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The Tone of Time

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Tone of Time first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine in November 1900 – a remarkably productive year for James in terms of shorter fiction. It was a period which saw the publication of The Great Good Place, Maud-Evelyn, Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie, The Special Type, The Abasement of the Northmores, The Third Person, The Tree of Knowledge, and the story which is widely regarded as his finest – The Beast in the Jungle. He wrote all of these (and more) in addition to working on his next novel, The Sacred Fount (1901).

The Tone of Time

Leon Riesener – Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863)

The Tone of Time – critical commentary

The story turns on the coincidence that two women who were once rivals for the same man recognise each other via the effect his portrait has upon them. One of them paints the portrait on a verbal commission from the other, mediated via the narrator, who knows them both. The narrator acts as a catalyst, and even inherits the painting, without ever knowing the identity of the man in question.

The Tone of Time – study resources

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

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

The Tone of Time Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Tone of Time Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Tone of Time The Tone of Time – Digireads reprint edition – Amazon UK

The Tone of Time The Tone of Time – eBook formats at Gutenberg Consortia

Red button The Tone of Time – read the story on line

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

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

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

The Tone of Time

The Tone of Time – plot summary

Part I. Mrs Bridgenorth is a middle-aged lady who wishes to commission a portrait of an ideally handsome man to hang in her house. The narrator, a successful painter, recommends the task to a colleague Mary Tredick, who is very good at producing copies. She doesn’t wish to meet the patron, but produces a striking portrait of a man she has once known and loved unhappily.

Part II. When Mrs Bridgenorth is shown the portrait she recognises the subject and reveals that it is someone to whom she was engaged before he died, but who she refuses to name. She is so stricken with the portrait that she offers to double the fee. The narrator reports this to Mary Tredick, who suspects that Mrs Bridgenorth knows something, and she retrieves her painting. When confronted by the narrator Mary reveals that she was once in a relationship with the man, but he ‘failed’ her in favour of Mrs Bridgenorth, who tried to make him marry her. Mary has intuited all this from Mrs Bridgenorth’s intense reaction to the painting. The narrator offers to buy the picture from her, but she refuses, leaving it to him in her will instead. Eventually after her death he has possession of the painting but still doesn’t know the identity of its subject.

Principal characters
— an un-named male narrator
Mary Juliana Tredick a painter
Mrs Bridgenorth commissioner of the painting

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

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2012

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

The Total Library

by

criticism, journalism, film reviews, and essays

Jorge Luis Borges is one of the few writers to establish an international reputation on the strength of only having written short stories: (Katherine Mansfield is another). In fact because he never wrote any long works, it is often assumed that he didn’t write very much. The truth is the exact opposite: he never stopped writing, and The Total Library, this huge collection of his non-fiction works is only a sample of his vast output.

The Total LibraryFrom his earliest years he produced book reviews, essays, lectures, film reviews, prologues, and translations in addition to his now-famous fictions. He even invented literary genres – the essay which is part philosophic reflection and part fiction; studies of imaginary works; and biographies of people who did not exist. This in addition to spoofs, mind games, and metaphysical writings of a kind that seem to transcend national boundaries – which is partly why he managed to establish his international reputation.

Borges’ attitude to the lecture illustrates both his personality and his versatility. In his earlier years he gave ‘lectures’ by sitting on the stage and letting somebody else read out a prepared text to the audience. After he went blind he didn’t write out a text at all, but sat in front of the audience and improvised monologues on his chosen topic. He is an immensely sophisticated playboy of the literary world

This volume is a very wide collection in chronological terms – from his earliest pieces written in the 1920s to fragments written shortly before his death in 1986. It even includes early work he later disowned, but which here has wisely been included. This allows us to follow (in excellent translation) the development of his approach to writing.

It has to be said that his early work is marked by an inflated and pretentious literary style – for instance his habit of trying to impress with paradoxical statements “all the film’s characters are recklessly normal”. He also seems to have adopted a great deal of whimsy from the English authors who were the favourite reading of his earlier years. But this affectation drops away from the early 1930s onwards.

At their most lightweight, some of these pieces are no more than paragraph long observations, but at their best they offer amazingly perceptive analyses based on his encyclopaedic knowledge and love of literature. For instance in the middle of discussing Melville’s Bartelby the Scrivener he persuasively argues that the text prefigures the work of Kafka in its rigorous logic and black humour. This is a perception he elaborated into a full length essay seven years later – ‘Kafka and his Precursors’ (1951) in which he wittily argues that great writers create not only their own works, but also their readers and even their precursors. He illustrates what we now call Kafkaesque elements in the work of Kierkegaard and Robert Browning, then observes:

Kafka’s idiosyncracy is present in each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist. The poem ‘Fears and Scruples’ by Robert Browning prophesies the work of Kafka, but our reading of Kafka noticeably refines and diverts our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we read it now. .. The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

There are surprises on nearly every page. Borges repeatedly asserts that whilst James Joyce is a great twentieth century writer, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are ‘unreadable’. In his film criticism, he pours scorn on King Kong and Now, Voyager (‘Across the screens of the most remote movie houses, the film spreads its bold thesis: A disfigured Miss Davis is less beautiful‘). He defends Rudyard Kipling against his political detractors. And his celebration of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass will make you want to dash out and buy a copy, if you don’t already have one.

There would be a good argument for reading this collection backwards – starting with pieces such as the magnificent essay on ‘The Detective Story’ (1951) or on ‘Blindness'(1977) which is a poetic meditation on the advantages he has gained from losing his own sight – which turn out to be his learning Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian languages. Work your way in reverse chronological order through his essays on anti-Semitism and the second world war, via the sketches he produced for Hogar (the Argentinean equivalent of Ladies’ Home Journal) until you reach the material he (understandably) disowned. For those who have read his celebrated short stories in Ficciones, Labyrinths, and The Book of Imaginary Beings, this collection is a welcome addition to understanding a fascinating writer.

The Total Library Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Total Library Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2011

Jorge Luis Borges, The Total Library, London: Penguin Books, 2001, pp.560, ISBN: 0141183020

More on Jorge Luis Borges
Twentieth century literature
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The Tree of Knowledge

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Tree of Knowledge first appeared in the volume of short stories published under the collective title The Soft Side in 1900 – a remarkably productive year for Henry James. It was a period which saw the publication of The Great Good Place, Maud-Evelyn, Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie, The Abasement of the Northmores, The Third Person, The Tone of Time, and the story which is widely regarded as his finest – The Beast in the Jungle. He wrote all of these (and more) in addition to working on his next novel, The Sacred Fount (1901).

The Tree of Knowledge

The artist’s studio

The Tree of Knowledge – critical commentary

This is one of many stories James wrote about artists and their varying degrees of success. Morgan Mallow is a hopelessly untalented sculptor who is blind to his own lack of skill but has apparently persuaded the people around him otherwise. The main point of the story is first his son’s realisation that his father is a fraud, and then the revelation that his devoted and supportive wife has been aware of his artistic failure all along.

The most noteworthy thing about the story is the lofty and droll manner in which James conveys Mallow’s lack of talent as a sculptor.

The room they sat in was adorned with sundry specimens of the Master’s genius…They were indeed of dimensions not customary in the products of the chisel and had the singularity that, if the objects and features intended to be small looked too large, the objects and features intended to be large looked too small…The creations [ …] stood about on pedestals and brackets, on tables and shelves, a little staring white population, heroic, idyllic, allegoric, mythic, symbolic, in which “scale” had so strayed and lost itself that the public square and the chimney-piece seemed to have changed places, the monumental being all diminutive and the diminutive all monumental

The Tree of Knowledge – study resources

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

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

The Tree of Knowledge Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Tree of Knowledge Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Tree of Knowledge The Tree of Knowledge – Digireads reprint edition – Amazon UK

The Tree of Knowledge The Tree of Knowledge – eBook formats at Gutenberg Consortia

The Tree of Knowledge The Tree of Knowledge – read the story on line

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

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

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

The Tree of Knowledge

The Tree of Knowledge – plot summary

Part I. Peter Brench is a bachelor and a writer of sorts who is very friendly with Morgan Mallow, a hopelessly untalented sculptor who gives himself great airs and lives on his wife’s money. Brench has been a long time admirer of Mrs Mallow and is godfather to her son Lance. Brench keeps to himself his belief that Mallow lacks talent, whilst Mrs Mallow helps to support the idea that her husband is an unrecognised genius.

Part II. When Lance comes of age he announces that he is giving up studying at Cambridge in favour of going to Paris to become an artist of some kind. Brench tries to dissuade him – without success. Mallow meanwhile recieves a commission from a wealthy Canadian to carve a tombstone.

Part III. Lance eventually returns from Paris, revealing to Peter Brench that he now realises the truth about his father’s lack of talent. Brench shares his own opinions, but asks him to conceal the truth for the sake of his mother’s feelings.

Part IV. Lance returns to Paris, but his father begins to put pressure on him to produce some tangible evidence of success. When Lance feels he can longer remain silent regarding his father’s fraudulence, he reveals to Brench that his mother has confessed to him that she too all along has secretly known about her husband’s lack of talent.

Principal characters
Peter Brench bachelor (50) and ‘writer’
Morgan Mallow his friend, a sculptor
Mrs Mallow Mallow’s wife
Lance (Lancelot) their son
Egidio their Italian footman

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

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 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.
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.

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

© Roy Johnson 2012

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

The Triumph of Night

by

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

The Triumph of Night was first published in 1914, and was one of a number of ghost stories written by Edith Wharton in the first part of the twentieth century. She believed that a tale of the supernatural should have the ability to ‘send a cold shiver down one’s spine’, but she did not resort to conventional depictions of ghosts and the spirit world. Instead, she believed in evoking states of psychological mystery and terror – rather like her friend and fellow novelist Henry James, who shared her interest in supernatural stories.

The Triumph of Night

a New England winter scene

The Triumph of Night – critical commentary

It is difficult to offer a rational critical analysis of a ghost story unless you are prepared to suspend disbelief in the supernatural, but fortunately Edith Wharton does not make an understanding of The Triumph of Night dependent upon a belief in ghosts.

The story at a surface reading is seemingly mysterious, almost to the point of being inexplicable – but in fact Edith Wharton is employing a literary device she uses in some of her other stories. That is, the apparent omission of important information which only becomes available when the story has been subject to close reading and interpretation.

When stranded on a wintry night, George Foxon is treated to warm hospitality by John Lavington, a man who he has never met before; and yet despite being offered the comfort of a flower-filled bedroom, Foxon feels that there is something discomforting about the house:

Mr Lavington’s intense personality – intensely negative, yet intense all the same – must, in some occult way, have penetrated every corner of his dwelling.

Mr Lavington has a smile – but it is a fixed smile. And it becomes apparent that despite his superficial generosity, he does not have his nephew’s best interests at heart. Frank Rainer, who seems to be suffering from tuberculosis, has been advised for the sake of his health to go to a warmer, drier climate in New Mexico. Indeed, his state of being is so enfeebled that Mr Balch thinks he should go there ‘at once‘. But his uncle has kept him in New Hampshire, and he sends him out into the snow swept night to retrieve Foxon when he leaves the house in fear.

We do not need a supernatural explanation for the story. Young Frank Rainer is virtually murdered by his uncle John Lavington. But what is Lavington’s motive?

The business meeting Lavington has concluded with Grisben and Balch is the witnessing of Frank Rainer’s will, being made on the occasion of his having reached the age of twenty-one. The event is punctuated by rumours of an impending financial crisis – ‘the biggest crash since ’93’. And we learn later that Lavington was caught up in financial corruption on a ‘Gigantic’ scale – and yet he is able to come forward with a plan to bale out the cement company with a donation of ten million dollars of his own money.

The implication is that he has come by this money via Frank’s will, and that he is therefore responsible for Frank’s death. Underneath the fixed smile, that is his truly malevolent intention – and it is that which Foxon ‘sees’ in the double figure who appear behind Lavington’s chair in the business meeting and at dinner. The double is the truly and ‘intensely negative’ side of Lavington who represents that unsavoury and unprincipled side of American capitalism.

Foxon’s dilemma is that he was vaguely aware that something was wrong, but he did nothing to act – in time. He felt that he was ‘the instrument singled out to warn and save’ someone. He is with young Frank in his last moments and releases his fur collar – only to have his hands covered in blood – from Frank’s death by tuberculosis, brought on by the hostile climate of New England in which his uncle has kept him.

The Triumph of Night – study resources

The Triumph of Night Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

The Triumph of Night Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Triumph of Night - eBook edition The Triumph of Night – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

Edith Wharton - biography The Triumph of Night – paperback edition – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton - biography Edith Wharton – biography

Edith Wharton - Wikipedia Edith Wharton at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Edith Wharton - tutorials Edith Wharton at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Edith Wharton - tutorials Edith Wharton’s Short Stories – publication details

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Triumph of Night

The Triumph of Night – plot synopsis

Part I.   George Foxon has been employed by Mrs Culme as a secretary. He is travelling to join her in New Hampshire when he is stranded at a remote train station on a stormy mid-winter night. Frank Rainer, a friendly but emaciated young man offers him temporary lodgings at the house of John Lavington, his rich uncle, where Foxon is made very welcome.

Part II.   The house is warm and comfortable, yet Foxon detects something cold and unfriendly in its ambiance. His bedroom is full of flowers. He joins John Lavington and two business associates who are witnessing the will of Frank Rainer, who has just reached his majority of twenty-one. The group is joined briefly by a mysterious figure who casts hostile glances at Frank.

Part III.   The group of men go to dinner, where Frank’s health is discussed. He has been advised to leave for a drier and warmer climate in New Mexico, and is offered a free trip and accommodation there. Foxon sees the mysterious figure in the room again, standing behind John Lavington’s chair, looking malevolently at Frank, though nobody else appears to notice. They drink a toast to Frank, but Foxon is transfixed and terrified by the mystery figure.

Part IV.   He bolts to his room, anxious that he alone should be singled out to witness the figure. He rushes out of the house into the snow and dark, wondering if his social isolation has predisposed him to such visions. Frank Rainer catches up with him, and they start back to return to the house, but Foxon feels that he is leading Frank back to his doom. They stop at the lodge, where Frank collapses and dies.

Part V.   Foxon subsequently has a breakdown, then goes on a tour of Malaysia to recover. There he reads in old newspapers that John Lavington has been involved in a gigantic financial scandal, from which he has bought himself out with ten million dollars. Foxon regrets that he was given the chance to save someone, but did not act in time, and feels that he has ‘blood on his hands’.

Principal characters
George Foxon a Boston secretary
Mrs Culme his new employer, who he never meets
Frank Rainer a cheerful but sickly young man (21)
John Lavington his rich uncle
Mr Grisben business associate of Lavington
Mr Balch business associate of Lavington

Video documentary

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.
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon US

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.
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon US

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

The Turn of the Screw & Other Stories

by

essays on the theory and practice of information design

Towards the late period of his long and astonishingly productive life, Henry James wrote a number of mystery or ghost stories. In these he combined his skills at controlling narrative and point of view with his penchant for puzzling and ambiguous situations. This collection contains some of the most famous tales – ‘Sir Edmund Orme’, ‘Owen Wingrave’, ‘The Friends of the Friends’, and his best-known shorter work, the terrifying story of (apparent) demonic possession, ‘The Turn of the Screw’.

The Turn of the Screw and other stories They all deal with ghosts (or the supernatural) in a non-conventional manner, in that they hold a narrative interest whether you find the ghosts believable or not. And none of them rely on any conventional notions of spookiness or ghastly apparitions for their credibility. As Leon Edel, James’s biographer observed, “A ghost was most ghostlike, James held, when it walked in broad daylight, shorn of all Gothic trappings. It was too obvious to have clanking chains, bloodstains, secret stairways and dead of night for one’s phantoms.”

But what these tales do have in common with many other ghost stories is a connection between the supernatural and death. There’s also a more-than-coincidental link to romantic liaisons between the characters. In Sir Edmund Orme for instance (without giving away too much of the story) a middle-aged lady has been haunted by apparitions of a man who took his own life many years before when she ‘wronged’ him. She wishes to protect her daughter from his influence, and does so with the aid of a narrator who falls in love with the daughter. But in the end there is a reversal of expectations and a dramatic price to pay.

Similarly in Owen Wingrave (which Benjamin Britten used as the basis for his opera) the eponymous hero is oppressed by family traditions of military service he is expected to uphold. He resists them on grounds of humane pacifism, and when challenged by a young woman with whom there is a romantic potential, he defies everyone by sleeping in a bedroom haunted by an ancestor. Once again the outcome is disastrous.

James rings quasi-humorous changes on this theme in The Friends of the Friends where he introduces the conceit of two characters who have both seen the ghost of a parent at precisely the moment they have died in a completely different location. When the narrator (a mutual friend and unusually for James, a woman) becomes engaged to the male character she is determined to introduce him to her friend who has had the same experience. But the female character dies first. Her ‘influence’ however, lives on to have a dramatic effect on the proposed marriage.

But of course the most famous story of all is The Turn of the Screw (another Britten opera) which has attracted widespread comment and a number of different interpretations. A governess has the job of looking after two loveable and innocent young children. She is hampered in her endeavours by the repeated appearances of a former gamekeeper and Miss Jessell (her predecessor) who are both supposed to be dead. It seems that these ghosts are seeking to exercise a malign influence over the children, and the governess is driven to desperate measures to protect them. Each step she takes winds the dramatic tension ever higher, right up to the last page and its horrible finale.

This tale was described at the time of its first publication as ‘the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read in any literature, ancient or modern.’ (the Independent 1899) and it has remained a tantalising puzzle ever since. Like the other stories in this collection it is delivered to us in a very oblique manner, and recounted by a narrator who may or may not be telling the complete truth. Readers are presented with a literary experience not unlike a hall of mirrors, in which nothing is quite what it seems. This is what makes the stories worth reading over and over again.

This is a particularly good edition, since it includes an editor’s introductory essay and explanatory notes to the text, a brief history of its publication, and James’s own introductions in which he explains the origins of the stories and how he decided to treat them – all without giving away their specific outcomes, just as I have tried to do above.

© Roy Johnson 2000

The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp.266, ISBN 0192834045

More on Henry James
More on literature
More on the novella
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The Two Faces

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Two Faces first appeared in Harper’s Bazar in December 1900 – which was a remarkably fertile period for Henry James in terms of his production of shorter fiction. It was a year which saw the publication of Maud-Evelyn, Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie, Broken Wings, The Abasement of the Northmores, The Third Person, The Tone of Time, The Tree of Knowledge, The Great Good Place, and the story which is widely regarded as his finest – The Beast in the Jungle. James produced all of these (and more) in addition to working on his next novel, The Sacred Fount (1901).

The Two Faces

Victorian fashion

The Two Faces – commentary

The crux of this story turns upon the almost hidden detail that Mrs Grantham is a former lover of Lord Gwyther. He has ‘played a trick’ on her only six months previously, which suggests that he has broken off a socially accepted relationship.

After only a short period, he has also broken the London society code of conduct by ‘turning up’ at Mrs Grantham’s house unannounced at a time when Sutton is consolidating his position as her currently accepted admirer.

This explains the social unease which ensues when he arrives at Mrs Grantham’s house at the start of the story, and why it is so surprising (and somewhat gauche of him) to wish to introduce his new wife to his (quite recent) former lover. It might also explain the ‘something new’ that comes into Mrs Grantham’s beauty when she conceives of her plan.

Thus too the significance of the story’s title. When Sutton witnesses the arrival of the Gwythers at Burbeck he sees Mrs Grantham’s face (which he normally finds very beautiful) transformed by the malevolence of her trick. Valda’s appearance of naive innocence amidst this piece of social theatre and personal vengeance is the contrast that leads Sutton to leave the party early, and with it the implication that he will abandon his pursuit of Mrs Grantham.

The Two Faces – study resources

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

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

The Two Faces Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Two Faces Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Two Faces The Two Faces – Digireads reprint edition

The Two Faces The Two Faces – eBook formats at Gutenberg

The Two Faces The Two Faces – read the story on line

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

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

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

The Two Faces

The Two Faces – plot summary

Part I. Mr Shirley Sutton is visiting Mrs May Grantham in whom he seems to have a particular interest, when they are joined by Lord Gwyther. He has come to announce his recent marriage to a young half-German girl Valda. He also expresses a wish that Mrs Grantham will introduce her into London society.

Part II. Mrs Grantham wonders about Gayther’s motives, but she agrees to take responsibility for the young woman, much to everybody’s surprise.

Part III. The characters assemble at Burbeck, an English country house and estate for a weekend party. Sutton discusses the arrival of the Gwythers with Miss Banker, who seems to know everybody’s business, and even secrets. When the Gwythers arrive, Sutton is shocked to see that Mrs Grantham has chosen for her a hideously inappropriate collection of dressware. Knowing that Valda Gwyther will never recover socially from this gaffe, Sutton leaves the party early.

Principal characters
Burbeck an English country house and estate
Mrs May Grantham a beautiful society lady
Bates her butler
Mr Shirley Sutton an admirer of Mrs Grantham
Lord Gwynther Mrs Grantham’s former lover
Miss Banker a society gossip

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

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

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 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 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.
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.

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

© Roy Johnson 2012

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

The Velvet Glove

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tutorial. commentary, study resources, and web links

The Velvet Glove was first published in the English Review in March 1909. It was collected into Volume XII of The Complete Tales of Henry James.

James and Wharton go Motoring

Henry James and Edith Wharton go motoring

The Velvet Glove – critical commentary

The biographical reading

Most commentators see this story as a thinly veiled allusion to Henry James’s relationship with his friend and fellow American novelist Edith Wharton. She like him was an expatriate who spent most of her life living in Europe (Paris in her case). She was very successful as a novelist (in fact she earned more than James from her writing) and in 1905 she had a bestseller with her novel The House of Mirth.

She was also well known for touring in her glamorous series of large automobiles – each of which she named after one of George Sand’s lovers. In fact James had toured France with her by car in 1904. But in 1907 she wrote The Fruit of the Tree, and James was asked to write a preface for it – though not by Wharton personally. James found the situation embarrassing, because he thought the novel was not successful. So, although a great friend and admirer, he turned down the opportunity out of artistic scruple.

Henry James and Edith Wharton

There is a very famous anecdote regarding James, Wharton, and motoring which is designed to throw an amused glance over the prolixity of his literary style. Around the turn of the century, James stopped producing his works by handwriting: instead, he dictated them to a stenograher, which makes this story all the more credible. It comes from Wharton’s autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934).

The most absurd of these episodes occurred on another rainy evening when James and I chanced to arrive at Windsor long after dark. […] While I was hesitating and peering out into the darkness James spied an ancient doddering man who had stopped in the rain to gaze at us. ‘Wait a moment, my dear—I’ll ask him where we are’; and leaning out he signalled to the spectator.

‘My good man, if you’ll be good enough to come here, please; a little nearer—so,’ and as the old man came up: ‘My friend, to put it to you in two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough; that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, we have recently passed through Slough on our way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our point of departure; and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if you would tell us where we now are in relation, say, to the High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the Castle, after leaving on the left hand the turn down to the railway station.’

I was not surprised to have this extraordinary appeal met by silence, and a dazed expression on the old wrinkled face at the window; nor to have James go on: ‘In short’ (his invariable prelude to a fresh series of explanatory ramifications), ‘in short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a word is this: supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past the turn down to the railway station (which in that case, by the way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right) where are we now in relation to…’

‘Oh, please,’ I interrupted, feeling myself utterly unable to sit through another parenthesis, ‘do ask him where the King’s Road is.’

‘Ah—? The King’s Road? Just so! Quite right! Can you, as a matter of fact, my good man, tell us where, in relation to our present position, the King’s Road exactly is?’

‘Ye’re in it’, said the aged face at the window.

The Velvet Glove – study resources

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

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

The Velvet Glove Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Velvet Glove Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Velvet Glove The Complete Tales (Vol 12) – Paperback edition

The Velvet Glove Selected Tales – Penguin Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Velvet Glove The Velvet Glove – eBook formats at Project 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

The Velvet Glove

The Velvet Glove – plot summary

Part I. John Berridge is a successful novelist and playwright. His work The Heart of Gold is enjoying a pan-European success. He mingles with upper-class society at sculptor Gloriani’s studio in Paris, where an English lord asks him for his opinion on a book written by a friend. Berridge speculates imaginatively about the lives of the people at the party, and unobtrusively watches a beautiful woman across the room during a Wagner recital.

Part II. The English lord introduces him to the beautiful woman, who is a princess. Berridge thinks of her as ‘Olympian’ in her beauty and grandeur of demeanour. The lord then produces the novel by his friend Amy Evans, which turns out to be the pen name of the Princess. The Top of the Tree is a florrid romance. The princess seeks out Berridge, promises to replace the book with her latest work, The Velvet Glove, and invites him to a private supper.

Part III. They are driven off together in her large automobile, surrounded by the romantic glamour of Paris at night. Berridge is flattered by her attentions, but then it turns out that she wants him to write a preface for her latest book to help her gain prestige in the literary world. He is deeply shocked at this, and refuses, saying her he will not see her again. He tells her that she does not need commercial success, because she herself embodies the very thing she is writing about – “Princess you are Romance!”

Principal characters
John Berridge novelist and playwright
— an English lord
The Princess romantic novelist (‘Amy Evans’)
— a great contemporary dramatist

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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.
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.

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

© Roy Johnson 2012

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

The Verdict

by

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

The Verdict first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine, number 43 for June 1908. The story was subsequently included in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction, The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories published by Charles Scribner’s in 1908.

The Verdict

cover design by Parish Maxfield

The Verdict – critical comments

Like her good friend Henry James, Edith Wharton was very fond of writing stories about artists – particularly painters, sometimes writers, but very rarely musicians. And like James she was confronted by the difficulty of rendering an account of a visual medium such as painting in the very different medium of words. It is not easy to say why or how a painting is great or a failure by merely describing it.

This story is essentially a critique of bad art. Gisburn has been a popular success, but the implication is that his work is second rate. Rickham thinks him a ‘cheap genius’. In the absence of any other evidence, we are forced to take Rickham’s word for it that Gisburn is a bad painter:

all the hesitations disguised as audacities, the tricks of prestidigitation by which … he managed to divert attention from the real business of the picture to some pretty irrelevance of detail.

And eventually even Gisburn is forced to recognise his lack of genuine artistic talent when confronted by the (dead) Stroud and his donkey sketch. That is the ostensible subject of the story – the reason why Gisburn gave up painting. But the ironic twist to the tale is that instead of completing the commission to paint Stroud, he recommends another young artist, Victor Grindle – and thereby passes on to him the reputation of fashionable (and shallow) success. As he remarks to Rickham:

the irony of it is that I am still painting – since Grindle’s doing it for me. The Strouds stand alone, and happen once – but there’s no exterminating our kind of art.

The Verdict – study resources

The Verdict Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

The Verdict Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Verdict - eBook edition The Descent of Man and Other Stories – Project Gutenberg

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Verdict

The Verdict – story synopsis

The narrator Rickham hears that his friend Jack Gisburn has suddenly given up his successful career as a fashionable portrait painter. The move is regretted by his sitters, but not by fellow painters.

Three years later Rickham visits Gisburn on the Riviera to find out why he gave up painting. Gisburn has married a rich widow and enjoys collecting works of art. But none of his own work is on display in the villa. His wife attributes this to his modesty, but she shows Rickham a portrait of herself which Rickham describes as ‘false virtuosity’.

Gisburn then takes Rickham to his private study where there is a small painting (of a donkey) by a famous artist, Stroud. Gisburn explains it was a gift from the Mrs Stroud, presented to him when he went to paint Stroud’s portrait immediately following his death. Mrs Stroud wanted her husband’s reputation vindicated by a fashionable artist – which was pre-eminently Gisburn at the time.

However, whilst Gisburn was attempting the commission he felt as if Stroud was watching him critically, and he realised that his famous ‘technique’ was just a sham. This is the reason why he gave up painting. Mrs Stroud is disappointed, so Gisburn recommends an upcoming portrait painter Victor Grindle, who completes the commission successfully, and thus takes over Gisburn’s reputation where he has left off.

Principal characters
Mr Rickham the narrator
Jack Gisburn a fashionable portrait painter
Mrs Gisburn his wife
Victor Grindle the next young upcoming fashionable painter

The Verdict

first English edition – Macmillan 1908

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 house - The Mount

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

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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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

The Visits

by

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

The Visits first appeared in Black and White weekly magazine in May 1892 It next appeared in the collection of tales The Private Life published in London by Osgood McIllvaine in 1893.

The Visits

The Visits – critical commentary

On the face of it this tale is hardly more than a sketch or an anecdote. An elderly woman recounts her meetings with a young girl who is upset because she has revealed her feelings to a handsome young man, and dies of ‘shame’ as a result.

At his excellent web site The Ladder Adrian Dover claims that Henry James is here dealing with an issue which simply cannot be made explicit – because of the prudish nature of nineteenth century society at that period.

In fact so prudish was society that this tale, destined to appear in one of its periodicals, has to be reticent about the facts to the point almost of incomprehensibility. Fear not, as so often in James, the point, or one, at least, of the points, lies in what cannot be named. Louisa Chantry cannot speak of it, Henry James cannot speak of it – even his (surviving) notebooks are silent.

Unfortunately, this argument is undermined somewhat by the fact that Dover himself is unable to say what it is, whilst claiming that it is ‘central to the tale’.

The fact is that Louisa Chantry has only just met the poor (but handsome) nephew Jack Brandon, and has obviously been smitten by him. The narrator and Brandon are both aware of a ‘fever in her blood’ when they are dining at the house. She subsequently reveals her feelings to him openly, in defiance of the protocol that a young woman should not do so to a man.

In fact that seems to be the only possible unspoken feature here – that Louisa Chantry has possibly been sexually aroused by Jack Brandon, and feels overwhelmed by the emotions stirred in her. She says “I said strange things to him”.

It should be remembered that in the nineteenth century it was quite commonly believed that women were incapable of being sexually aroused, as such feelings were regarded as unwomanly and degrading. This might explain the profound sense of shame that Louisa feels. James was certainly a master of concealment, restraint, and understatement, but it does not seem altogether convincing that this was the subject he was trying to suggest here – in which case the mystery remains unresolved.

Narrative

This is yet another of James’s tales which is delivered by an outer-narrator relaying the account of events provided by an inner-narrator. And as is very often the case, the outer-narrator makes no further appearance or intervention after introducing the story. The outer-narrator has heard the story from the inner-narrator and has (slightly improbably) taken notes.

The tale occurs only a few years before James used the most elaborately complicated occurrence of the same narrative strategy for The Turn of the Screw (1898). In that tale there is both an inner and an outer-narrator, and the tale has been hand written by one of the characters (the governess) then given to one of the narrators, who makes a copy of it – which is then read out to an assembled company..

The Visits – study resources

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

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

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

The Visits Complete Stories 1892—1898 – 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

The Visits

The Visits – plot summary

An un-named elderly woman recollects visiting a house in the West Country where she meets Louisa Chantry, the daughter of a woman friend she is about to stay with. Louisa is full of mysterious anxiety, possibly to do with a Jack Brandon, a handsome young man who is the host’s nephew.

The narrator comes across Louisa in the garden, very distraught. Before leaving, Louisa begs the narrator not to tell her mother she has been upset.

The narrator goes on to visit Chantry Court, where Louisa is still upset. She tells the narrator that she is going to die. The girl tells her mother that she has done something bad, but will not reveal what it is. The girl falls ill, and a doctor reveals that she has a weak heart. Subsequent specialists are unable to diagnose anything specific.

Louisa eventually reveals to the narrator that at a recent house party she had revealed her feelings to Jack Brandon, who had acted in a gentlemanly manner towards her, though rejecting her advances. Shortly after making this revelation, she dies.

Principal characters
I the un-named female outer narrator
I the un-named inner-narrator, an elderly woman
Mr Christopher Chantry a country gentleman
Mrs Helen Chantry his wife, friend of the narrator
Louisa Chantry their pretty young daughter
Jack Brandon a handsome and poor young man
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 Daisy MillerDaisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Daisy’s innocence and her audacity challenge social conventions, and she seems to be compromising her reputation by her independent behaviour. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. This novella is a great study in understatement and symbolic power.
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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 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.
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Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

The Warrior’s Soul

by

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

The Warrior’s Soul was written in late 1915–early 1916. It was first published in Land and Water, March 1917. It was posthumously collected in Tales of Hearsay, published by T. Fisher Unwin in 1925. The other tales in the volume were The Tale, Prince Roman, and The Black Mate.

The Warrior's Soul

The Retreat from Moscow

Illarion Pryanishnikov 1840-1894

The Warrior’s Soul – critical commentary

Internationalism

The issues here are very typical Conrad subjects. There is a strong sense of internationalist friendship between the Russian Tomassov and his French colleague De Castell. They are also united in their admiration for the French lady in whose salon they have met. De Castell gives Tomassov classified information which is advantageous to the Russians.

But then Tomassov is confronted by his patriotic duty in circumstances of a tragic coincidence. As a Russian he ought to be remorseless towards the Frenchman who has invaded his own country. Even worse: De Castell is so devastated by the grim conditions and the slim chances of surviving the French retreat from Moscow (in which 380,000 men died and 100,000 were captured) that he begs Tomassov to shoot him. At first he refuses, but then does so – with what seem like devastating consequences to his own conscience.

Conrad is being unusually even-handed here. Russians do not usually fare well in his work – with the good biographical reason that Conrad’s family suffered under the political control of Poland by Russia in the nineteenth century. His father and family were exiled to the Ukraine because of his father’s political agitation as a democrat and a patriot.

Of course at the time of this tale’s composition, England , Russia, and France were allies during the first part of the first world war in the conflict with Germany. So it might be argued that Conrad was contributing a little propaganda to the war effort with this tale. Conrad had an unusual and complex relationship with nationality. He was born a Russian citizen – since Russia ruled Poland at that time. He imbibed a strong sense of Polish patriotism from his father. And after serving in the British merchant navy, he took out English citizenship in 1886. Following that, it took him a further three years to renounce his Russian citizenship in 1889.

Evaluation

This is another of Conrad’s historical narratives which is not so successful as his more mature and contemporary-based works. It smacks of the anecdote and lacks the aesthetic and moral complexities of his more successful writing. The elements of the drama are related in very general terms, with very little concrete detail and almost no personal focalization.

It is interesting that he reaches back into the Napoleonic wars to come up with a topic which might throw some light on the conflict which was tearing Europe apart in 1914-1918. The connection is logical – a major international conflict – but somehow the time gap is too wide, and the work pales beside Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent

The Warrior’s Soul – study resources

The Warrior's Soul The Warrior’s Soul – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

The Warrior's Soul The Warrior’s Soul – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Warrior's Soul The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

The Warrior's Soul Tales of Hearsay – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Warrior's Soul 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

A Warrior's Soul Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

A Warrior's Soul Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Warrior's Soul

The Warrior’s Soul – plot summary

An un-named narrator, an old Russian military campaigner, recounts scenes from the Napoleonic wars, finally focusing on his special relationship with a young soldier called Tomassov who had previously been posted in Paris. In an attack on the demoralised Napoleonic Grand Army in its retreat from Moscow, Tomassov takes pity on the enemy and puts up his sword.

Tomassov had previously fallen in love with a beautiful woman who ran a salon in Paris. One afternoon in early 1812 he visits the salon to find her in conversation with French officer De Castel. The two men sense that they are in competition for her favours. When the y both leave, De Castel reveals to Tomassov that the Russian envoy and his staff are about to be arrested. This disclosure permits the envoy to escape arrest.

Back at the Napoleonic battle, the narrator expresses sympathy for the French troops who have fared so badly in the ill-fated Moscow campaign. Tomassov arrives from his patrol with an utterly bedraggled and despairing French prisoner. The prisoner has begged Tomassov to kill him as an act of mercy – but he has refused. The prisoner turns out to be De Castel. Tomassov is mocked in his regiment for being ‘humane’ – and in the end he is so touched by De Castel’s pleas that he does shoot him.

Afterwards, Tomassov resigns from the army and retreats into provincial obscurity.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

The Warrior’s Soul – principal characters
I an un-named Russian officer, the narrator
Tomassov an idealistic young Russian soldier
De Castel a French army officer
The Warrior’s Soul

The Warrior's Soul

first edition, Fisher Unwin 1925

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 York: 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

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