellamy does make his appearance to claim his bride-to-be.

At the start of part one, Vogelstein has just been appointed to the German legation in Washington – and so has travelled from Europe to America. At the end of part two, Bellamy has been appointed as ambassador to Holland – and will therefore be travelling from America to Europe to take up his post.

Inter-textuality

This is very much a conscious variation on the theme of the ‘new type’ of woman from James’s earlier success, Daisy Miller – so much so that he has his protagonist and narrator Vogelstein actually reading the story on board ship whilst journeying to New York – in a German pocketbook edition. He comments on the characters in the story and draws comparisons between Daisy and Pandora, as well as between Randolph Miller and Pandora’s brother, who he sees as what the young Randolph might have grown up to become.

there was for Vogelstein at least an analogy between young Mr.Day and a certain small brother … who was, in the Tauchnitz volume, attributed to that unfortunate maid. This was what the little Madison [Randolph] would have grown up to at nineteen, and the improvement was greater than might have been expected

Name and title

The Pandora of classical Greek mythology was the name for the first ‘all gifted’ woman, created by Zeus (King of the Gods) for the deliberate confusion of man. She was sent as a wife to Epimetheus with a box which she was forbidden to open. When she disobeyed this injunction, she released all the evils of the world. Only Hope remained inside the box.

It is not difficult to see these meanings linked to the repeated appearance of strong women in James’s stories as predatory creatures who might threaten men who have a fear of marriage. Vogelstein certainly perceives Pandora as an aggressive female, putting her into that category with other women he has encountered ‘they were apt to advance, like this one, straight upon their victim’.

It is also perhaps worth noting that Pandora is not her real but her ‘pet’ name. Just like the socially mobile Daisy Miller, whose real name is Annie P. Miller, Pandora is shedding part of her provincial identity as she climbs upwards. We do not learn her real name.

Pandora – study resources

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

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

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

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

Red button Pandora – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Red button Pandora – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Pandora Pandora – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Pandora

Pandora – plot summary

Part I. Count Otto Vogelstein has just been appointed as secretary to the German legation in Washington. He is travelling from Southampton to New York on board the steamship Donau when he meets Pandora Day, a spirited young American woman and her family. Because of his lack of experience and his rather conventional social views, he is unable to place her socially. Mrs Dangerfield, an experienced American fellow traveller, warns him against closer acquaintance on the grounds that the family lack the necessary social cachet.

Henry James Daisy MillerPart II. Two years later he meets Pandora again at an exclusive society party in Washington which includes the American president. She has become even more attractive and socially confident. The hostess describes her to Vogelstein as a woman of a ‘new type’. He wonders what this type can be, and is told that it is an exclusively American phenomenon of a younger woman developing upward social mobility as a result of reading, natural talent, and foreign travel.

Vogelstein joins Pandora on a boating party up the Potomac river to the home of George Washington and feels himself drawn closer to her – even entertaining ideas of her qualities as a diplomat’s wife. However, he is cautious because he thinks she might be a pushy spouse, and might commit social gaffes in his aristocratic German social circles. However, on landing back in Washington, she is met by a man who turns out to be her long term fiancé who has just been appointed as American ambassador to Holland.

Principal characters
Count Otto Vogelstein a young man in the German diplomatic service
‘Pandora’ Day a young American woman
Mr P.W. Day her father from Utica in upstate New York
Mrs Day her mother
Mrs Dangerfield Vogelstein’s American confidante on board the Donau
Mr D.F. Bellamy Pandora’s fiancé from Utica (40)
Mr Lansing Bellamy’s friend, an immigration officer in New York
Mrs Bonnycastle social hostess and arbiter in Washington
Mr Alfred Bonnycastle her husband
Mrs Steuben a widow

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

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

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2012

More tales by James
More on literature
More on the novella
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Paste

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

Paste first appeared in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly in December 1899. It was then reprinted in the collection of tales The Soft Side published by Methuen in 1900.

Paste

The Necklace

Paste – critical commentary

Historical background

The crux of this story is based on a social factor which might seem rather obscure in the twenty-first century. It’s the fact that actresses (and any women associated with the stage) were regarded from the Renaissance right up to the twentieth century as synonymous with loose morals and even prostitution.

It was very common for upper class males (and even royalty) to have mistresses who were singers or actresses. These women were either set up in premises or showered with gifts by their suitors – who were often described in euphemistic terms such as ‘protector’ or ‘admirer’.

It was a form of prostitution – and was tolerated because it did not threaten the established order. The procuring male bought the sexual favours of the female, and his place in society as either a bachelor or a man who had married within his own class remained unthreatened.

Why was it the stage rather than other occupations which should have given rise to this practice? Presumably because as singers or performers, the women would be more socially mobile, and would operate in a zone which was close to but not part of polite society.

The occupation of singer or actress was regarded as declasse. Arthur’s father (as a vicar) has courted social danger in marrying an actress, and the explanation for Arthur’s priggishness (and lies) is that he wishes to protect his family’s (and his own) reputation.

Literary tradition

This story is a variation on a tale made famous by Guy de Maupassant in 1884 called The Necklace (La Parure). Henry James was a personal friend of Maupassant, and wrote a critical study of his work in French Writers.

In Maupassant’s story a socially ambitious married woman borrows a diamond necklace to attend a grand public event. She loses the necklace and is forced to replace it, putting herself and husband in crippling debt. It takes them more than ten years of privation to repay the loan – at which point she discovers that the diamonds were only fakes, worth next to nothing.

The same theme was given a further twist by Somerset Maugham in his story A String of Beads (1927). In this version a young governess appears at a dinner party wearing a string of pearls which a fellow guest says are real and worth a small fortune. She says she paid fifteen shillings for them in a department store. Then two representatives from the store arrive and explain that she has been given the wrong pearls by mistake. They present her with three hundred pounds as compensation – which she lavishes on an expensive holiday in Deauville, mixing with rich men. She eventually becomes a courtesan, living in high style in Paris.

This story was itself a second variation on this theme, to which Maugham makes inter-textual reference. In Mr Know-All a young woman appears at dinner on a cruise ship wearing a set of pearls. A rather annoying guest claims he knows all about pearls and that they are worth a lot of money. The woman’s husband says she bought them for eighteen dollars. The two men have a one hundred dollar bet on who is right. But then Mr Know-All, seeing the woman’s discomfort, suddenly backs down, realising they must have been a gift from another man, presumably her lover. Next day she returns to him the one hundred dollars he gallantly forfeited to her husband.

Paste – study resources

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

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

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

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

Paste Paste – HTML version at Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Paste

Paste – plot summary

Arthur Prime’s father and stepmother die within two weeks of each other. Mr Prime senior was a vicar, and his second wife was a former actress. Arthur’s cousin Charlotte is presented with a box of her old theatrical costume jewellery as a memento of her aunt. Arthur and Charlotte wonder if some of the items might be real rather than fake, and if they turn out to be real, were possibly a present from an admirer. But Arthur priggishly denies this suggestion, claiming that his stepmother’s reputation was above reproach.

When a party is being organised by Charlotte’s employer, her associate Mrs Guy borrows the jewellery for a tableau vivant and reveals that a string of pearls are real, not fake. Charlotte thinks she is obliged to return them, but realises that to do so would reveal to Arthur their origin as a ‘gift’ from an actress’s ‘admirer’.

Mrs Guy wears the pearls to dinner and they are much admired. She even offers to buy them. Charlotte still thinks she ought to return them, but starts wearing them in private. Some months later she confronts Arthur with the truth about the pearls. He refuses to believe that they are real, and says he will seek a professional opinion.

He later writes to Charlotte telling her that the pearls are fake, but Charlotte meets Mrs Guy wearing them. She has bought them in Bond Street from a jeweller. Charlotte knows that Arthur has lied, but she also wonders if Mrs Guy has bought them directly from Arthur, since she knew his address.

Principal characters
Arthur Prime a prissy young man
Charlotte Prime his cousin, a governess
Mrs Guy a social events organiser

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

Henry James Washington SquareWashington Square (1880) is a superb early short novel, It’s the tale of a young girl whose future happiness is being controlled by her strict and authoritarian (but rather witty) father. She is rather reserved, but has a handsome young suitor. However, her father disapproves of him, seeing him as an opportunist and a fortune hunter. There is a battle of wills – all conducted within the confines of their elegant New York town house. Who wins out in the end? You will probably be surprised by the outcome. This is a masterpiece of social commentary, offering a sensitive picture of a young woman’s life.
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon US

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

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

Phyllis and Rosamond

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

Phyllis and Rosamond (1906) is of particular interest because it is Virginia Woolf’s first short story. She had begun to write book reviews and essays two years earlier, and some elements of the exploratory essay and the intellectual study are present here: indeed, she would continue to blend philosophic reflections with narrative fiction throughout the rest of her career. The story was written in June 1906 and was never published in her own lifetime.

Phyllis and Rosamond

Virginia Woolf

Phyllis and Rosamond – critical commentary

The short story

Virginia Woolf began her writing life in the shadow of her father Sir Leslie Stephen, a famous nineteenth century essayist and biographer. Even her own first writings were essays and reviews, and it is interesting to note that she often blends other genres with that of the short story.

Phyllis and Rosamond begins in the mode of a discursive essay before it settles into any sort of dramatised narrative.

Let each man, I heard it said the other day, write down the details of a day’s work; posterity will be as glad of the catalogue as we should be if we had such a record of how the doorkeeper at the Globe, and the man who kept the Park gates passed Saturday March 18th in the year of our Lord 1568.

This is an approach to the short story she would often repeat – an idea or an observation of a quasi-philosophic nature, which is then illustrated by the story that follows.

And the story itself has very little drama, plot, or even suspense. It is an account of the tension between the imaginative nature of the two sisters and the stifling social conditions in which they find themselves. We are simply invited to contemplate their dilemma.

Woolf is picking up the baton of earlier writers of short stories – Maupassant and Chekhov (who she had read) – and continuing their narrative strategies of minimising overt drama in favour of a more contemplative and poetic juxtaposition of significant detail.

Themes

It is interesting to note that in this, the first of her many experimental short stories, Woolf flags up a number of the important large scale issues which were to emerge more fully developed in her later works – particularly studies such as A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Her consciousness of history, her interest in biography, and her perception of women’s role in society are all foregrounded in the very first paragraphs of this story.

And as such portraits as we have are almost inevitably of the male sex, who strut more prominently across the stage, it seems worth while to take as model one of those many women who cluster in the shade. For a study of history and biography convinces any right minded person that these obscure figures occupy a place not unlike that of the showman’s hand in the dance of the marionettes;

Woolf’s argument is that the lives of women such as Phyllis and Rosamond are worth recording, even though they are trapped in a lifeless stasis, waiting to become married. In fact she is arguing that this quasi-tragic waste of spirit and imagination is worth recording just because it is so common, so typical, and yet unrecorded.

The story conveys an acute sense of the intellectual and cultural stimulation Phyllis finds in the free-ranging discussion (which is not dramatised) compared with the boring rituals of her home life. Radical ideas are expressed, religious belief is challenged, and dangerous topics such as love and marriage are frankly explored.

This is a fictionalisation of the experiences which had led Virginia Woolf (and her sister Vanessa) to depart their Victorian home in Kensington two years before, and de-camp to what was seen at the time as the bohemian milieu of Gordon Square, Bloomsbury.

It is interesting to note that although she had made that cultural transition in her own personal life, she chose to fictionalise the more typical experience of women who were unable to make the transition.

It is a common case, because after all there are many young women, born of well-to-do, respectable, official parents; and they must all meet much the same problems, and there can be, unfortunately, but little variety in the answers they make.

Phyllis and Rosamund – study resources

Phyllis and Rosamond The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

Phyllis and Rosamond The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

Phyllis and Rosamond The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

Phyllis and Rosamond The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Phyllis and Rosamond Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Phyllis and Rosamond Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Phyllis and Rosamond Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

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

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

Phyllis and Rosamond The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Phyllis and Rosamund

Phyllis and Rosamond – story synopsis

Phyllis and Rosamond are two daughters of a prominent civil servant Sir William Hibbert and his wife Lady Hibbert. They live in the centre of London and are ‘daughters at home’. That is, they have no occupation or career of any kind, and can expect no change in life except to be married, which their mother is very eager should happen.

The story lists the suffocating ritual of everyday upper class life, from breakfast to bedtime, a period which is only punctuated by their mother giving them petty domestic jobs to perform. They draw comfort from each other in their shared sense of oppression and the few private moments during which they can share ideas.

Their father brings work colleagues home to lunch, an occasion which is an empty ritual during which Phyllis is expected to make meaningful contact with Mr Middleton, who is being cast as a potential suitor. The two sisters agree that the man has no imagination or intelligence at all.

Later in the day they make social calls with their mother – leaving visiting cards at other people’s houses in the hope of being invited there. Then tea at six o’clock is followed by dinner at eight.

Finally Phyllis escapes to join her sister at the Tristrams, who live in a ‘distant and unfashionable’ part of the city – Bloomsbury. The group of people assembled there are free-thinking radicals who are discussing ideas. Phyllis has a disturbing experience of tension. She is excited by the intellectual atmosphere but conscious of herself as looking like something from a Romney painting.

The group discuss art and even love and marriage. Phyllis thinks herself inadequate in this heady environment, and feels that it is almost impossible to enter a world where people can choose freely who they might love. The hostess Sylvia Tristram tries to engage the sisters, but Phyllis feels that she cannot be at ease either at home or in such a bohemian milieu, concluding wistfully that ‘We might have been something better’.

Principal characters
I the un-named narrator of the story
Sir William Hibbert a senior civil servant
Lady Hibbert his wife
Phyllis Hibbert one of their daughters (28)
Rosamond Hibbert her younger sister (24)
Mr Middleton Sir William’s secretary, suitor to Phyllis
Sylvia Tristram a Bloomsbury hostess

Gordon Square

Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red button Susan Sellers, The Cambridge Companion to Vit=rginia Woolf, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

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

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

Other works by Virginia Woolf

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

Point of View

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the perspective of authors, narrators, and characters

Point of view – what is it?

An important part of analysing fictional narratives is to take into account the point of view from which a story is being told. Point of view is the manner or perspective from which events and characters are seen or being depicted. The term should not be confused with its everyday meaning of ‘a personal opinion’.

The point of view can be created and controlled in a number of different ways. For instance, by –

  • the author’s attitude towards the events and characters – which could be comic, serious, or satirical
  • the attitude of a narrator towards the events and characters being described
  • the perspective of characters as they participate in the events of the narrative

Point of view

Point of view – the author

A typical example of authorial point of view is the well-known ironic and witty opening of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). She is poking gentle fun at her characters in a mild satirical manner:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Pride and PrejudiceThis way of seeing things influences very strongly the way in which readers are likely to understand the novel. It would be difficult almost to the point of impossibility to see Pride and Prejudice as anything other than a comedy of manners. So the point of view is a powerful factor in our understanding and interpretation of this narrative.

This example is an authorial point of view because Austen has chosen a traditional third person omniscient narrative mode. Readers can be confident that such remarks reflect the author’s own attitudes to characters and events – because she does not create any distancing effects between herself as author and herself as omniscient narrator. Direct authorial comment giving a point of view is sometimes referred to as ‘authorial generalisation’.

Point of view – the narrator

This occurs when the author creates a separate character to tell the story – who is called the narrator. And the narrator can be objective, biased, or even unreliable in relaying information, depending on how the author wishes to affect the reader. The narrator may or may not be an active participant in the events of the narrative. The important thing to keep in mind is that the author and the narrator are not necessarily one and the same.

Fyodor Dostoyevski chose the first person narrative mode for his novella Notes from Underground (1864). The protagonist and narrator is a fictional character who is not even given a name, and whose ‘story’ is a long tirade against society and even against himself:

I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite.

Russian novels - Notes from UndergroundDostoyevski is now seen as one of the precursors of the movement in philosophy known as existentialism, and this novella is an exploration of an individual who is stripping away all comforting ideas and exposing his personal inner-demons in an age which is losing the reassurance of religious belief.

The importance of point of view in this case is that the reader is forced to accept this rather perverse and unpleasant man’s vision of the world, because no alternative is made available to us. Dostoyevski makes no attempt to present his character as attractive or likeable. We are simply being invited to consider his peculiar and often contradictory views.

When authors create first person narrators in this way, there is often a temptation to think that the narrator reflects the author’s own views. In some fiction (usually of poor quality) this might be the case; but in general (and certainly in good quality work) this is not or may not be true.

Many traditional ‘life history’ fictions use a first person narrator – such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850). This device usually has the effect of drawing the reader close to the narrator as a fictional character and lending credulity to their account of events.The reader is being encouraged to think of the character as a ‘real’ person.

Studying FictionStudying Fiction is an introduction to the basic concepts and technical terms you need when making a study of stories and novels. It shows you how to understand literary analysis by explaining its elements one at a time, then showing them at work in short stories which are reproduced as part of the book. Topics covered include – setting, characters, story, point of view, symbolism, narrators, theme, construction, metaphors, irony, prose style, tone, close reading, and interpretation. The book also contains self-assessment exercises, so you can check your understanding of each topic.
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Point of view – the character

It is also perfectly normal for authors to give an account of events from the perspective of a character (or characters) in their narratives. This enables the author to create a credible vision of the world in which the character exists, and to invite readers to share (or reject) their personal point of view. This view can shift from one character to another, or it can stay with one character.

Franz Kafka’s dark and expressionistic novel The Trial (1925) opens with an innocent man being arrested:

Somebody must have been telling lies about Joseph K, for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested. Frau Grubach’s cook, who brought him his breakfast every day, did not appear. That had never happened before. For while K waited—from his pillow he saw the old woman who lived opposite watching with, for her, quite unusual curiosity—but then, both perplexed and hungry, he rang. Immediately there was a knock at the door and a man he had never seen in the apartment came in. He was slimly yet solidly built and was wearing a close-fitting black suit which, like an outfit for travelling, was equipped with a variety of pleats, pockets, buckles, buttons, and a belt that made it appear especially practical without its precise purpose being clear.

The TrialAfter the opening sentence of the narrative, all the information we are given is delivered from Joseph K’s point of view. The non-appearance of his breakfast; the absence of the cook; his being observed (whilst in bed!) by an old lady opposite; and the sudden appearance of a stranger in his room – who has come to arrest him. Sometimes authors use the points of view of a number of characters in order to create a multi-dimensional account of reality which might be more complex and therefore more convincing than an account from a single perspective.

William Faulkner uses an interesting version of this mode in his novel As I Lay Dying (1930) in which members of a poor southern American family are transporting their dead mother in a coffin to be buried in a distant town. The narrative is a series of interior monologues in which each of the the characters reflect in turn on the others. This even includes the dead mother, from inside her coffin.

Strategies of this kind become in effect a series of overlapping first person narratives. The English novelist Laurence Durrell pushed this approach even further in his sequence of novels The Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960). Four novels cover the same set of events as seen (largely) from the point of view of the four characters – Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea – who are involved in them.

Virginia Woolf developed an approach to narrative which used this device at a micro level. In her novel Mrs Dalloway, the reader is invited to view events largely from the point of view of her protagonist Clarissa Dalloway, but from time to time the view shifts momentarily to that of other characters:

She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Dornall’s van to pass. A charming woman Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.

Virginia Woolf Mrs DallowayThe character Scrope Purvis never appears again in the novel, but for this single paragraph as they pass each other in the street we are invited to share his view of Clarissa. We see her from the point of view of a close neighbour, who knows she has been ill, and who admires her appearance and her manner. Later we will see her from the point of view of a close friend, an old admirer, and from the slightly antagonistic view of her own daughter.

This fluctuating point of view helps to generate what might be called a ‘three-dimensional’ view of the character, and it is closely associated with Virginia Woolf’s belief in the fluidity and relativity of human character – that a person can be one thing to one person and somebody quite different to another.

© Roy Johnson 2015

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Pomegranate Seed

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

Pomegranate Seed first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on 25 April 1931. It was subsequently included in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction, The World Over (1936), and then in her collection, Ghosts, published in 1937, the last year of the author’s life.

Pomegranate Seed

original Saturday Evening Post illustration

Pomegranate Seed – critical comments

This is simultaneously a mystery tale, a ‘ghost story’, and more importantly a penetrating study in the psychology of jealousy. The mystery element is possibly the least important and successful, because once the authorship of the grey letters has been explained, there is very little more to say about the issue, and no reason to re-read the tale.

As a ghost story it is more successful. Even though there is no explanation of how the letters come to have been written by somebody who has died a year previously, they act as a convincing metaphor for the influence a former love object might still exert on someone from beyond the grave. This part of the story also meshes successfully with Charlotte’s inflamed jealousy over the puzzle of the letters and the effect they have on her husband. She is in fact quite correct in he supposition that they were written by a woman who is a ‘previous engagement’ in his life – since they are written by the woman to whom he was married for twelve years.

The rapid fluctuations in Charlotte’s feelings as she tries to interpret the evidence at her disposal is a very convincing portrayal of the agonies and uncertainties of jealousy – how trivial details are seized upon and magnified to enormous proportions in the search for emotional resolution, and how a hairsbreadth can sometimes separate an imagined betrayal from an insight into one which is all too real.

The title of the story Pomegranate Seed is an oblique reference to the Greek myth in which Persephone, the goddess of fertility, is abducted and taken to Hades, where she breaks her vow of abstinence by eating some pomegranate seeds. It is not too difficult to see the fertile Elsie Corder (who bears her husband two children) as this figure who eventually lures her former husband to join her in the afterlife. She has written to him regularly; her last letters are only two days apart; and the only word Charlotte can decipher in the last is “Come” – though it has to be noted that he does not read this letter, having already departed to join his dead first wife.

Pomegranate Seed – study resources

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

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

Pomegranate Seed Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Pomegranate Seed Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Pomegranate Seed Tales of Men and Ghosts – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Pomegranate Seed

Pomegranate Seed – story synopsis

Part I.   Charlotte Gorse has been married to New York lawyer Kenneth Ashby for a year, following the early death of his first wife Elsie after twelve years together. Charlotte’s marriage has been successful, but she is puzzled by the regular appearance of a handwritten letter addressed to her husband which appears to upset him and change his mood, but about which he reveals nothing. On arriving home there is familiar grey envelope with spidery handwriting waiting in the hall.

Part II.   She assume’s the letters might be from some woman in her husband’s past, is very tempted to open the latest, but instead spies on him when he arrives home. On seeing him kiss the letter, she challenges him and demands an explanation. He claims it is a business letter and refuses to divulge the name of its author.

Part III.   Charlotte tries to be sympathetic to her husband’s obvious distress, but all she can see is that he is trying to be evasive. She proposes a holiday, but he says he cannot go. She continues to harass him with questions, and finally he agrees to the notion of a holiday.

Part IV.   Next morning he leaves a message saying that she should prepare for the holiday the very next day. Charlotte at first feels triumphant because she has prevailed over the influence of the ‘other woman’. She tries to contact her husband throughout the day – without success, because nobody knows where he is. Finally, she goes to see her mother-in-law, where she thinks he might have called. He is not there, so the two women go back to Charlotte’s house, where they find another grey letter waiting. Charlotte decides to open it, but neither she nor Mrs Ashby can read the faint and spidery handwriting. They conclude that the letters have been coming from Kenneth Ashby’s dead wife, from beyond the grave, and that they ought to telephone the police.

Principal characters
Kenneth Ashby a New York lawyer
Mrs Ashby his mother
Elsie Corder Ashby’s first wife, who is dead
Charlotte Gorse Ashby’s second wife

Edith Wharton's house - The Mount

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

Further reading

Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman of her Time, New York: Viking, 1971,

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp.222. ISBN: 0820305138

Janet Beer, Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work), New York: Northcote House, 2001, pp.99, ISBN: 0746308981

Millicent Bell (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.232, ISBN: 0521485134

Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1992, pp.329, ISBN: 0824078489

Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, ISBN: 0810927950

Gloria C. Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, California: University of California Press, 1992, pp.223, ISBN: 0520075838

Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals, UPNE, 1990, pp.220, ISBN: 0874515246

Irving Howe, (ed), Edith Wharton: A collection of Critical Essays, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986,

Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.240, ISBN: 0521830893

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, London: Vintage, new edition 2008, pp.864, ISBN: 0099763516

R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975, pp.592, ISBN: 0880640200

James W. Tuttleton (ed), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.586, ISBN: 0521383196

Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991,

Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Work, Fact on File, 1998, pp.352, ISBN: 0816034818

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, New York: Perseus Books, second edition 1994, pp.512, ISBN: 0201409186

Edith Wharton's writing

Edith Wharton’s writing

Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the CountryThe 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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Edith Wharton - The House of MirthThe 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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The ReefThe Reef deals with three topics with which Edith Wharton herself was intimately acquainted at the period of its composition – unhappy marriage, divorce, and the discovery of sensual pleasures. The setting is a country chateau in France where diplomat George Darrow has arrived from America, hoping to marry the beautiful widow Anna Leith. But a young woman employed as governess to Anna’s daughter proves to be someone he met briefly in the past and has fallen in love with him. She also becomes engaged to Anna’s stepson. The result is a quadrangle of tensions and suspicions about who knows what about whom. And the outcome is not what you might imagine.
Edith Wharton - The Reef Buy the book from Amazon UK
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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

© Roy Johnson 2014

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

Poor Richard

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

Poor Richard first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly magazine over three issues in June—August 1867. Its next appearance in book form was as part of the collection Stories Revived published in London by Macmillan 1885. This is the one of four stories James wrote with the American Civil War as a background. The other stories are The Story of a Year (1865), A Most Extraordinary Case (1868), and The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868).

Poor Richard

The American Civil War – 1861-1865

Poor Richard – critical commentary

The title

The term Poor Richard is taken from a famous American publication, Poor Richard’s Almanack which was written and published each year in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin between 1732 and 1758. It was a very popular compilation of weather forecasts, practical household hints, and puzzles, and was padded out with aphorisms and proverbs related to thrift, industry, and frugality. Hence the link to Richard Maule’s progress via work, abstinence, and honesty.

Interpretation

It is difficult to see this story as anything but a warning against the fickleness of women. Gertrude ‘encourages’ Richard; she is in love with Captain Severn; and when Severn is killed in the war she is prepared to marry Major Lutterel, even though she does not love him. She is only twenty-four; she is rich, and she’s good-looking. There is no reason for her to accept an offer from a much older man for whom she feels no affection. Lutterel is thirty-six and he has no money.

Another way to see the story is as a short Bildungsroman – a narrative of growth and education into wisdom. Richard starts out as a drunken wastrel, and then propelled by his love for Gertrude manages to give some clarity and purpose to his life. He does not get the girl, but in the end he tells the truth, he sells the farm, does the honourable social thing by joining in the war, and on return takes up paid employment. That is a success of sorts.

Poor Richard – study resources

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

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

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

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

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Poor Richard

Poor Richard – plot summary

Part I.   Wastrel and poor orphan Richard Maule is in love with rich Gertrude Whittaker. He tries to persuade her to love him, and even proposes marriage. But she offers him only friendship in return, plus a willingness to help him ‘improve’.

Part II.   Richard and Gertrude are old school friends. She has inherited a lot of money from her father. Richard has done virtually nothing except work on the farm he has inherited and allowed to run down. But the prospect of winning Gertrude inspires him to reform his life. Gertrude meanwhile decides it will help Richard if she introduces him to Captain Severn.

Part III.   Severn is a serious, honourable, but poor man who accepts Gertrude’s comforts when he is injured in the Civil War. But he hasn’t enough money to marry, so they remain just good friends.

Gertrude invites Richard and Severn to meet each other – but they are joined unexpectedly by Major Lutterel and the event is ruined. Richard feels ill at ease in this more sophisticated company.

Part IV.   After tea, they all go for a walk, during which Richard and Severn exchange opinions on Gertrude, and realise that they are rivals for her favour. Richard gauchely tries to impress everyone with his knowledge of the local river. There is a complex tension of competition between all three men for Gertrude’s attention.

Part V.   Richard cultivates a regime of hard work and self-denial, hoping to overcome his obsession with Gertrude. One day he rides over to see her, only to discover Captain Severn just leaving and Gertrude very upset. Richard accuses her of being in love with Severn.

She is in fact holding out against both Severn and Richard, and it brings her little joy. But on mature reflection, she begins to see positives in Richard’s simplicity She drives over to his farm where he is apologetic for his behaviour. His courtesy and simple behaviour win her over.

News arrives of a defeat for the Unionists in the Civil War in Virginia. Richard and Major Lutterel leave Gertrude’s house, only to meet Captain Severn on his way to pay her his last respects before re-joining his regiment. Richard lies to Severn about Gertrude being away from home, and Major Lutterel is complicit in the deception, because he wishes to keep away all rivals, having decided that he wishes to marry Gertrude himself.

Richard wishes to reveal his guilt to Gertrude about the deception, but fails to do so because she receives him in a very neutral manner. He goes home with Major Lutterel, gets drunk, and by next day he is very ill with typhoid fever.

Part VI.   Colonel Lutterel arrives at Gertrude’s house with the news of Richard’s illness. They drive over to see him, and Gertrude arranges nursing support for him. Whilst Richard is ill, Colonel Lutterel increases the intensity of his attentions to Gertrude, who although she is not in love with him is prepared to countenance a possible alliance.

The Major arrives at Gertrude’s house with the news that Richard is getting better and Captain Severn has been killed. He asks her to marry him, and although she tells him she does not love him, she is prepared to accept the offer.

Part VII.   Gertrude makes her preparations for the marriage in secret, with a heavy heart. Major Lutterel visits Richard, where he denies having any news of Captain Severn, and reveals that he is engaged to Gertrude. Richard takes a stoical view, and hopes that his disappointment will help him recover. When he meets Gertrude she is pale and unhappy: he implores her to give up the plan to marry Major Lutterel. Suddenly Major Lutterel arrives, and Richard reveals the truth about Captain Severn’s last failed visit to see Gertrude. Gertrude breaks off her engagement with Lutterel and forgives Richard.

Richard sells the farm, pays off his debts, and joins the war. When he returns at the end of the war he finds employment in his old neighbourhood. Gertrude also sells up, and goes to live in Florence.

Poor Richard – principal characters
Richard Maule a poor orphan of twenty-four
Gertrude Whittaker a rich young woman of twenty-four
Fanny Maule Richard’s sister, a friend of Gertrude
Captain Edmund Severn a Unionist soldier of twenty-eight
Major Lutterel a recruiting officer of thirty-six with no money
Mrs Martin Captain Severn’s sister
Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

Henry James – 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.

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

Prince Roman

by

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

Prince Roman was written by Joseph Conrad in 1910 and first published in 1911 in The Oxford and Cambridge Review. It was posthumously collected in Tales of Hearsay, which was first published by T. Fisher Unwin in 1925. The tale is based on the real life story of Prince Roman Sanguszko of Poland (1800–81). The other tales in the collection are The Black Mate, The Warrior’s Soul, and The Tale

Prince Roman

Prince Sanguszko’s coat of arms

Prince Roman – critical commentary

Content

This is an unashamedly patriotic piece of writing on Conrad’s part. Prince Roman is a Pole who gives up his comfortable position in the aristocracy to fight as a (virtually) unknown soldier resisting Russian oppression. When captured, he has every opportunity to escape punishment, but declares himself unequivocally committed to Polish liberation. As a result he suffers a quarter of a century in the nineenth century Tsarist equivalent of the GULAG – the Siberian mines – before returning to live in humble circumstances on what should have been his own estate before devoting his life to helping other people. There is none of the ambiguity and complexity that is normally found in Conrad’s other works, nor any of the light ironic touches in his commentary within the narration.

History

The story is based on the real life history of Prince Roman Stanislaw Sanguszko (1800–1881) who was a Polish aristocrat, patriot, political and social activist. Conrad’s fictional account is remarkably faithful to the historical details of Sanguszko’s life – though in some regards the truth is even more remarkable than the fiction. For instance, part of the punishment for taking part in the insurrection was that he should walk in chains to his place of exile. This was a distance of 3,300 kilometres which took ten months to complete.

Narrative

The main problem with the tale, from a technical point of view, is that it mixes narrative modes in a way that reflects adversely on the overall artistic effect. The story begins in first person narrative mode: the un-named narrator recalls having seen as a child this fabled Polish patriot, when Roman was an old man. That is, the narrative starts at the end of its chronological events.

The narrator then fills in the details of Roman’s background – information of a biographical nature which could be publicly available. But gradually, the narrative slips into third person omniscient mode. We are presented with Roman’s thoughts and feelings whilst he is in the Polish army of resistance – information which would not be available to anyone but Roman himself.

Then at the end of the tale, Conrad returns to a first person narrative mode, with the un-named narrator rounding off the sad but heroic account of Prince Roman’s life story. Conrad makes these transitions quite smoothly, and most readers are unlikely to complain, but in terms of strict narrative credibility and logic they are illegitimate.

Prince Roman – study resources

Prince Roman Tales of Hearsay – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

Prince Roman Tales of Hearsay – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

Prince Roman The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

Prince Roman Prince Roman – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Prince Roman Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

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

Prince Roman Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Prince Roman Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Prince Roman

Prince Roman – plot summary

An un-named narrator recalls as a child once meeting Prince Roman, who by that time was a bald and deaf old man. This reminiscence forms the springboard for a potted life history, which is the substance of the narrative. Roman comes from an aristocratic Polish family. His wife dies two years after the birth of their daughter, and Roman is badly affected by the loss. He finds solace by retreating into the countryside, and whilst there hears news of a successful patriotic uprising against the occupying Russians. Roman renounces his position as a military office in the Tsar’s army and announces his intention of joining the nationalist rebels. His father understands Roman’s patriotism, but thinks this is rather rash and impolitic.

Roman summons an old family servant and confides in him his intention of volunteering in the partisan army. He enlists under a false name (Sergeant Peter) and distinguishes himself for courage and valour. However, although unharmed, he is eventually taken prisoner by the Russians. There he is recognised by his captors. News of his arrest is sent to St Petersburg, where his family use their wealth and influence to plead for clemency.

The military commission that tries his case attempts to guide his responses to questioning to bring about an acquittal, but he states quite bluntly that he joined the rebellion from ‘political conviction’. He is condemned to the Siberian mines, which at that time was considered a living death. Because of his disgrace, his daughter inherits his estates, and lives abroad – in the South of France and Austria. Twenty-five years later, on his release, Roman goes to live in a modest house on one of the estates and dedicates himself to doing public good.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Joseph Conrad - manuscript page

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

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

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad Lord JimLord 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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Joseph Conrad Heart of DarknessHeart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
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© Roy Johnson 2013

Joseph Conrad web 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

Professor Fargo

by

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

Professor Fargo first appeared in The Galaxy magazine for August 1874. Its next appearance in book form was in the collection of stories Travelling Companions published in New York by Boni and Liveright in 1919.

Professor Fargo

Phineas Taylor Barnum 1810-1891

Professor Fargo – critical commentary

The story seems to combine elements of comic burlesque with a savage criticism of the shabby fraudulence in the ‘spiritual’ showman – something which would surface again in the character of Selah Tarrant in The Bostonians (1886). Its subject appears to be aimed at the market for popular fiction for which James was writing around this time, but there are two issues worthy of note in artistic terms.

The first of these is that all three male characters in the story do the same thing: they attempt to persuade their audiences with the power of rhetoric. The narrator is a travelling salesman whose livelihood rests on persuading other people to purchase the goods he sells – which remain unspecified. The Colonel claims to have ‘inventions’ and mathematical formulae which he thinks will be of great benefit to society. Perhaps because he doesn’t follow the conventional method of writing down his ideas, he is forced to describe them orally. But nobody in the audiences can understand what he is talking about, and his ‘inventions’ have all failed – which has led him to be dependent upon the Professor.

The Professor himself is an out-and-out fraud. He claims he can communicate with people who are dead, and that he has special powers of ‘spiritual’ and personal ‘magnetism’ which he singularly fails to demonstrate during his performances. However, the second detail worthy of note is that the Professor does eventually wield some sort of personal persuasiveness on Miss Gifford – who abandons her own father and takes up with the florid mountebank Fargo.

This sudden reversal of allegiance is not unlike that demonstrated by the young girl in James’s story Adina written earlier in the same year. Adina is engaged to marry a somewhat unattractive classical scholar, but she suddenly elopes with a handsome young Italian man to whom she has hardly even spoken. The common element of lack of speech is perhaps telling. James obviously believed that some people were susceptible to being attracted by sheer animal magnetism, even if they did leave behind them a distinct trace of ‘Frailty, thy name is woman’.

Professor Fargo – study resources

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

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

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

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

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Professor Fargo

Professor Fargo – plot summary

Part I. An un-named narrator decides to wait for three days in a sleepy little American town for a business contact to return. In the town hall he encounters Professor Fargo, who is preparing the evening’s demonstration of spiritualism and mental magnetism. They exchange opinions regarding spiritualism – the narrator being firmly sceptical. Later the same day he sees the Professor again, engaged with a pretty deaf-mute girl in the public cemetery.

Part II. The narrator attends the evening show. The Professor’s performance is poor and without any results. Then his partner Colonel Gifford presents a new mathematical method, which nobody in the audience understands. Then his daughter the deaf-mute girl presents miracles of multiplication on a blackboard.

Next day the narrator meets all three performers at breakfast at the inn where they are all staying. He compliments the Colonel on his mathematical theories. The sombre Colonel reveals that he does not subscribe to the Professor’s quack claims. He himself has practical inventions which he hopes will benefit society; he has lost his wife; and he resents being dependent on the Professor, who he thinks a vulgar fraud. Because all the Colonel’s experiments have so far failed, the Professor has persuaded him to feature his gifted daughter in their act.

Later the same day, the Colonel unburdens himself further to the narrator. The Professor drinks heavily and treats visitors at the inn to his philosophy of ‘spiritual magnetism’. The Colonel then denounces these claims publicly, following which the Professor proposes to prove his powers with a practical demonstration.

Part III. Six weeks later the narrator sees another of their performances in New York. Their fortunes have sunk even lower than before. The Colonel has let the Professor off his challenge (because it was made whilst drunk). Whilst out walking with the narrator, the Colonel has a sudden inspiration for a major new idea. But when they arrive at the Colonel’s lodging they find the Professor is there: he offers the narrator a free ticket for the evening’s performance.

However, there is no audience at all, and when the manager demands rent for the hall, the Professor is unable to pay. The narrator offers to pay the Colonel’s half of the bill. The Professor proposes to form a new act featuring the girl – but the Colonel indignantly refuses. However, when faced by a choice of loyalties, the girl goes off with the Professor. The Colonel is completely crushed by this outcome, and is placed in an asylum, where he continues his meaningless mathematical ‘experiments’.

Principal characters
I the un-named narrator, a commercial traveller
Professor Fargo a fat and florid showman
Colonel Gifford a ‘mathematician and inventor, his partner
Miss Gifford a poor but pretty young deaf mute girl, his daughter

Professor Fargo - Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

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

Henry James – web links

Henry James 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.

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

Revenge

by

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

Revenge was written in the early spring of 1924 and was published in
Russkoye Ekho in April 1924. In his list of stories collected for publication in single volume form, Nabokov listed the story under the heading ‘Bottom of the Barrel’, and it was first included in Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York in 1995.

Revenge

Vladimir Nabokov

Revenge – critical commentary

This is an early (and rather crude) example of Nabokov’s love of the grotesque, coupled with his penchant for narrative suspense and playfulness, as well as the use of irony and the dramatic twist.

The contents of the professor’s second suitcase are not revealed – but we know that fellow passengers on board the cross Channel ferry think it is something unusual. The professor has previously joked to a student trying to assist him that it is ‘Something everybody needs. Why, you travel with the same kind of thing yourself. Eh? Or perhaps you are a polyp?’

So – we know the professor wishes to murder his wife, but we do not know that the suitcase contains a skeleton. And the suspense generated by these two features of the narrative (and the connection between them) is not resolved until the final words of the story.

The principal irony is that the professor’s young wife actually loves him, even though he is an unattractive bully, and her note to ‘Jack’ is just a girlish piece of romantic nonsense written to an imaginary man who has appeared to her in a dream. But the professor wants her to die in the most excruciating way possible – something he actually fails to achieve, for we are led to believe that she has died of fright.

Nabokov also shows his early love of first person narrators and self-referentiality in fiction – that is, stories that comment upon themselves. In the opening of the narrative a student and his sister are discussing the professor’s appearance and his similarity to a comic actor:

‘He’s really enjoying the sea,’ the girl added sotto voce. Whereupon, I regret to say, she drops out of my story.

Narrators commenting on their own narratives became almost a hallmark of Nabokov’s later works as both a novelist and writer of short stories. It is also worth noting that his narrators sometimes became increasingly unreliable – reaching perhaps what is a highpoint in his novel Pale Fire where Charles Kinbote comments on and interprets another writer’s work – to create a narrative which is an elaborate, gigantic, and very amusing lie.

Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories   Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories   Vladimir Nabokov: The Collected Stories – Amazon US

Revenge – study resources

Revenge The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Revenge Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

Revenge The Paris Review – 1967 interview with jokes and put-downs

Revenge First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection of photographs

Revenge Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Revenge Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Revenge – plot summary

Part 1   A middle-aged biology professor is travelling back from a scientific congress in Berlin to his home in England. On the Ostend ferry he has two suitcases – one old and well-travelled, the other new and orange-coloured. He has hired a private detective to spy on his much younger wife and received evidence of a love note she has written to a man called Jack. He has therefore determined to murder his wife. At the customs inspection the contents of the orange suitcase amaze his fellow travellers.

Part 2   His young wife who believes in ghosts has written a note to Jack, a man who has appeared to her in a dream, but in fact she loves her husband the professor even though he is jealous of her and very temperamental.

When he arrives home he makes fun of her beliefs then tells her a macabre story about a woman whose body unravels until she is just a corpse. He then goes to bed and tells her to follow him. She prepares herself then joins him in the dark, snuggling up to him under the covers. But her husband has put into their bed the skeleton of a hunchback, and she dies of shock on making contact with it.

Revenge – further reading

Revenge Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Princeton University Press, 1990.

Revenge Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton University Press, 1991.

Revenge Laurie Clancy, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

Revenge Neil Cornwell, Vladimir Nabokov: Writers and their Work, Northcote House, 2008.

Revenge Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: An Illustrated Life, Overlook Press, 2005.

Revenge Norman Page, Vladimir Nabokov: Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1997

Revenge David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Revenge Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

PninPnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.
Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin Buy the book at Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin Buy the book at Amazon US

Collected StoriesCollected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.
Vladimir Nabokov - Collected Stories Buy the book at Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov - Collected Stories Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2014

Right of Sanctuary

by

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

Right of Sanctuary (El derecho de asilo) has a rather strange publishing history. Its first appearance was in the collection of stories Guerre de temps published in France (Paris: Gaillmard, 1967). Next it appeared in English, published by Victor Gollancz in 1970 and translated by the Bloomsbury Group diarist Frances Partridge. Only in 1972 did it appear in Spanish, published by Editorial Lumen, in Barcelona. The collection The War of Time contains a group of stories all told in radically different styles, but with a recurrent theme of exploring various notions of time and chronology.

Right of Sanctuary

Right of Sanctuary – critical commentary

The most unusual feature of this story is the fact that Carpentier uses all three possible narrative modes to deliver the sequence of events. The story begins in a conventional third person omniscient mode. That is, an unspecified narrator reveals information about the Secretary, his actions, and (some of) his feelings, referring to him using the third person pronoun ‘he’:

Going into his office, which was decorated in the Pompeian style, the Secretary found several dossiers that could quickly be dealt with, waiting for him beside an inkpot surmounted by a Napoleonic eagle. This task over, he passed the time until Sergeant Raton should serve his luncheon [by] walking through the Palace.

But from the next section of the story onwards, he uses a combination of first and second person narrative modes – and switches in and out of all three modes for the remainder of the story. The first person narrative mode will be familiar to most readers – a sequences of events related from the point of view of a specific character – in this case the Secretary himself, who refers to himself as ‘I’:

I’m bored. I’m bored. I’m bored. And I’m surrounded by things that contribute some new elements to my boredom.

But the second person narrative mode is likely to be less familiar. This takes the form of ‘you’ being used as the form of address – and that ‘you’ can be thought of as singular or plural. It can be the individual ‘I’ of the first person narrative mode, speaking about himself; or it can be either the first person narrator or the author addressing the reader – as if saying ‘this is what you would do in these circumstances’:

You take advantage of the momentary respite to leave the bar and hurry off to the offices of the National City Bank of New York, which is crowded with people quite unaware of what is going on fifty yards away. You take the next street and plunge into the old part of town, where you know no one.

This mixture of narrative modes seems to create a distance between the author and his work. The reader is being invited to contemplate a series of tableaux vivants rather than become engaged psychologically and emotionally with the characters and their predicaments. But this is entirely consistent with Carpentier’s general approach to fiction, which does not follow the norms of traditional European literature

The story is a slightly improbable jeu d’esprit, but strangely enough it has a close link to historical reality – because Alejo Carpentier, having been a political exile from Cuba during the Batista regime, was actually made Cuban ambassador to France in 1966 by Fidel Castro. It is worth noting that this is only twelve months before the story was first published. Carpentier even draws attention to this strange phenomenon during the course of the story:

the Consul told me that in his country—’our’ country—the position of Ambassador was not generally given to a professional diplomat, but to brilliant or able men: writers, financiers, men of the world, journalists. Moreover, it was an American tradition to appoint men from other nations of the continent to diplomatic and educational posts

This might even be considered Alejo Carpentier obliquely patting himself on the back, or it could alternatively be seen as the ‘real’ part in ‘lo real maravilloso’ – a term he coined to describe the type of literature which emerged from Latin-America in the wake of the modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

The story also embraces one of Carpentier’s favourite conceits – the idea of circularity, or things returning to their original state – but maybe in a changed form. At the beginning of the story, the Secretary (whose name is Ricardo – which is only mentioned once) is working for the Ambassador of an un-named country. The embassy is located in what seems like a Latin-American state which is in the grip of a military coup. To escape danger, the Secretary seeks asylum in the embassy of another small Latin-American country. As a result of his knowledge of the country’s history he is appointed its Ambassador – replacing the diplomatic incumbent, who is incompetent.

This neat irony is underscored when he goes to present his credentials to General Mabillan, who knows who he is, appreciates the ironic political twist, and shields him from possible negative publicity. As the story closes, the Secretary returns to more or less the same work (but in a different Embassy) and he returns to a normal sense of time, having been ‘outside’ it during his period of refuge.

Right of Sanctuary – study resources

Right to Sanctuary is one of five stories contained in the collection The War of Time. The other four stories are Journey Back to the Source (1944), The Road to Santiago (1948), Like the Night (1947), and The Wise Men (1967).

Right of Sanctuary Right to Sanctuary – at Amazon UK – (text in English)

Right of Sanctuary El derecho de asilo – at Amazon UK – (Text in Spanish)

Right of Sanctuary Right to Sanctuary – at Amazon US – (Text in English)

Right of Sanctuary El derecho de asilo – at Amazon US – (Text in Spanish)

Right of Sanctuary – plot summary

Part 1.   On a Sunday some time in the early 1940s, in the lavish and empty rooms of a government Palace, the Secretary to the President hears rumours of a possible military coup d’etat . He shares the news with Sergeant Raton, a mild-mannered adjutant who is a fan of Clausewitz and his theory of Total War. The country is in a border dispute with an adjacent state.

Part 2.   Next day the Secretary arrives at the Palace to find government ministers being arrested. When the President himself arrives for a cabinet meeting there is an exchange of gunshots. The Secretary escapes from the building and takes refuge in the embassy of a small Latin-American country. The foreign Ambassador is reluctant to have him, but his wife is more hospitable. The rebel General Mabillan makes a patriotic broadcast, but the Secretary foresees nothing but potential corruption in all his declared new public works.

Part 3.   Some days later the Secretary has become bored, cooped up in a small spare bedroom in the foreign embassy. He passes time itemising the contents of a hardware store in the street outside his window.

Part 4.   The frontier dispute intensifies, and General Mabillan makes further patriotic broadcasts on radio and television. He organises a display of anti-aircraft defence forces which does nothing but injure his own population. The Secretary studies the history of the Frontier Country in its post-Colombian development, and comes up with an ambiguous compromise solution to the border dispute

Part 5.   After some months the Secretary more or less takes over the business of the foreign Embassy, enhances its trade in folkloric merchandise, and becomes the lover of the Ambassador’s wife, Cecilia.

Part 6.   The Secretary loses track of time, whilst in the streets below riots erupt against General Mabillan. Meanwhile, he and Cecilia plan to poison the Ambassador.

Part 7.   The Secretary is eventually granted nationality by his host country, and because of his efficiency he is made Ambassador by the visiting Consul, to replace his incompetent host, who has been recalled and posted to Gothenburg. The Secretary presents himself formally to General Mabillan, who is aware of the diplomatic trick. Next day the Secretary, now Ambassador, returns to work and resumes a normal relationship with time.

Right to Sanctuary

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)

© Roy Johnson 2015

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