Mantex

Tutorials, Study Guides & More

>> Home / Archives for The Short Story

The Watering Place

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Watering Place was not published during Virginia Woolf’s lifetime, and it is possibly the last thing she ever wrote. She records in a diary entry for 16 February 1941 overhearing a conversation in a Brighton restaurant very much like the one in the story. It is one of her short, non-dramatic stories which records a mood through a collection of related images – and for Woolf it has a rather unusual setting.

The Watering PLace

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition

The Watering Place – critical commentary

Running through all three sections of the story are images of fish – the smell of fish in the town; the ‘enormous’ consumption of fish in the restaurant; the ‘queer fishy smell’ that permeates the ladies room; and the ‘skeleton’ of the town left at night.

Along with the fish imagery, there is recurrent mention of the sea – the ‘depths of the sea’ in the opening, then the ‘surge of an indrawing tide’ with which the flushing toilet is compared, and then the town itself, at night, ‘has sunk down into the water’.

It is amazing enough to think of Virginia Woolf writing a story based on a conversation in a women’s toilet, but what is really remarkable about the story is the similarity of the crucial ‘overheard conversation’ with T.S.Eliot’s bar room chat in ‘A Game of Chess’, the second part of The Waste Land:

Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart,
He’ll want to know what you’ve done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.

The common factors are a serviceman and a lower class woman. Eliot’s Albert is ‘coming back’ from the first world war; Woolf’s Bert is in danger of being ‘courtmartialled’ for something he is doing. Eliot’s Lil needs to get a new set of teeth, whilst Woolf’s Gert (a ‘simpering little thing’) is more fortunate, with a set to match Bert’s:

Bert never did care about big women … Ave you seen him since he’s been back? … They’ve both got the same teeth … Are He’s [sic] got such beautiful white teeth … Gert has em too … But his are a bit crooked

It should be noted that Virginia Woolf herself set Eliot’s entire poem in type when it was published by the Hogarth Press in 1923. This was in the early years of the Press, when all production was hand-crafted by Woolf and her husband Leonard.

Study resources

The Watering Place The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Watering Place The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Watering Place The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Watering Place The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

The Watering Place The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Watering Place

The Watering Place – synopsis

The first paragraph of the story is an evocation of seaside life presented as a satirical account of its inhabitants described in terms of the seashells used to decorate holiday gifts and memorabilia.

The second paragraph starts in the fishy interior of a restaurant, and then proceeds to the ladies room, where three young women are applying make-up and exchanging gossip. Fragments of their conversation are punctuated by the sound of a flushing toilet.

The story ends with a description of the town at night, illuminated only by fairy lights.

Virginia Woolf podcast

A eulogy to words

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red button Susan Sellers, The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

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

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

Virginia Woolf's handwriting

“I feel certain that I am going mad again.”

Other works by Virginia Woolf

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

 

Woolf - OrlandoOrlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon US

Kew GardensKew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon US

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

Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

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

The Wheel of Time

by

tutorial, commentary, synopsis, and study resources

The Wheel of Time (1892) first appeared in Cosmopolitan Magazine in December 1892 and January 1893. It later appeared in the collection of Henry James stories published by Osgood, McIlvaine later the same year. The other stories in the volume were The Private Life, Lord Beaupre, The Visits, Collaboration, and Owen Wingrave.

The Wheel of Time

The Wheel of Time – critical commentary

The main point of interest in this story is the twinning, inversions, and parallels which are drawn between the two generations – together with the ironic reversal of Fanny’s appearance and Maurice’s reaction to her.

The young Maurice cannot bring himself to propose marriage, despite his mother’s encouragement, to the rich but plain Fanny Knocker – so he escapes the social expectations being made of him by fleeing abroad. Fanny falls seriously ill in a manner which suggests lovesickness.

Later, the older Maurice has a plain daughter of his own. The roles are reversed. He would like to marry off the plain Vera to Fanny’s handsome son Arthur – thus ‘correcting’ the mistake he now feels he has made regarding Fanny. But Arthur behaves in the same way – fleeing abroad rather than marrying a plain woman. Vera too falls ill, but she actually dies.

Fanny’s miraculous transformation from a plain young woman to spectacular mature beauty causes Maurice serious pangs of regret – so much so that he ends up reproaching her for not giving him sufficient warning when they first met. It is not quite clear from the text if this is to be taken as a faintly comic reaction or a more serious example of his essential egoism.

Eugene Onegin

This story is Henry James’s variation of Pushkin’s famous novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, but with an added twist. The centre of Pushkin’s narrative is that an unsophisticated country girl, Tatyana, falls in love with the romantic but bored hero, Onegin. She writes a letter declaring her feelings to him – to which he doesn’t even reply. Later he coldly rejects her, and makes matters worse by flirting with her sister.

Several years later Onegin meets Tatyana again at a ball in St Petersburg. She is now transformed into a mature and confident society beauty – completely unlike her younger self. Onegin becomes obsessed with her, even though she is now married to an ageing prince. He writes her several letters – to which she doe not reply. Eventually he confronts her and pleads to resume their former relationship. She admits that she still loves him, but refuses to be unfaithful to her husband. He is left bitterly regretting his lost opportunity.

The Wheel of Time – study resources

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

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

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

The Wheel of Time Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Wheel of Time The Complete Tales of Henry James – Volume 8 – Digireads reprint – UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

The Wheel of Time The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle eBook edition

The Wheel of Time The Wheel of Time – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Wheel of Time

The Wheel of Time- principal characters
Lady Greywood a society lady
Maurice Glanvil her handsome third son, who is a failure
Vera Glanvil Maurice’s daughter, who is plain and short
Mrs Jane Knocker Lady Greywood’s friend
Fanny Knocker her plain daughter, later Mrs Trejant
Arthur Trejant Fanny’s handsome son
The Wheel of Time – plot summary

Part I.   General Knocker and his wife Jane have recently inherited money, and are on their way back from India to England. In Paris, Jane Knocker meets her old friend Lady Greyswood and seeks her help to find a husband for Fanny, her plain daughter.

A year later Lady Greyswood suggests the rich Fanny as a suitable match to her untalented but handsome son Maurice. He rejects the idea because Fanny is so plain: he wants an attractive wife. Lady Greyswood thinks it will be prudent to let the idea mature. However, when she invites the Knockers to dinner, Jane feigns a headache and sends Fanny in her place, so that she will meet Maurice. Following this, further social meetings take place.

Part II.   The two mothers plot and negotiate. Maurice has no money and no prospects, but is very handsome: Fanny is rich but plain. Lady Greyswood tries again to persuade Maurice to take an interest in Fanny, even revealing that Fanny is in love with him. He still rejects the idea because he thinks that Fanny is ‘awful’.

Lady Greyswood lies about Maurice’s feelings to Jane Knocker and tries to promote further meetings between the two younger people. Maurice then makes an effort to socialise with Fanny for the sake of his mother. He admits that she has talents, but eventually bolts for France when he cannot pretend any more. Fanny is taken ill – with the implication that she is sick with love for Maurice.

Part III.   Twenty years later Maurice is now a widower and is almost fifty years old. He has brought his daughter Vera to England to help launch her in society. But she is short and plain, and something of a disappointment to him. At a lunch party Vera meets a charming young man, and they all witness the unveiling of a portrait painting of a very beautiful woman, his mother, who turns out to be Fanny Knocker, now Mrs Trejant. The boy Arthur offers to introduce Maurice and Vera to his mother. Maurice reveals to Vera that the woman is an old friend.

Part IV.   Maurice waits impatiently for a dinner engagement with Mrs Trejant. He goes to see the portrait again and learns that she is popular, handsome, and is now a widow. He pays her a visit and is astonished to find that she is almost a different person than the one he knew. They compare notes about their respective lives, and are very amicable with each other. He asks her about the old agreement between their mothers – but she feigns ignorance.

Part V.   Maurice goes to see Mrs Trejant every day and feels he has never met such an interesting woman. She accommodates him warmly, but they do not discuss the nature of their previous relationship. Mrs Trejant takes an enthusiastic and protective interest in Vera. Her son Arthur suddenly goes to Ireland, and Maurice reflects on the similarities in their behaviour – bolting before the prospect of marrying a plain girl. Arthur however has good prospects, both financial and social.

Maurice patronisingly reproaches Mrs Trejant for not having warned him (a quarter of a century before) that she would not always be plain. Eventually, he convinces himself that she has always been in love with him, and that she now has a chance to show it.

Part VI.   Maurice realises that he is in love with Mrs Trejant. He arranges a formal dinner, and after everyone else has gone he asks her to marry him. But she refuses, and instead takes Vera to her estate in Derbyshire for six months. Maurice goes abroad alone, hoping that their two children will find the happiness that he and Fanny once missed.

But in Paris he bumps into Arthur, who is bolting from Derbyshire to Spain. Maurice goes to Derbyshire to find Mrs Trejant distraught with the failure of her plans, and Vera is critically ill. Like Fanny, she does recover, but a year later she dies in Rome.

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

Red button 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 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 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 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 Wind Blows

by

tutorial, comment, study resources, and plot summary

The Wind Blows was first published on 27 August 1920 in the Athenaeum (edited by Katherine Mansfield’s husband John Middleton Murry) and later reprinted in Bliss and Other Stories (1920).

The Wind Blows

The Wind Blows – critical commentary

The story is a wonderfully subtle, restrained, and even understated evocation of the emotional turmoil in the maturation process of a young teenage girl. The portrait is composed of her reactions to the people in her life and the atmosphere of her surroundings. To these are added a number of suggestive symbols and metaphors that Mansfield selects to suggest her sexualisation and emotional growth.

These suggestions begin with the phenomenon that gives the story its title – the wind. As every teacher knows, young people are enlivened and even excited by windy weather – and Matilda is no exception. She is woken up by the wind and thinks ‘something dreadful has happened’. But it hasn’t – the disruption is merely a relection of her febrile transitory feelings. She is part way between being a girl and a woman.

Next she thinks that life is ‘hideous and simply revolting’ and she ‘hates’ her mother for trying to control her appearance – particularly her hair. This is clearly a portrait of adolescent unrest, or ‘growing pains’ as they are sometimes known.

She also feels a sense of competition with the girl next door – Marie Swainson – seeing her as reckless and possibly a sexual rival: ‘Her skirt flies up about her waist … she doesn’t mind what she does’. Matilda is also irritated that Marie turns up for her piano lesson ‘hours before her time’, thus breaking the spell of Matilda’s contact with the teacher Robert Bullen.

For when she arrives at the home of her teacher the story takes a distinctly erotic turn. Matilda feels comforted by Mr Bullen’s enviornment and engaged by his manner – his ‘very nice hand’ and the fact that he speaks ‘so kindly’. Her own fingers ‘tremble’ and ‘her heart beats so hard she feels it might lift her blouse up and down’. She is so affected by his presence and the romance of playing Beethoven that she starts to cry.

Mr Bullen uses the language and gestures of seduction. He takes hold of her hands, allows her to rest her head against him, and resorts to a flattering cliché – ‘that rare thing, a woman’. Fortunately for Matilda, the spell of this moment is broken by the arrival of her rival Marie Swainson.

When she goes to the harbour with her brother Bogey she takes her hat off and allows her hair to fall free – defying her mother’s injunction. The height and force of the stormy sea is a clear reflection of the disturbed feelings and potential for liberation that she feels inside herself.

This liberation is confirmed and underscored in the visionary moment of imagining her older self on board the ship, looking back as it leaves the island and sailing out to sea. Matilda then sees her younger self as the girl who cried that day at her music lesson ‘many years ago’. Two separate periods of time are telescoped into one before the story ends on the same note as it began – with the wind.

The Wind Blows – study resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wind Blows – plot summary

Matilda is a young teenage girl living in south New Zealand with her mother and her brother Bogey. On a particularly windy autumn day she feels somewhat irritated by life and is at odds with the world, partucularly her mother’s fuss over her appearance and clothing.

She goes to a piano lesson with her teacher Mr Bullen, where she feels soothed by his avuncular manner and the atmosphere of his drawing room. He seems to her a protective and slightly romantic presence, to which she is in the process of yielding when they are interrupted by the arrival of his next pupil, Matilda’s neighbour Marie Swainson.

Back home she continues to feel an existential resentment regarding her home life. When her bother suggests a walk on the esplanade she feels it as a liberation. They go down to the harbour where they see a steamer putting out to sea. She has a vision of herself and Bogey on board the ship as older people, leaving the island and looking back on their youthful past.

The Wind Blows

Katherine Mansfield – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2015

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

Theodolinde

by

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

Theodolinde was first published in Lippincott’s Magazine in May 1878. Its next appearance in book form was as part of the collection Stories Revived, published in three volumes by Macmillan in London in 1885. It was later given the title Rose-Agathe.

Theodolinde

Paris shop window

Theodolinde – critical commentary

This tale is not much more than an over-extended joke – the point of which is clearly visible from very near the beginning of the story. James can perhaps be forgiven, since the piece was written early in his career, at a time when he was writing what he himself regarded as pot-boilers for popular magazines.

Having said that, He had already produced tales such as Gabrielle de Bergerac (1869)and The Madonna of the Future (1873) which whilst not at the same level of achievement as late masterpieces such as The Altar of the Dead (1895) and The Beast in the Jungle (1903) show a serious and restrained side of James which seems hard to reconcile with the almost farcical premise of Theodolinde.

Theodolinde – study resources

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

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

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

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

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

Theodolinde

Theodolinde – plot summary

An un-named American narrator waits on his first floor Paris lodgings for his friend Sanguinetti, who is late arriving for dinner. The narrator admires the pretty wife of the hairdresser in a shop opposite. When Sanguinetti arrives in the street he too pauses to stare admiringly in the hairdresser’s window.

Over dinner they agree that the woman is a ‘Madonna’ type . Sanguinetti is from a family of Italian immigrants dealing in artistic objects, which he himself collects. He says his objective is to visit the shop, make a favourable impression. then offer money for the woman.

Next day the narrator visits the shop, but is served by a less attractive assistant. Sanguinetti then visits the shop and reports to the narrator that he has spoken to the hairdresser’s wife, and that he is completely in love.

Sanguinetti continues to mount his campaign, much to the amusement of the narrator, who chaffs him about his obsession. Sanguinetti starts to buy presents for his love object, though he buys imitation rather than real jewels.

The narrator notices that the jewels appear on the heads of the models in the hairdresser’s window. Sanguinetti arrives to say that he has succeeded in his plan. But when the narrator goes to Sanguinetti’s apartments, it is the shop window model Sanguinetti has fallen in love with and bought.

Theodolinde – principal characters
I the un-named narrator, an American
Sanguinetti an Italo-American collector of antiques
Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

To Please His Wife

by

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

To Please His Wife first appeared in Black and White magazine for June 1891 and was later collected in the first edition of Life’s Little Ironies published by Osgood, McIlvane in 1894. Hardy sold the rights to the story outright for £50 to the American publisher S.S.McLure. The weekly magazine Black and White also published work by Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

To Please His Wife

To Please his Wife – critical commentary

Structure

The tale is structured on a series of parallels or twinnings. The protagonist Jolliffe is attracted to two women at the same time, the friends Emily and Joanna, who are forced into rivalry with each other. Both the two women are shopkeepers, and eventually live opposite each other in the town, and both have two sons. Joanna’s sons both disappear at sea, whilst Emily’s sons are going on to university.

Even one of Thomas Hardy’s favourite plot devices (the letter which is not delivered) is used twice here. Joanna writes to Jolliffe revealing her lack of passion for him. But when she goes to deliver the letter, her competitive spirit is inflamed when she sees Jolliffe kissing Emily. Jolliffe (who knows nothing about her letter) then writes to Joanna in his turn, asking to be released from the engagement, but she insists on the marriage going ahead. So – two people enter a marriage, even though we know that both of them secretly wish to be released from it.

Education

This is almost a primitive folk tale, but Hardy’s regular preoccupation with class, social status, and education all play a vital part in events. Joanna envies Emily’s rise in social status within the town. Emily’s sons, coming from a more prosperous family, will naturally go on to university, and thence to the ‘professions’, which at that time were the Church, the Law, and Medicine.

Joanna is fueled by envy and a competitive spirit regarding her former rival. But it is not for her own comfort and luxury that she spurs Jolliffe on to make more money; it is for the finance that will provide an education for her sons. That of course is the major tragedy of the story: it is Joanna’s ambition that drives to their (presumed) deaths both her husband and the very two sons she wishes to prosper. And just to rub in the tragic irony (of which Hardy was so fond) the name of the ship on which Jolliffe and his two sons set sail, never to return, is Joanna.

To Please His Wife – study resources

To Please His Wife Life’s Little Ironies – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

To Please His Wife Life’s Little Ironies – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

To Please His Wife Life’s Little Ironies – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

To Please His Wife The Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle eBook

To Please His Wife Life’s Little Ironies – eBooks at Project Gutenberg

To Please His Wife Life’s Little Ironies – audiobook at Project Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Red button The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Red button Authors in Context – Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

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

To Please his Wife

To Please his Wife – plot synopsis

Part I   Shipwreck survivor captain Shadrack Jolliffe arrives back in his home town of Havenpool ( Poole, Dorset) where he rapidly enchants Emily Henning, a solicitor’s daughter. However, her friend Joanna Phippard just as rapidly supersedes her in his affections. Jolliffe proposes marriage to Joanna and becomes engaged to her. She however, is not deeply in love with him, and writes him a letter, releasing him from his promise of marriage. But when she goes to deliver the letter, she sees Jolliffe withEmily. He is explaining to her that he feels confused, but then kisses her passionately, which inflames Joanna’s jealousy. Jolliffe then writes to Joanna asking her to release him from his promise of marriage, but when he meets her to discuss the matter she insists on maintaining the engagement, and he agrees as a man of ‘honour’.

Part II   Jolliffe marries Joanna, they have two sons, and they run a grocery shop, without much success. Meanwhile Emily marries Mr Lester, an older and more prosperous man. She too has two sons, and rises successfully in society. Joanna feels envy and rivalry towards Emily. Jolliffe admits that he is not a success in business and goes back to sea. He returns with money, but not enough for Joanna, who wants her sons to be well educated. But the only way they can make more money is for her sons to go to sea with their father – which they do, sinking all their savings into the enterprise.

Part III   The sons and father are a long time at sea, and Joanna’s business collapses completely. Socially thriving Emily takes pity on her and offers her accommodation. Six years later Joanna thinks she hears her husband and sons returning in the middle of the night, but when she gets up nobody is there. The implication is that they will never return.

To Please his Wife – principal characters
Captain Shadrack Jolliffe a simple sailor
Emily Henning an accountant’s daughter
Joanna Phippard Emily’s friend, a socially ambitious woman
Mr Lester a thriving merchant, Emily’s husband

Map of Wessex

Hardy’s WESSEX

Further reading

Red button John Bayley, An Essay on Hardy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Red button Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form, Brighton: Harvester, 1982.

Red button Kristin Brady, The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1982.

Red button L. St.J. Butler, Alternative Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1989.

Red button Raymond Chapman, The Language of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1990.

Red button R.G.Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1970.

Red button Ralph W.V. Elliot, Thomas Hardy’s English, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984.

Red button James Gibson (ed), The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, London, 1976.

Red button Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1962. (This is more or less Hardy’ s autobiography, since he told his wife what to write.)

Red button P. Ingham, Thomas Hardy: A Feminist Reading, Brighton: Harvester, 1989.

Red button P.Ingham, The Language of Class and Gender: Transformation in the English Novel, London: Routledge, 1995,

Red button Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist, London: Bodley Head, 1971.

Red button Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. (This is the definitive biography.)

Red button Michael Millgate and Richard L. Purdy (eds), The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978-

Red button R. Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, London: Routledge, 1988.

Red button Harold Orel (ed), Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, London, 1967.

Red button F.B. Pinion, A Thomas Hardy Companion, London: Macmillan, 1968.

Red button Norman Page, Thomas Hardy, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1977.

Red button Rosemary Sumner, Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist, London: Macmillan, 1981.

Red button Richard H. Taylor, The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, London, 1978.

Red button Merryn Williams, A Preface to Hardy, London: Longman, 1976.

Hardy’s study

Thomas Hardy's study

reconstructed in Dorchester museum

Other works by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Tess of the d'UrbervillesTess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) is probably the most popular of Hardy’s late, great novels. The sub-title is ‘A Pure Woman’, and it is a story which explores the tragic consequences of a young milkmaid who becomes the victim of the men she encounters. First she falls for the spiritual but flawed Angel Clare, and then the physical but limited Alec Durberville takes advantage of her. This novel has some of the most beautiful and the most harrowing depictions of rural working conditions which reveal Hardy as a passionate advocate for those who work the land. It also has a wonderfully symbolic climax at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. There is poetry in almost every page.
Thomas Hardy Tess of the d'Urbervilles Buy the book at Amazon UK
Thomas Hardy Tess of the d'Urbervilles Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Wessex TalesWessex Tales Don’t miss the skills of Hardy as a writer of shorter fictions. None of his short stories are really short, but they are beautifully crafted. This is the first volume of his tales in which he was seeking to record the customs, superstitions, and beliefs of old Wessex before they were lost to living memory. Yet whilst dealing with traditional beliefs, they also explore very modern concerns of difficult and often thwarted human passions which he developed more extensively in his longer works.
Thomas Hardy Wessex Tales Buy the book at Amazon UK
Thomas Hardy Wessex Tales Buy the book at Amazon US

Thomas Hardy – web links

Thomas Hardy at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, book reviews. bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Thomas Hardy Collection
The complete novels, stories, and poetry – Kindle eBook single file download for £1.29 at Amazon.

Thomas Hardy at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

Thomas Hardy at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, the novels and literary themes, poetry, religious beliefs and influence, biographies and criticism.

The Thomas Hardy Society
Dorset-based site featuring educational activities, a biennial conference, a journal (three times a year) with links to the texts of all the major works.

The Thomas Hardy Association
American-based site with photos and academic resources. Be prepared to search and drill down to reach the more useful materials.

Thomas Hardy on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production features, box office, film reviews, and even quizzes.

Thomas Hardy – online literary criticism
Small collection of academic papers and articles ‘favoring signed articles by recognized scholars and articles published in peer-reviewed sources’.

Thomas Hardy’s Wessex
Evolution of Wessex, contemporary reviews, maps, bibliography, links to other web sites, and history.

© Roy Johnson 2014

More on Thomas Hardy
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

To-Morrow

by

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

To-Morrow was written in early 1902 and serialized in Pall Mall Magazine, 1902. It was later collected in Typhoon and Other Stories (1903). The other stories in the volume were Amy Foster, Falk: A Reminiscence, and Typhoon. In currently available editions, these are supplemented by the novella The Secret Sharer.

To-Morrow

To-Morrow – critical commentary

This is a story of deluded hopes and dramatic irony which might have come from the pages of Thomas Hardy rather than his friend and contemporary Joseph Conrad.

There are two principal ironies in the tale – one real, and the other potential. The first, which is real, is that the apparently doting father Hagberd turns out to be a tyrant and a fraud, whose eagerly awaited son actually wants nothing to do with him. Hagberd has built up a self-enclosed system of belief about his son, and he has prepared a homecoming which is a myth which sustains Hagberd himself.

The second irony, which may only be realised outside the narrative time-frame, is that Harry borrows money from the hapless and moon-struck Bessie, but if Hagberd sticks to his word and disinherits his son, she will be the benefactor.

Even Conrad, in his introductory remarks to the collection Typhoon and Other Stories, has very little to say about the tale:

Of that story I will only say that It struck many people by its adaptability to the stage, and that I was induced to dramatise it under the title of One Day More, up to the present my only effort in that direction. (1919)

To-Morrow – study resources

To-Morrow Typhoon and Other Stories – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

To-Morrow Typhoon and Other Stories – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

To-Morrow To-Morrow – Kindle eBook

To-Morrow One Day More – Kindle eBook

To-morrow Typhoon and Other Stories – eBook at Project Gutenberg

To-morrow 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

Red button Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Red button Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

To-Morrow

To-Morrow – plot summary

Retired skipper Hagberd goes from Colchester to Coalbrook in search of his son Harry, who ran away to sea. Failing to find him, Hagberd settles there. He confides his hopes for his son’s return (which he endlessly hopes will be ‘to-morrow’) to Bessie, the daughter of his next door neighbour and tenant.

Hagberd has been a reluctant sailor, rarely out of sight of land. He makes elaborate preparations for Harry`s return, and assumes he will be a suitable husband for Bessie. She looks after her cantankerous father, who mistreats her.

Hagberd advertises in the newspapers for information about his son, and meanwhile furnishes the cottage for his arrival, letting nobody see the results.

One day a man arrives at the cottage claiming to have news of Hagberd’s son – but the old skipper refuses to hear it, claiming that he has all the information he needs, as his son will be returning soon. The man turns out to be his son Harry, and Bessie explains how he has kept up his hopes with the myth of `to-morrow’.

Harry tells Bessie how his father mistreated him as a child. Harry tries to get inside Hagberd’s cottage, but his father will not let anybody in. He goes into Bessie’s cottage instead and recounts scenes from his childhood, including satirical accounts of his father boasting about going on long sea voyages, when it was just short trips up the coast to South Shields for coal.

Harry reveals himself as a sailor adventurer who has been on a drinking spree in London and come to his father’s house in the hope of borrowing some money He tells Bessie romantic tales of prospecting for gold in Mexico and mixing with Gambucinos who live independent carefree lives.

Bessie tells him of Hagberd’s plans and preparations for his son – but Harry rejects them scornfully. He does not want to be pinned down to domestic life. Hagberd meanwhile shouts down from upstairs next door, warning Bessie not to deal with the stranger, but to wait for Harry who will be there the next day. He threatens that if Harry does not marry her when he turns up, he will cut him out of his will and leave Bessie all his money.

This alerts Harry to the full extent of his father’s plans. He borrows money from Bessie, showers her with kisses, and leaves.

To-Morrow – principal characters
Captain Hagberd a retired coastal skipper and widower
Harry Hagberd his son, an adventurer (31)
Josiah Carvil a blind boat-builder, his neighbour
Bessie Carvil his daughter
Biography

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

Joseph Conrad - writing table

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other work by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad NostromoNostromo (1904) is Conrad’s ‘big’ political novel – into which he packs all of his major subjects and themes. It is set in the imaginary Latin-American country of Costaguana – and features a stolen hoard of silver, desperate acts of courage, characters trembling on the brink of moral panic. The political background encompasses nationalist revolution and the Imperialism of foreign intervention. Silver is the pivot of the whole story – revealing the courage of some and the corruption and destruction of others. Conrad’s narration is as usual complex and oblique. He begins half way through the events of the revolution, and proceeds by way of flashbacks and glimpses into the future.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

Joseph Conrad The Secret AgentThe Secret Agent (1907) is a short novel and a masterpiece of sustained irony. It is based on the real incident of a bomb attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1888 and features a cast of wonderfully grotesque characters: Verloc the lazy double agent, Inspector Heat of Scotland Yard, and the Professor – an anarchist who wanders through the novel with bombs strapped round his waist and the detonator in his hand. The English government and police are subject to sustained criticism, and the novel bristles with some wonderfully orchestrated effects of dramatic irony – all set in the murky atmosphere of Victorian London. Here Conrad prefigures all the ambiguities which surround two-faced international relations, duplicitous State realpolitik, and terrorist outrage which still beset us more than a hundred years later.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013

Joseph Conrad links

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

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

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

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

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

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

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

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

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
Joseph Conrad complete tales

Together and Apart

by

tutorial, synopsis, commentary, and study resources

Together and Apart was probably written in early 1925. It is one of a number of short stories by Virginia Woolf set at a party in the Westminster home of Richard and Clarissa Dalloway, the hosts of the central social event in her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925). The story originally carried the (slightly ironic) title of The Conversation, and it was first published in A Haunted House (1944).

Together and Apart

Virginia Woolf

Together and Apart – commentary

In all these short sketches and stories based on figures circulating in Clarissa Dalloway’s drawing room, there is a common theme of a failure of communication. Occasions which are designed to offer social interaction to her guests are revealed as a series of communication breakdowns, gulfs of empathy, and studies in solipsism.

This story brings together two different forms of egoism which prevent any meaningful communication taking place. Roderick Serle is encased in a morbid form of self-congratulation and unwarranted self-esteem. He is also guilty of philosophic bad faith, blaming his lack of success on too intense an engagement with the world around him — ‘He had involved himself too deep in life’ — which is exactly the opposite of the case.

Ruth Anning on the other hand has retreated into a tiny world which excludes any dangers of engagement. She has few friends, and comforts herself with what appears to be a tightly circumscribed domestic life — ‘She had Sarah, Arthur, the cottage, the chow’. Despite this reserve she is on the verge of being touched by — ‘She could imagine something different, more like lightening, more intense. She could imagine some physical sensation. She could imagine —’ but at this very point she puts a stop to her own feelings.

Point of view

By 1925 Virginia Woolf was very much in control of the modernist technique of shifting point of view she had pioneered in earlier works such as Jacob’s Room. She combined this with a sense of fluidity or mosaic-like topic-shifting in her narratives to produce some extraordinarily long sentences:

‘Yes, I know Canterbury,’ he said reminiscently, sentimentally, inviting, Miss Anning felt, discreet questions, and that was what made him interesting to so many people, and it was this extraordinary facility and responsiveness to talk on his part that had been his undoing, so he thought, often, taking his studs out and putting his keys and small change on the dressing-table after one of these parties (and he went out sometimes almost every night in the season), and, going down to breakfast, becoming quite different, grumpy, unpleasant at breakfast to his wife, who was an invalid, and never went out, but had old friends to see her sometimes, women friends for the most part, interested in Indian philosophy and different cures and different doctors, which Roderick Serle snubbed off by some caustic remark too clever for her to meet, except by gentle expostulations and a tear or two — he had failed, he often thought, because he could not cut himself off utterly from the society of and the company of women, which was so necessary to him, and write.

The statement begins with his reported speech, but then in the two adverbs immediately following — ‘reminiscently, sentimentally’ — the first might represent Serle’s point of view, whereas the second suggests an authorial criticism. They are followed by the verb ‘inviting’, which leads directly into the narrative taking up Miss Anning’s point of view.

The following phrase whose subject is ‘this extraordinary facility’ appears to be ambiguously unattached to a point of view — until it is anchored to Serle again with ‘so he thought’, after which the narrative returns to a third person omniscient narrative mode, describing his unfeeling behaviour towards his wife, until it returns to his point of view as he reflects that it is his engagement with ‘life’ that has prevented him from writing.

So the single sentence includes three different points of view; three locations; and four identifiable subjects of interest, and apart from the curious hesitation of ‘sometimes almost’ runs fluently for almost two hundred words.

Together and Apart – study resources

Together and Apart The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

Together and Apart The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

Together and Apart The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

Together and Apart The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Together and Apart Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Together and Apart Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Together and Apart Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

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

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

Together and Apart The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Red button Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Together and Apart

Together and Apart – story synopsis

Two people are introduced to each other by Clarissa Dalloway at one of her parties in Westminster, London. Ruth Anning is a timid spinster of forty and Roderick Serle is a fifty year old would-be poet with an invalid wife. They make halting small talk which does not in an way reflect their interior thoughts.

She rationalises the fact that she hasn’t got many friends, whilst he hides behind a facade of conventionality. He feels as if he as not achieved as much as he should in life, but since Miss Anning is not aware of this shortcoming, he thinks that their meeting presents him with a new opportunity.

Serle rationalises his lack of success with the idea that he has been too engaged with ‘life’ – when all the evidence suggests that the opposite is likely to be the case. He regards himself as a poet and compares himself favourably with Wordsworth. Miss Anning is impressed by an image he uses to describe a fellow guest, but she is unable to understand the fluctuations in her own feelings towards him.

Their desultory conversation centres on the fact that she once visited Canterbury, the city where he grew up. Her thoughts about it are quite different to his, but a sudden congruence strikes them both and prompts her to wonder if marriage might have provided more excitement in her life. But she immediately closes down the topic in her mind, as she does not have the language to deal with it.

Both of them recognise that they have come to an impasse, so they revert to stock gestures and an embarrassed silence – from which they are rescued by the arrival of another guest at the party.

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red button Susan Sellers, The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

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

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

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Jacob's RoomJacob’s Room (1922) was Woolf’s first and most dramatic break with traditional narrative fiction. It was also the first of her novels she published herself, as co-founder of the Hogarth Press. This gave her for the first time the freedom to write exactly as she wished. The story is a thinly disguised portrait of her brother Thoby – as he is perceived by others, and in his dealings with two young women. The novel does not have a conventional plot, and the point of view shifts constantly and without any signals or transitions from one character to another. Woolf was creating a form of story telling in which several things are discussed at the same time, creating an impression of simultaneity, and a flow of continuity in life which was one of her most important contributions to literary modernism.
Virginia Woolf - Jacob's Room Buy the book – Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Jacob's Room Buy the book – Amazon US

Virginia Woolf Mrs DallowayMrs Dalloway (1925) is probably the most accessible of her great novels. A day in the life of a London society hostess is used as the structure for her experiments in multiple points of view. The themes she explores are the nature of personal identity; memory and consciousness; the passage of time; and the tensions between the forces of Life and Death. The novel abandons conventional notions of plot in favour of a mosaic of events. She gives a very lyrical response to the fundamental question, ‘What is it like to be alive?’ And her answer is a sensuous expression of metropolitan existence. The novel also features her rich expression of ‘interior monologue’ as a narrative technique, and it offers a subtle critique of society recovering in the aftermath of the first world war. This novel is now seen as a central text of English literary modernism.
Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway Buy the book – Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway Buy the book – Amazon US

Kew GardensKew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book – Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book – Amazon US

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

Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

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

Travelling Companions

by

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

Travelling Companions first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly during November—December 1870. Its first presentation in book form was in the collection of stories Travelling Companions published by Boni and Liveright in New York, 1919.

Travelling Companions

Venice – St Mark’s Square

Travelling Companions – critical commentary

Convention

The crux of this story is a situation which has been used many times in late nineteenth and early twentieth century fiction. Indeed, James used it again in his tale The Solution (1888), and it forms the background to his famous novella Daisy Miller (1878).

The situation arises from the notion that the reputation of an unmarried woman will be sullied if she spends even a short amount of time unchaperoned by either a male relative or an older married woman or spinster. This notion rests on the retail value of the woman in terms of securing a favourable marriage. The notion originates in the upper class and the aristocracy who wished to form financially and politically advantageous liaisons strictly within their own class.

A young woman’s reputation had to be unimpeachable, because any previous liaisons she might have had could produce illegitimate children, who would have some claim on the family’s accumulated property and capital. And given the way that ideology works, this idea would percolate down in society, even to the lower classes who had no property or capital to conserve.

The further ramification of this convention is that any man responsible for putting a woman into a compromised position had a duty of honour to offer the woman marriage. Thus when Mr Brooke and Charlotte Evans innocently miss the last train back from Padua to Venice, they are forced to stay in a hotel overnight. This would be enough, under the prurient conventions of the time, to cast a shadow on Charlotte’s reputation.

It is noticeable that the incident is being talked about by people in the Venice hotel, and that Mr Evans on his return from Milan checks that Brooke has made a formal proposal of marriage to his daughter. Actually, Brooke has proposed before the incident, but Charlotte has refused him. She only accepts him later, following the death of her father.

Travelling companions – study resources

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

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

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

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

Travelling Companions Travelling Companions – eBook formats at Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

Travelling Companions

Travelling Companions – plot summary

Part I
Mr Brooke, an American, is making his first visit to Italy after years of living in Germany. In Milan cathedral whilst viewing Leonardo’s Last Supper he meets Charlotte Evans, a young American girl with her father. Later the same day he escorts Charlotte to view the marbles up on the cathedral roof. He is gushingly romantic in his appreciation of what he calls ‘Transalpine life’: she is more sceptical and reserved.

He then makes his way via Verona to Vicenza , where he meets a young painter who wants to sell him an old master sketch. The man’s family of aged mother and sickly young daughter spin him a tale of poverty and terminal illness. He buys the sketch, even though he knows it is not an old master, because the portrait reminds him of Charlotte.

On reaching Venice he meets Charlotte and her father again. He is very eager to be with her, but she suggests a three-day hiatus before continuing their relationship.

Part II
Mr Brooke and Charlotte go across to the Lido, where he decides to tell her about the painting and the fact that he is in love with her. She tells him that he is under the spell of Romanticism, and that she herself is in love with VeniceThey look at paintings together; he pays court to her; she keeps him at bay.

Then whilst her father is away in Milan, they go to Padua together. He speculates that the appreciation of art and churches might mean more to them if they were Catholics. They visit the Chapel of Giotto, then over ice creams she tells him that she lost her betrothed in the Civil War. They miss the last train and have to spend the night at an inn. He worries that her reputation might be compromised by this.

He begins to think that marriage would mean giving up the freedom to travel. Next day when they get back to Venice, Mr Evans wants an explanation for the overnight stay in Padua. Brooke proposes to Charlotte, but she refuses him again. Mr Evans double-checks that Brooke has made his daughter an offer of marriage.

Brooke goes on to Florence, Rome, and Naples. When he returns to Rome he meets Charlotte again, only to discover that her father has died rather suddenly. She now accepts Brook’s offer, and they are married.

Principal characters
Mr Brooke the narrator, an American art lover
Charlotte Evans a young American girl from New Jersey
Mr Mark Evans her father

Travelling Companions - Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

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

Henry James – web links

Henry James 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

Two Countries

by

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

Two Countries (also known as The Modern Warning) first appeared in magazine form in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in June 1888, alongside a story by James’s contemporary William Dean Howells and a poem by Wordsworth. It was then reprinted in book form amongst The Aspern Papers and Other Tales published in England and America by Macmillan later the same year.

Cadenabbia Lake Como

Cadenabbia – Lago di Como

Two Countries – critical commentary

The international theme

The tale begins well enough with an exploration of one of Henry James’s favourite themes – the differences between America and Europe – specifically Britain. The two capital cities of London and New York are represented by Grice’s work as a lawyer and Sir Rufus Chasemore’s as a member of the English parliament – though the first part of the story is set on Lago di Como in Italy.

Macarthy Grice is a pompous and self-regarding ass – but he is proudly American. He represents the new American spirit of self-reliant republican independence – a society which had thrown off the shackles of an old conservative monarchism in a revolutionary war only a hundred years before. So – Macarthy regards his sister’s alliance with the arch-Tory Sir Rufus as an act of personal and socio-political betrayal.

Sir Rufus is the epitome of arrogant English sangfroid, who hides beneath a carapace of relentless ‘good manners’, refusing to be rattled or show any discomfiture even under the most severe provocation. It is significant that he become a diplomat during the course of the story. His is the lofty superiority of a class which believes it is ‘born to rule’.

But we are led to believe that Sir Rufus takes his revenge on American attitudes in the critical work The Modern Warning he produces following his tour of the North American continent. And the warning is to modernizers in Britain. It is not clear if the book will eventually be published or not – or even if the galley proofs still exist.

The ending

This is the principal weakness of the story. We might well tolerate the uncertainty over the publication of The Modern Warning and see the story as an exploration of Anglo-American relationships. Something might even have been made of Agatha’s divided loyalties to her husband and brother.

But there is no persuasive reason given for her suicide. And it is just not plausible that she would commit such an act out of a fear of being disloyal to Macarthy. The story takes a very abrupt turn into the melodramatic at that point, from which it does not recover.

Two Countries – study resources

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

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

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

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

Two Countries Two Countries – read the original publication

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

Two Countries

Two Countries – plot summary

Part I.   Macarthy Grice, a pompous young American lawyer joins his mother and his attractive sister Agatha on holiday at Cadenabbia in the Italian lakes. He is annoyed to discover that they have befriended Sir Rufus Chasemore, a conservative English MP, with whom he spars verbally.

Part II.   Next day his mother reveals that they know Sir Rufus quite well, and that there might be an ‘understanding’ between him and Agatha. Macarthy is angry at the idea and suggests that they leave immediately for Venice. He would prefer his sister not to marry at all, and would regard marriage to an Englishman as a form of betrayal. He reads something critical of Sir Rufus in a newspaper, and then is surprised when the Englishman seems quite unruffled by their sudden decision.

Part III.   Agatha has agreed to the Venice move because she sees that encouraging Sir Rufus further would lead nowhere. Moreover, Sir Rufus does not like Americans in general. He pays court to her anew, and both reveal that they have Irish ancestors. Finally, he proposes to her, but she refuses on grounds that she must look after her mother, and not take her away from her bother. She also argues that he should visit America.

Part IV.   Five years later Mrs Grice has dies, and Agatha is now Lady Chasemore and has been married for a year. She is returning to the USA on holiday for the first time. Her bother Macarthy is still unmarried and living alone. He disapproves of her marriage as an unpatriotic act. Sir Rufus has been promoted and she enjoys living in London. Sir Rufus behaves well (as a diplomat) on their visit, but privately does not like the USA.

Part V.   Macarthy provides introductions for Sir Rufus, who examines American institutions, but the distance remains between the two men. When Sir Rufus makes a tour of the States and Canada alone, Agatha reconnects with New York and her brother. When Sir Rufus returns from his fact-finding tour, he declares that American women are ‘plain’ and the country as a whole is a ‘fraud’. He announces that he will write a book about America, based on his experiences. Macarthy Grice is sneeringly critical of the idea, and thinks that Britain is ‘finished’.

Part VI.   A year later back in England, Agatha is horrified by the galley proofs of Sir Rufus’s book. He has produced a scathing critique of American ‘democracy’ as a warning to the British. This causes Agatha to defend America and what it stands for.

Part VII.   When Sir Rufus returns the next day he cannot understand her objections. She knows that Macarthy will feel deeply wounded and betrayed. She argues with Sir Rufus late into the night, and appeals to him on the grounds of her Irish ancestry. Eventually he agrees not to publish The MOdern Warning, even though ‘his country’ would be the loser.

Following this Agatha admires her husband for the sacrifice he has made – and made with such good grace. However, she worries that she will never know his true thoughts and feelings, because they are eternally hidden behind his ‘good manners’. Then she begins to feel guilty for having robbed him of the opportunity to make a contribution to his country and for being the source of a disappointment to him.

Finally, she changes her mind completely and insists that he publish his book. Her brother Macarthy visits London on holiday, but is met with the news that she has committed suicide by taking poison. Sir Rufus accuses Macarthy of ‘killing’ her because she was so frightened by the prospect of facing him, but the two men are later reconciled in their common grief. Macarthy Grice goes to the continent for the remainder of his holiday, and the book may or may not be published.

Principal characters
Macarthy Grice a young, pompous, and self-regarding American lawyer
Agatha Grice his attractive younger sister
Mrs Grice his mother
Sir Rufus Chasemore a conservative English MP
Lady Bolitho Chasemore’s sister

Two Countries - Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

Two Countries Buy the book at Amazon UK
Two Countries Buy the book at Amazon US

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

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

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 2013

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

Ultima Thule

by

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

Ultima Thule was written in 1939/40 as the first chapter of a novel which was never finished – the second chapter being Solus Rex. It was one of the last pieces Vladimir Nabokov wrote in Russian before switching to write in English, which he continued to do for the next twenty years during his stay in America. It was first published in the emigré journal Novyy Zhornal in New York in 1942, and then appeared in English translation (by Dmitri and Vladimir Nabokov) in the New Yorker in 1973. It was then collected in the volume of stories A Russian Beauty and Other Stories published later the same year.

It is difficult to escape the suspicion that Nabokov embellished the story whilst engaged in the process of translation for the 1973 publication. The style of the piece has many of the features of his late, Rococo mannerism – the persistent use of alliteration, a straining for obscure vocabulary, and a wilful, almost irritating wordplay. There is certainly a case to be made for a scholarly comparison of the original 1942 Russian text with its revised counterpart of thirty years later.

Ultima Thule

Vladimir Nabokov

Ultima Thule – critical commentary

Nabokov published a number of ‘stories’ which were in fact chapters from longer works – such as his novels or his memoir Speak, Memory. This was common publishing practice at the time, and Nabokov was living a financially precarious life as an exile in an almost hand-to-mouth manner.

Ultima Thule is primarily a character study – and a protracted philosophic argument somewhat reminiscent of The Magic Mountain (a comparison which Nabokov would intensely dislike). It also contains fictional elements which are not developed – such as Sineusov’s relationship with his wife, a complex time sequence, and the ambiguous nature of Falter himself, who could be a charlatan or a gifted visionary.

These elements might have been taken up in later parts of the projected novel, and Nabokov comments on them in the introductory notes to A Russian Beauty and Other Stories in which the story appeared:

Perhaps, had I finished my book, readers would not have been left wondering about a few things: was Falter a quack? Was he a true seer? Was he a medium whom the narrator’s dead wife might have been using to come through with the blurry outline of a phrase which her husband did or did not recognise?

These authorial observations are doubly significant. First, from the point of view of the story itself, they reinforce the idea that Falter is a deliberately ambiguous figure. Sineusov describes his former tutor as if he were some sort of preternatural genius – but Falter is a shabby, down at heel character who works in the wine trade and stays in seedy hotels. Following his ‘vision’ he claims to have some transcendental insight into the human condition, but chops logic with Sineusov and gives specious arguments for not revealing the nature of this Universal Truth.

But the remarks also reveal something interesting about Nabokov’s methods and practice as a writer. He is at great pains to claim elsewhere that he composed all his works completely, in his head, then on his famous index cards, before he started writing them.

Following the posthumous publication of The Original of Laura, we now know that this claim is not to be taken at face value. The index cards which were published along with that last unfinished novel reveal that he was making up the story as he went along. And these retrospective observations on Ultima Thule demonstrate the same thing. If Nabokov did not know the answers to those questions his readers might ask, then the story was not complete in his mind when he came to write it.

Ultima Thule – study resources

Ultima Thule The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Ultima Thule Zembla – the official Vladimir Nabokov web site

Ultima Thule The Paris Review – 1967 interview, with jokes and put-downs

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

Ultima Thule Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Ultima Thule Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

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

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

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

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

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

Ultima Thule Norman Page, Vladimir Nabokov: Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1997

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

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

Ultima Thule – plot summary

The narrator, an artist Gospodin Sineusov is grief-stricken following the death of his wife. He addresses her as if she were alive and recounts their meeting with his former tutor Adam Falter.

Sineusov thinks that Falter is gifted with ‘volitional substance’ and claims that he is an exceptional individual. But some time later Sineusov hears that Falter has had a violent seizure in a hotel on the Riviera, then gone slightly mad. Falter is treated by an Italian psychologist Dr Bonomini, who questions him about the seizure. Falter claims that he revealed to Bonomini the solution to ‘the riddle of the universe’ – but the shock of this revelation killed him (though actually, it was a heart attack).

Whilst his wife is in hospital, Sineusov is commissioned to produce illustrations for a Nordic epic called Ultima Thule. When the epic’s author disappears and his wife dies, Sineusov nevertheless continues to work on the series of drawings as a distraction from his grief. He decides to return to Paris.

Before leaving he asks Falter to reveal what he told the Italian doctor. Falter refuses, and instead they have a cat and mouse philosophic debate about ‘essences’ and ‘being’. Falter insists that he has had a gigantic Truth revealed to him, and Sineusov enters into a guessing game, but Falter eludes all attempts to extract the secret from him.

Sineusov poses questions such as ‘Does God exist?’ and ‘Is there an afterlife?’ But Falter argues that the questions are falsely predicated and evades answering them. He then reflects on human beings and their fear of death – and finally leaves.

Sineusov later receives a bill for 100 francs for the consultation, and is left feeling that he must remain alive so as to preserve the memory of his dead wife.

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

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

Pale FirePale Fire is a very clever artistic joke. It’s a book in two parts – the first a long poem (quite readable) written by an American poet who we are encouraged to think of as someone like Robert Frost. The second half is a series of footnoted commentaries on the text written by his neighbour, friend, and editor. But as we read on the explanation begins to take over the poem itself, we begin to doubt the reliability – and ultimately the sanity – of the editor, and we end up suspended in a nether-world, half way between life and illusion. It’s a brilliantly funny parody of the scholarly ‘method’ – written around the same time that Nabokov was himself writing an extensive commentary to his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire Buy the book at Amazon UK
Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire Buy the book at Amazon US

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

 

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

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

Get in touch

info@mantex.co.uk

Content © Mantex 2016