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A Bundle of Letters

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A Bundle of Letters first appeared in The Parisian in December 1879. This was an English language magazine produced for a readership of expatriate English and Americans living in Europe. The tale was immediately pirated in the USA, not just once, but twice. It first appeared in legitimate book form along with The Diary of a Man of Fifty published by Harper in New York, 1880. James wrote the tale in a continuous creative burst of only two days whilst he was staying in Paris.

A Bundle of Letters

A Bundle of Letters

A Bundle of Letters – critical commentary

This tale is fairly rare in James’s oeuvre in being entirely composed of letters. There is very little attempt to create a narrative or to generate any development of character or plot. James’s approach is something like a mixture of Tobias Smollett and Jane Austen. His characters are writing back home to friends and relatives, recounting their experiences of staying in a Parisian boarding house. The one joke which is sustained throughout the letters is that the characters have come there to live amidst a French family so as to improve their fluency in the language – but they are surrounded by non-French speakers all doing the same thing.

The individual correspondents make self-satirising revelations of themselves – the gushingly enthusiastic aesthete (Louis Leverett); the slightly over-confident New Woman (Miranda Hope) – many of which could be said to be aspects of James’ own character, exaggerated for effect. English and American tourists are staying with a family in Paris to learn the language, but where it seems they spend most of their time talking to each other.

The tale is also connected thematically to the later tale The Point of View where the character Louis Leverett turns up again, along with characters from another earlier story, The Pension Beaurepas. In the later tale they are returning to America on a transatlantic steamer, and there is a similar entertainment offered in their various and contrasting reactions to American society.

A Bundle of Letters – study resources

A Bundle of Letters The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

A Bundle of Letters The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

A Bundle of Letters Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon UK

A Bundle of Letters Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon US

A Bundle of Letters A Bundle of Letters – Classic Reprint edition

A Bundle of Letters A Bundle of Letters – Kindle edition

A Bundle of Letters Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition

A Bundle of Letters A Bundle of Letters – eBook formats at Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

A Bundle of Letters

A Bundle of Letters – plot summary

Miranda Hope is a naive but ardent American feminist who believes in democratic values and is amazed to find European women prepared to tolerate old-fashioned male dominance. She is travelling without a chaperone, and moves to the private boarding house in order to practice her French – but it turns out to be inhabited by other Americans, English, and a German professor.

New Yorkers Violet Ray and her mother end up in the same venue for similar reasons. So does a Bostonian aesthete Louis Leverett who is a name-dropping poseur. All of them write back home to their compatriots, criticising the other guests in the boarding house.

Miranda Hope feels miffed that she cannot establish any contact with the haughty New Yorker Violet Ray, but she is very impressed by Louis Leverett. She also gives an unknowingly satirical account of English arrogance in her descriptions of the English guest Evelyn Vane.

A Bundle of LettersEvelyn herself writes letters packed with vacuous cliches which confirm her as a conventional upper class snob. Meanwhile, the proprietor’s cousin Mr Verdier lives there amongst them free of charge in exchange for making conversation with the guests. His letters to a friend are full of pompous and smutty innuendo concerning his flirtations with the ladies in the house.

The German professor indulges in large scale quasi-philosophic generalisations about the French, American, and English national character – all dressed up in laboured abstract language. Whilst the other characters display petty human weaknesses and vanity, the German professor’s remarks display a rather disturbing picture of what he sees as racial superiority.

There is no real story line or development of any real kind. The letters stop when Miranda Hope suddenly decides to move on to another European country.

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Principal characters
Miranda Hope an ardent feminist and democrat from Maine, New England
Madame de Maisonrouge proprietress of the boarding house
Miss Violet Ray a society girl from New York city
Louis Leverett a small Bostonian aesthete
Evelyn Vane an upper-class young English woman
Mr Verdier the landlady’s cousin, a vain sponger
Dr Rudolph Staub a self-important German professor

Henry James's Study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

Henry James The BostoniansThe Bostonians (1886) is a novel about the early feminist movement. The heroine Verena Tarrant is an ‘inspirational speaker’ who is taken under the wing of Olive Chancellor, a man-hating suffragette and radical feminist. Trying to pull her in the opposite direction is Basil Ransom, a vigorous young man 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.

The Bostonians Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Bostonians 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.
The Ambassadors Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Ambassadors Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013

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.

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A Commission in Lunacy

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tutorial, study guide, commentary, further reading

A Commission in Lunacy (1836) is one story from the many which make up La Comedie Humaine. Its original French title was L’Interdiction and it features two characters – Eugene de Rastignac and Horace Bianchon – who appear in many of Balzac’s other novels and stories which constitute the fictional world he generated.

A Commission in Lunacy

A Commission in Lunacy – commentary

Structure

This story is a very brief episode in the vast work that is The Comedie Humaine. It has a simple but very powerful structure. Basically, it is in two parts, contrasting Greed and Honour, pivoting around Principle. It can also be seen as the ‘new’ values of vulgar social ambition contrasted with old-fashioned patrician modesty and restraint. In briefest terms, it is Self-interest versus Self-sacrifice.

We are introduced to a fashionable society woman who wishes to bring legal proceedings against her estranged husband. Her damning case against him is discussed in close detail.

The judge who will examine the case is then presented as a somewhat saintly figure – neglected by himself and the state, he spends his spare time and money helping the poor.

He then interviews both parties to the dispute. First the wife, who is exposed as a self-indulgent and money-grabbing villain. Then her husband, who is revealed as a man of integrity who has voluntarily repaid a family debt of honour.

Characters

The principal characters in the story illustrate perfectly the complex nature of La Comedie Humaine – its interdependent associations and overlapping events, as well as the recurrent appearances of its individuals.

Eugene de Rastignac and Horace Bianchon are old friends, both former student lodgers at the Maison Vauquer which features in the novel Old Goriot (1834). Rastignac was an ambitious student of law who has risen rapidly via social connections to become an influential politician.

Horace Bianchon was once a humble student of medicine who has mixed with raffish arrivistes but who has never lost his Hippocratic principles of helping those in need. He has risen to become a leading medical authority in fashionable Paris, and he appears in several other Balzac novels, including Cousin Bette (1846) and Lost Illusions (1837-1843).

Popinot the judge is Bianchon’s uncle, and he also appears in a number of other episodes in La Comedie Humaine. So too does the judge who replaces him in the final pages of the story. Camusot has recently arrived in Paris from the provinces: he presides over the report on the d’Espard case and decides in favour of the Marquis.

Interestingly, we learn in another novel Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life that Camusot is assisted in reaching this judgement by Lucien Rubempré, who also appears in several volumes of La Comedie Humaine.

What is a ‘commission in lunacy’?

This expression is not merely a picturesque example of translation. The French title of the story is L’Interdiction. The Commission in Lunacy was a body established (in the UK) in 1845 to oversee the treatment of people who were deemed mentally ill. It was a board comprising legal and medical experts, plus a cohort of laymen.

The main theme

At the heart of this story is a conflict between what Balzac sees as two sets of social values. The Marquise is greedy, self-obsessed, and full of vulgar social ambition. Her husband the Marquis on the other hand represents self-denial, honesty, and a respect for an old-fashioned but honourable system of values.

The Marquise is obsessed with appearances: she lies about her age and doesn’t even wish to be seen with her own teenage sons in case this reveals how old she is. She lives in luxurious surroundings, but wants to have her husband committed as a lunatic so that she can take over his money. She constructs what adds up to a pack of lies and distortion to defame him in court.

The Marquis on the other hand lives in a simple (but tasteful) fashion: he brings up his two sons; and he has lived within his means for twelve years so as to pay back to the Jeanrenaud family wealth that has been unfairly seized from them by his own grandfather. Meanwhile he is working (and providing employment for others) on a scholarly research project which has the backing of a distinguished Parisian publishing house.

The general picture

Balzac is renowned for his insights into the social, political, legal, and economic workings of society. Indeed Frederick Engels said of him “I have learned more from Balzac than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together”. Balzac exposes how society is governed via money, law (especially inheritance), property, political power, and ruling elites.

What is not so frequently remarked upon is how realistically he renders the material fabric of the living world he creates. He has acute powers of observation, and can depict both the architectural history of someone’s housing, plus their moral and aesthetic attitudes as revealed by interior decor.

[Monsieur d’Espard] restored the woodwork to those brown tones beloved in Holland, and by the old Parisian bourgeoisie, which, in our day, afford such fine effects to painters of genre. The walls we hung with plain papers which harmonised with the woodwork. The windows had curtains of some material that was not costly, and yet was chosen in a manner to produce an effect in keeping with the general harmony. The furniture was choice and well arranged.

Whoever entered these rooms could not fail to be conscious of a peaceful, tranquil feeling, inspired by the stillness and silence that reigned there, by the quietness and symphony of the colouring

Balzac – selected reading

The best current editions of the major novels are those published in the Oxford World’s Classics paperback series. Each volume contains a critical introduction, a note on the text, a bibliography of further reading, a chronology of Honore de Balzac, and most importantly a series of explanatory notes giving historical, geographical, and scientific information about details mentioned in the text.

Pere Goriot – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Eugenie Grandet – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Cousin Bette – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Ursule Mirouet – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Selected Stories – NYRB – Amazon UK

Cambridge Companion to Balzac – Cambridge UP – Amazon UK

Reading a Balzac Novel

A Commission in Lunacy – plot summary

Eugene de Rastignac and Horace Bianchon discuss the fashionable socialite Marquise d’Espard. Bianchon warns against women of this type, whilst Rastignac thinks a connection with her will assist his social ambitions.

Jean-Jules Popinot is a conscientious but neglected judge who dresses badly. He devotes his early mornings to supporting the poor and destitute. His nephew Bianchon arrives to discuss the petition made by the Marquise to have her husband declared insane.

The petition claims that Marquis d’Espard has become demented and is under the psychic influence of Mme Jeanrenaud and her son. The Marquis has also become obsessed with the subject of China, has taken his two sons away, and given Mme Jeanrenaud a million francs. Bianchon persuades his uncle to see the Marquise.

The Marquise devotes her life to looking young and maintaining an exclusive salon. She lives in luxurious surroundings and has taken on Rastignac as a protégé.

The Marquise explains how she was abandoned by her husband when she was twenty-two. But Popinot unpicks her arguments and exposes her as a greedy gold-digger.

The fat Mme Jeanrenaud visits Popinot and rejects the claims made against her. Popinot then visits the Marquis who lives modestly and tastefully in the Latin quarter. He is a patrician of the old school.

Questioned by Popinot, the Marquis explains that he has been repaying a debt of honour caused by his family’s illegal seizure of Jeanrenaud’s assets. He proposed this restitution to his young wife, but she refused to participate. He also explains his major research project into Chinese culture and history.

Popinot writes a report exonerating the Marquis to the Commission in Lunacy, but he is unable to present it in court, because he has compromised himself by socialising with the applicant, the Marquise. He is being replaced on the case by a new provincial lawyer Camusot. However, Popinot is awarded the Legion of Honour.

© Roy Johnson 2018

A Commission in Lunacy – characters
Eugene de Rastignac a socially ambitious man-about-town
Horace Bianchon a young and principled Parisian physician
Jean-Jules Popinot a scrupulous and neglected lower court judge
Marquis d’Espard an old-fashioned and high-principled aristocrat
Marquise d’Espard his estranged wife, a self-indulgent socialite
Mme Jeanrenaud the overweight head of family disenfranchised by the d’Espards

More on Honore de Balzac
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A Cup of Tea

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

A Cup of Tea was written on 11 January 1922 in the space of just ‘4-5 hours’ and was published in a popular magazine the Story-teller in May of the same year. It then appeared in the collection The Dove’s Nest and Other Stories compiled by Katherine Mansfield’s husband John Middleton Murry and published in 1923.

A Cup of Tea

A Cup of Tea – critical commentary

The ostensible point of the story is that a rich and self-regarding woman has her complacency disturbed. On a whim, she makes what she thinks of as a charitable gesture to a destitute lower-class girl, only to discover (via her husband) that the girl has qualities that she herself does not possess.

However, there is another reading of the story buried subtly in the narrative and its dialogue. Rosemary is a rich and spoiled woman with a self-indulgent lifestyle who feels that her sudden encounter with a girl off the streets could be ‘an adventure … like something out of a novel by Dostoevsky’ – which in a sense that Rosemary would not understand, it does turn out to be.

She takes the girl back home, ushers her into her private bedroom, and undresses her (in the sense of taking off her hat and coat). She has the intention of leading her into another room for tea but does not do so. When the girl begins to cry, she puts her arm around the girl’s ‘thin, bird-like shoulders’ and promises to look after her.

When Rosemary’s husband Philip interrupts, the young girl gives what is clearly a false name (‘Smith’) and is strangely unfazed by the situation in which she finds herself: she is ‘strangely still and unafraid’. Rosemary describes their encounter in terms of procurement: ‘I picked her up in Curzon Street. She’s a real pick-up’.

Philip, the husband, is shocked by two things – first, by how attractive the girl is, and second by the inappropriate relationship that exists between the two women. He asks satirically if ‘Miss Smith’ will be dining with them, in which case he might be forced to look up The Milliner’s Gazette.

The surface implication of this remark is that the girl might be an unemployed shop girl who is sponging off his wealthy wife, but at a deeper level there is a suggestion that she might be a prostitute of some kind. At that time in the early twentieth century, the employment of single females in occupations such as milliner (hat maker) shop assistant, and other forms of casual jobs was regarded as loosely equivalent to prostitution. This suggestion in the story is reinforced by what happens next. Rosemary pays off the girl with three pound notes and sends her on her way.

The sting in the tale for Rosemary is that she wonders if she, for all the wealth and luxury in her life, lacks the animal magnetism possessed by the lower-class young girl which has left her husband Philip ‘bowled over’ after a single glance.

Narrative voice

The literary quality in the story comes largely from the skillful manner in which Mansfield creates a fluid narrative voice which combines an engagement with her subject, her readers, and even (to some extent) with herself as an identifiable narrator.

Technically, the story starts in third person narrative mode: ‘Rosemary Fell was not exactly beautiful’ – but that ‘not exactly’ establishes a conversational style and an attitude to the character. She raises questions, cancels thoughts (‘No, not Peter—Michael’) employs slang (‘a duck of a boy’) and speaks to an imaginary interlocutor (‘she would go to Paris as you and I would go to Bond Street’).

It is also interesting to note that her use of fashionable exaggeration is remarkably similar to that being used today – almost a hundred years later: (‘her husband absolutely adored her … the man who kept it was ridiculously fond of serving her’). This captures perfectly the speech mannerisms and the attitudes of the nouveau riche milieu in which the story is set.

A Cup of Tea – 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

A Cup of Tea – plot summary

Rosemary Fell is a socially poised young woman who has been married for two years to a rich and devoted husband. She shops in the fashionable and expensive part of the West-End in London. An ingratiating antiques dealer shows her a small enamelled box which she covets but asks to be put by for her.

Coming out of the shop into the rain, she is accosted by a poor young woman who asks for the price of a cup of tea. Rosemary sees the incident as a potential adventure and invites the girl back home.

When they reach the house Rosemary takes the girl into her bedroom and relieves her of her hat and coat. The girl breaks down in tears and says she cannot go on any longer.

Rosemary gives the girl tea and sandwiches, whilst she herself smokes cigarettes. This relieves the girl, and they are about to start a conversation when they are interrupted by the arrival of Rosemary’s husband Philip.

Philip takes Rosemary into an adjoining room and asks her what is going on. She explains that she is merely trying to be kind to a poor girl. But Philip points out that the girl is remarkably pretty, but the relationship not desirable.

Rosemary gives the girl some money, and she leaves, after which Rosemary asks her husband if she can have the enamel box she has seen – but what she really wants to know from him is if she is pretty or not.

Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

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A Day in the Country and Other Stories

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19th century master of the short story form

Guy de Maupassant was a prolific and very famous writer in his own lifetime. Between 1880 and 1891 for instance he wrote about 300 short stories, 200 articles, six novels, two plays, and three travel books. He wrote in the heyday of the short story, and it is this literary form for which he is now best remembered. Maupassant was one of the late nineteenth-century writers shaping what was to become the modern short story. His contribution to the genre was to pare down the means of expression and to focus on the effect of the tale.

A Day in the Country and Other StoriesHis stories are not abbreviated novels or rambling prose poems. They tell a story – and often it has a sting in the tail. Like other French writers of the late nineteenth century he was keen to explore ordinary everyday life – often exposing its less appetising and even grim features. I bought this particular collection after watching Jean Renoir’s beautiful film Partie de campagne which is a completely faithful account of the title story. But I was amazed to discover that the full length feature film and masterpiece of the cinema was based on a tale no more than a few pages long.

His style, much influenced by his friend Flaubert, is one of scrupulous clarity. Everything is pared to a minimum, and the material world is rendered in well-chosen detail. His attitude is that of a sceptical realist, with an eye for the tragic and sad elements of life which lead many critics to brand him a pessimist. They may have a point, because it’s remarkable just how many of his stories end with someone’s abrupt death.

He was shortening and concentrating the narrative, stripping it of excrescence. Yet he still drags along some of its traditional features – the whiplash ending for instance. Some of them are not much more than well-articulated anecdotes, but they are usually resolved with an ironic or dramatic twist.

Despite these weaknesses, it’s his contribution to the development of the short story for which he is still respected. It is his stories which are still widely read, not his full-length novels.

[Maupassant] fixes a hard eye on some spot of human life, usually some dreary, ugly, shabby, sordid one, takes up the particle, and squeezes it either till it grimaces or till it bleeds. Sometimes the grimace is very droll, sometimes the wound is very horrible … Monsieur de Maupassant sees human life as a terribly ugly business relieved by the comical.

It’s amazing to think that Henry James, a friend and admirer who wrote those words was writing at the same time – though when considering the compositional crudities in some of these stories, their origin in newspapers and popular magazines should be taken into account.

But this famous terseness of style is not quite so ubiquitous as is often claimed. He is quite prepared to indulge in rhetorical flourishes to make his point – as in this account of a Parisian visiting the provinces:

I wondered: ‘What on earth can I do after dinner?’ I thought how long an evening could be here in this town in the provinces: the slow, grim stroll through unfamiliar streets, the depressing gloom which the solitary traveller feels oozing out of passers by who are complete strangers in every respect, from the provincial cut of their jackets, hats, and trousers to their ways and the local accent, an all-pervading misery which drips from the houses, the shops, the outlandish shapes of the vehicles in the streets, and the generally unaccustomed hubbub, an uneasy sinking of the spirits which prompts you to walk a little quicker as though you were lost in a dangerous, cheerless country and makes you want to go back to your hotel, that loathsome hotel, where your room has been pickled in innumerable dubious smells, where you are not entirely sure about the bed, and where there’s a hair stuck fast in the dried dust at the bottom of the washbasin.

In one of the finest tales in this collection he tackles a subject which has a long and honourable history amongst writers – the story of a man who, as a result of some trivial argument or misplaced notion of pride, suddenly finds that he is about to fight a duel. It also includes his best known – ‘The Necklace’ – another tale which has spawned many variations, as well as ‘Le Horla’, a story which strangely parallels Maupassant’s own descent into premature madness and death, brought on by syphilis.

Later writers such as James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and especially Virginia Woolf were to take his stylistic developments further – and bring the short story into closer contact with the prose poem and the philosophic meditation. But connoisseurs of this literary form will always be well rewarded by re-visiting one of the earlier masters of the genre.

© Roy Johnson 2000

A Day in the Country Buy the book at Amazon UK

A Day in the Country Buy the book at Amazon US

Guy de Maupassant, A Day in the Country and Other Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp.312, ISBN 0192838636

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A Day of Days

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

A Day of Days first appeared in The Galaxy magazine for June 1866. Its initial appearance in book form was as part of the collection Stories Revived published in three volumes by Macmillan in London, 1885.

A Day of Days

New England – Summer

A Day of Days – critical commentary

This early story reveals James’s enormous potential for generating psychological interest out of very little drama. Almost nothing happens in this story except that a young woman has vague romantic thoughts about one man, when another man unexpectedly arrives. They circle round each other emotionally, go for a walk, and she tempts him to stay. He decides that despite the attraction, it would be better to regard the meeting as a self-contained pleasure. He sticks to his original plans, and moves on.

But in the space of this short narrative we are treated to Adela’s movements from listless boredom, through vague expectancy, to her slightly patronising interest in Ludlow’s frank honesty, and then her overt attempts to detain him when she thinks he might be leaving. All this is done with a Jane Austen-like touch of irony and satirical inflation. Adela is described thus:

Even after six years of the best company, too, she had excellent manners. She was, moreover, mistress of a pretty little fortune, and was accounted clever without detriment to her aimiability, and aimiable without detriment to her wit.

A Day of Days – study resources

A Day of Days The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

A Day of Days The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

A Day of Days Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon UK

A Day of Days Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon US

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

A Day of Days

A Day of Days – plot summary

Young Adela Moore has decided to take a break from society: she goes to live with her elder widowed brother in the countryside. Whilst he is away at a university conference, she lounges at home, secretly hoping that Wheatherby Pysent, a young local parson will visit. Instead, Thomas Ludlow appears, hoping to meet her brother. He is seeking letters of introduction regarding their shared interest in fossils, which he intends to study in Germany.

The couple flirt with each other over the question of his staying or leaving. They decide to go for a walk, but whilst she is changing young Pysent does call at the house. However, Ludlow tells him Adela is not at home. Once in the countryside, they continue their banter. He tells her about himself and his plans to go the very next day to study in Berlin.

When they return to the house she tempts him to stay, and he perceives her as a very attractive option. But on mature reflection he decides that the romance of a single day is sufficient unto itself, and he leaves to take up his journey.

A Day of Days – principal characters
Mr Herbert Moore a childless widower
Adela Moore his rich young sister (23)
Whetherby Pysent a young local parson
Thomas Ludlow a student of fossils from New York
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

© Roy Johnson 2013

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Haunted House

by

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

A Haunted House first appeared in Monday or Tuesday (1921) – a collection of experimental short prose pieces Virginia Woolf had written between 1917 and 1921. It was published by the Hogarth Press and also included A Society, Monday or Tuesday, An Unwritten Novel, The String Quartet, Blue and Green, and Solid Objects.

A Haunted House

Virginia Woolf

A Haunted House – critical commentary

Pronouns

First time readers of this story are likely to be bewildered by Woolf’s very indirect form of narrative, the lack of formal identification of anybody in the story, and her switching between one pronoun and another.

In the opening sentence – ‘Whatever hour you awoke’ – she is using you in the sense of one, not speaking of any person in particular. In the very next sentence – ‘From room to room they went’ – they refers to the ‘ghostly couple’ who are re-visiting the house in search of something.

They are referred to as she and he in what follows, but in their imagined conversation – ‘Quietly’ they said, ‘or we shall wake them’ – the them refers to the couple who currently occupy the house, one of whom is the narrator of the story.

And the point of view switches back to the narrator, who confirms ‘But it wasn’t that you woke us’, and goes on to observe ‘They’re looking for it’. At this point it is not at all clear what it refers to. It appears be something like the spirit of the house: ‘Safe, safe, safe,’ the pulse of the house beat gladly, ‘The treasure yours.’

The ghostly couple then revisit their old bedroom, where the current occupants are asleep. They reflect on their own previous happiness there, which parallels that of the current occupiers, and the narrator, who has been imagining the visiting ghosts, awakens to wonder if the hidden treasure they were seeking was a sense of joy at living there.

A Haunted House -study resources

A Haunted House The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

A Haunted House The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

A Haunted House The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

A Haunted House The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

An Unwritten Novel Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

A Haunted House A Haunted House – Hogarth reprint edition – Amazon UK

A Haunted House A Haunted House – Hogarth reprint edition – Amazon US

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

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

A Haunted House 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

A Haunted House

A Haunted House – story synopsis

An un-named narrator and one of the current occupants of an old house recounts the impression of a visit to it by previous occupants in the form of ghosts.

The ghostly couple are in search of something, and move through the rooms, whilst the narrator is reading in the garden.

The house and its garden are evoked with rural images, shafts of light and shade, and the passage of time and seasons.

The ghostly couple re-visit their old bedroom at night where the current occupants are asleep. They find what they are looking for – in the form of memories of their previous existence, doing the same things as the current occupants, living in harmony with the house.

A Haunted House – principal characters
I the narrator
you (singular) as in ‘one’
they the previous occupants of the house
she previous occupant
he previous occupant
it the ‘ghostly treasure’
them the current occupants of the house
you (plural) the previous occupants
us the current occupants
A Haunted House – first edition

A Haunted House

Cover design by Vanessa Bell

Monk’s House – Rodmell

Monk's House

Virginia Woolf’s old house in Sussex

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 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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Hunger Artist and Other Stories

by

short stories by a master of modernism

A Hunger Artist is a collection of short fictions by one of the most remarkable writers of the early twentieth century. Franz Kafka was a completely original writer. He’s classified as a novelist and writer of short stories, and yet most of his novels were not finished, and many of his short works don’t have normal characters or recognisable stories. Many of them are not continuous, logical narratives that we expect in work classified as fiction. Much of his writing is closer to being philosophic meditations or the exploration of bizarre images and metaphors. Yet such is the power of his symbol-making and his imagination that there is really nowhere else for him to be categorised.

A Hunger ArtistSome of his stories are as short as one-sentence aphorisms or the exploration of curious metaphors, striking images, and parables that present one idea in the guise of another. In one story a man is a bridge, stretched across a chasm, terrified of the responsibility he bears. In another a man spends his entire life at a gateway, pleading to be admitted to the Law. On the point of his death he asks the gatekeeper why nobody else has ever requested entry. The gatekeeper tells him “Nobody else could be granted entry for this entrance was meant only for you. I shall now go and close it.”

Kafka was a writer of great contradictions: the semi-mystical believer who doubted everything; the prudish sceptic of personal relationships who consorted with prostitutes; the neurasthenic who was devoted to sunbathing and swimming; the self-denying ascetic who was described by one of his friends as ‘the best-dressed man I have ever known’.

He wrote a great deal about animals, birds, insects, and rodents which nevertheless have human thought processes. In one of his most famous stories The Metamorphosis a young travelling salesman wakes up to find that he has changed into a giant insect. Another story features the effect on a small village when it is visited by a giant mole. In The New Advocate a horse is appointed as a lawyer, and A Report to an Academy is the transcript of a lecture in which the speaker describes his former life as an ape.

All the now-familiar elements of Kafka’s world are tried out in these stories, parables, and fragments – the inaccessible palace or castle, the closed gate, incomprehensible foreigners, the remote unknowable figure of Authority, and the unspecified menace from without. The essence of a Kafka story is often an inexplicable mystery, a paradox, or a vague un-named threat. He establishes a situation then immediately undermines it by introducing the opposite or a contradiction

It was a beautiful day and K. intended to go for a stroll. But he had scarcely taken two steps before he was already in the graveyard.

In fact K. finds that he is a witness to his own burial. A story such as The Burrow combines the animal motif with a study in paranoia when an unspecified rodent describes the building of a giant network of tunnels against some un-named exterior threat. But the construction is eventually so elaborate that maintaining it becomes a threat in itself.

This collection is made up of some of his earliest and his last published works – from the almost journalistic Aeroplanes at Brescia (1909) to Josephine, the Singer or The Mouse People (1924) completed the year of his death. It also contains some of his most famous and anthologised stories – Investigations of a Dog, The Burrow, Before the Law, and The Great Wall of China.

This volume makes an excellent starting point for anyone who has not tackled Kafka before. The translations in these new Oxford University Press editions are recently commissioned, and the texts come with an extensive critical apparatus of introductory essay, explanatory notes, biographical details, and lists of further reading.

A Hunger Artist Buy the book at Amazon UK

A Hunger Artist Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2012

Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist and Other Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, trans. Joyce Crick, 2012, pp.218, ISBN: 0199600929

More on Franz Kafka
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

A Landscape Painter

by

tutorial, synopsis, commentary, and study resources

A Landscape Painter first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly magazine for February 1866. Its initial appearance in book form was as part of the collection Stories Revived published in three volumes by Macmillan in London, 1885.

A Landscape Painter

New England seascape – Winslow Homer (1836-1910)

A Landscape Painter – critical commentary

The principal theme in this story is that of deceit. The Captain ‘deceives’ Locksley with his sailor’s yarns; Locksley deceives the Blunt family quite explicitly by pretending to be poor; and Esther deceives Locksley by pretending to be in love with him.

The instance of Esther’s deceit is all the more pointed because Locksley has gone into his seaside retreat following the discovery that his fiancée Josephine was marrying him for his money. So in the end he is doubly deceived by the outcome of his venture.

There is an interesting leitmotiv of Locksley’s poor health, though it does not seem to be linked to anything essential in the narrative as a whole. At the outset of the story Mrs M. mentions that ‘He [Locksley] was looking very poorly’. Then whilst living with the Blunts he falls ill. This gives Esther the chance to read his diaries. But following only a few years marriage to her, he dies at the age of only thirty-five.

It is interesting in such an early work by James (1886) that he should make use of a metafictional device – a story that reflects upon itself. It is also the first of his stories to use the device of the ‘framed’ narrative – a principal story which is introduced by a smaller, separate narrative.

A Landscape Painter – principal characters
Mrs M. the outer narrator
Locksley a very rich bachelor, the diarist, a landscape painter (30)
‘Captain’ Richard Blunt an old sailor
Esther Blunt his daughter, a handsome talented woman (27)
Mr Johnson an admirer of Esther’s
John Bannister formerly engaged to Esther
A Landscape Painter – study resources

A Landscape Painter The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

A Landscape Painter The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

A Landscape Painter Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon UK

A Landscape Painter Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon US

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

A Landscape Painter Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

A Landscape Painter Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

A Landscape Painter

A Landscape Painter – plot summary

Rich bachelor Locksley has broken off his engagement to beautiful Josephine Leary upon discovering her mercenary nature. He dies at the age of thirty-five. His estate comes into the possession of Mrs M, and she presents the events described in the ‘last hundred’ pages of a diary he kept between the ages of twenty-five and thirty.

Following the split with his fiancée Locksley goes into seclusion and is pleased with his isolation at Newport, but feels he ought to explore his surroundings. He hires a boat, finds an island and, caught by the tide, has to be taken back by Captain Blunt, an old sailor. Blunt invites him to be a lodger in his home, subject to the approval of his daughter, who teaches music in a local school.

Esther Blunt turns out to be young, handsome, and intelligent. Locksley later changes his opinion of her and revises her age. Having decided to change his life and conceal his wealth, he feels that a simple rustic life will suit his purposes. He is aware that he is acting out the part of a ‘poor’ person, and he believes that the captain indulges in romantic fibs and sailors’ yarns. He writes in a self-congratulatory manner about his integration with the household.

On a Sunday, instead of going to church, Locksley flirts with Esther, who lectures him on being less egotistical and more sociable. The captain reveals that Esther was formerly engaged to John Banister, who failed to become rich and later left for China.

Esther helps nurse Locksley through a period illness, after which it is revealed that she has refused an offer of marriage from Mr Johnson. The captain, Esther, and Locksley go on a picnic to a local island, all of which Locksley describes in his diary as an impressionist painting.

When the captain is absent one night, Locksley proposes to Esther, and although teasing him the meanwhile, she accepts. He still maintains his pretense of being poor, but plans to reveal the truth after they are married.

But on honeymoon, when he gives her his diaries to read, she reveals that she has already read them whilst he was ill. She knows he is rich, and even points out that she doesn’t love him and has only married him for his money.

A Landscape Painter – 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

© Roy Johnson 2013

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.
Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

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

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

A Light Man

by

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

A Light Man first appeared in The Galaxy magazine in July 1869. Its first appearance (heavily revised) in book form was in the collection Stories by American Authors published in New York by Scribner in 1884.

A Light Man

A Light Man – critical commentary

It is interesting that the quotation at the head of this tale is from Robert Browning – who is famous both for his dramatic monologues and his use of dubious ‘narrators’. One thinks for instance of the Duke in My Last Duchess who is explaining away with apparent sang froid the fact that he has had his former wife murdered.

First person narrators may be honest; they may be misguided; and they may be outright liars. Henry James was alert to the possibilities of this literary device from the earliest days of his writing career, and is famous for the use he made of it in his later works, such as the very complex situation he creates in The Turn of the Screw.

A Light Man seems to be a study in both ambiguity and the unreliable narrator. – but one which does not quite resolve itself to any satisfactory conclusion.

At one level, Max is quite honest in revealing that he is both hypocritical and insincere. He is an empty man emotionally and spiritually, and yet he tells us so. He has no ambition, and eventually thinks he ought to marry a rich woman just for something to do. He describes himself as an ‘adventurer’.

But his account of Sloane reveals his most disgusting characteristics. Whilst accepting the comforts of his host’s hospitality, he unleashes a torrent of criticism belittling and criticising him. .

Yet in his final dealings with Theodore in the conflict over Sloane’s will, he expresses a wish to remain friendly with Theodore. This is either completely insincere or yet another level of his duplicity. The narrative offers few clues about how this should be interpreted.

And of course at the end of the story he is waiting for Miss Meredith – the woman who has inherited from her wealthy relative Sloane and who will fit the template for a rich wife Max has created for himself.

The only way the story makes more sense and these inconsistencies and contradictions can be resolved, is to see it as a lightly coded study of Sloane as an aged homosexual paying for the attention of two much younger men who are vying with each other to be his favourite. The extensive revisions made to the text after its first publication support this reading.

A Light Man – study resources

A Light Man The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

A Light Man The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

A Light Man Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon UK

A Light Man Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon US

A Light Man A Light Man – paperback reprint – Amazon UK

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

A Light Man

A Light Man – plot summary

The narrative takes the form of a diary written by Maximus (Max) Austin, who has returned to his native America after living in Europe. He receives a letter from his friend Theodore Lisle inviting him to spend a month with Frederick Sloane at his house in the country. Sloane is old and infirm, but a bon viveur, and he has embarked on writing his memoirs.

Max recounts the story of his friend Theodore, who returned from living in Europe to look after his sisters. He then became ill, and finally got the job of amanuensis to Sloane, which Max sees as a demeaning role.

Sloane invites Max to stay on at the house. Max gives an account of his own nature, which reveals him as complacent, uncreative, and self-congratulatory. He can think of nothing to do with his life, and decides he might as well look for a rich wife.

He provides a hypocritical summary of his host’s life: Sloane married a rich woman who died young; he has spent most of his life (and fortune) living in Europe, and has returned to America to restore his present home. He has had a succession of hangers-on living with him. Max’s account becomes a vituperative character assassination of his host.

When Theodore falls ill, Sloane implores Max to stay with him as a form of surrogate son, and he begins to be critical of Theodore, whose role Max takes over. Theodore receives letters from his sister, which Sloane uses as a pretext to get rid of him. Theodore discusses his insecurity with Max, who thinks of his friend as merely a vulgar fortune hunter.

Max tells Sloane he must leave to find employment in New York, because he has no money – at which Sloane offers to alter his will if Max will stay (the implication being that the will is currently made in Theodore’s favour). When slightly recovered, Sloane asks Max to retrieve his will, with a view to destroying it.

But when Max goes to fetch the will, Theodore has it. They discuss its contents without actually reading it. Theodore burns the will, then the two men challenge each other. Theodore believes that Max has usurped his position and hoped to gain the property: Max unconvincingly claims innocence and says he wishes to remain friends.

Meanwhile, Sloane dies. His estate will go to a distant niece, Miss Meredith, for whom Max is waiting at the end of the story.

Principal characters
Maximus Austin the American narrator (32)
Theodore Lisle his old friend
Frederick Sloane a rich widower (72)
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

© Roy Johnson 2013

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Most Extraordinary Case

by

tutorial, commentary, web links, and study resources

A Most Extraordinary Case first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly for April 1868. The first book text was in the collection Stories Revived published in London and New York by Macmillan in 1885.

A Most Extraordinary Case

The American Civil War 1861-1865

A Most Extraordinary Case – critical commentary

In 1861 Henry James injured his back helping to pump water during a fire at Newport (RI). His father Henry James Snr had him examined by Dr Bigelow, an eminent physician at Harvard Medical School, who pronounced that there was nothing organically wrong with the young man. Nevertheless, by the time Henry James’s name was selected for military service in the Union Army in 1863, he was excused service because of what he described as ‘that obscure hurt’.

James was very ambiguous regarding his affliction, and yet he used it as a personal metaphor to identify himself with the war and the pain and suffering that he witnessed at first hand amongst the combatants he visited in field hospitals after battles. It is therefore perhaps not fanciful to see the curiously undefined illness from which Colonel Ferdinand Mason is suffering as both a parallel to James’s own condition and a metaphor for public suffering because of the war.

Perhaps the really most extraordinary thing about the story is the amazing episode when Mason comes close to making a full declaration of his feelings to Caroline whilst they are on their countryside excursion. The two characters are circling round each other emotionally when she detaches herself to explore some rocks by the water’s edge. She returns with a torn dress:

“You have torn your dress,” said Mason.
Miss Hoffmann surveyed her drapery. “Where, if you please?”
“There, in front.” And Mason poked out his walking-stick, and inserted it into the injured fold of muslin. There was a sudden unexpected violence in the movement which attracted Miss Hofmann’s attention. She looked at her companion, and, seeing that his face was discomposed supposed that he was annoyed at having been compelled to wait …
Mason had planted his stick where he had let it fall on withdrawing it from contact with his companion’s skirts, and stood leaning against it, with his eyes on the girl’s face.

It is unusual for James to use such very explicit symbolism: he is normally much more subtle. But it should perhaps be borne in mind that he was only twenty-five when he wrote this story, and it is even possible that he was unconscious of the suggestive nature of this episode. Not that this matters: we should ‘Trust the tale, not the teller’.

A Most Extraordinary Case – ptudy resources

A Most Extraordinary Case The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

A Most Extraordinary Case The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

A Most Extraordinary Case Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon UK

A Most Extraordinary Case Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon US

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

A Most Extraordinary Case

A Most Extraordinary Case – principal characters
Colonel Ferdinand Mason a young American ex-Civil War invalid
Mrs Maria Mason his aunt, a childless widow
Miss Caroline Hofmann her beautiful and talented niece (25)
Dr Horace Knight a former army surgeon
Dr Gregory old-school practitioner
George Stapleton young, handsome, and rich friend of Caroline
Edith Stapleton friend of Caroline

Henry James's Study

Henry James’s study

A Most Extraordinary Case – plot summary

Part I.   In 1865 at the end of the American Civil War, Colonel Ferdinand Mason is recovering in a seedy New York hotel when he is visited by his aunt Mrs Maria Mason. She wishes to help him recuperate in her own home. The next day he arrives there.

Part II.   Mason is looked after by Dr Knight, to who he describes his state of demoralisation. He has spent years in scholarship, then three years of arduous war service. He becomes more domesticated under the influence of his aunt.

Part III.   Caroline Hofmann is a beautiful and well-educated young woman who has toured Europe and turned down a number of offers of marriage. His aunt asks him not to fall in love with her. Mason spends his time going for drives, reading, and admiring Caroline.

Part IV.   Mason and Dr Knight listen to Caroline playing the piano, then discuss his prospects of recovery. The doctor advises him to allow a full year for the process. Mason is thin and weak, and feels pessimistic about his future.

Part V.   Mason assists his aunt and Caroline to get ready for a party, and then suddenly feels faint. Next day the doctor enthuses about Caroline’s energy at the dance and her good looks.

Part VI.   Mason doesn’t think he has the human resources that Caroline would require from a man. He is in love with her, but acts with consummate restraint. She takes him on an excursion into the countryside, where he comes very close to revealing his true feelings about her.

Part VII.   But the next day he is ill again, and remains so for the next three weeks. Caroline moves out to live with some friends the Stapletons, and returns slightly changed, possibly because of the attentions of her friend, George Stapleton.

Part VIII.   But following another visit from doctor Knight Mrs Mason reveals to Ferdinand that Caroline and the doctor are engaged. Mason is pained by the news, but feels he ought to face the blow stoically. Nevertheless, when Caroline goes to stay with her future mother-in-law, Mason misses her terribly. He reads voraciously to distract his attention, and Mrs Mason helps him to plan a future in Europe, where she intends to live.

Part IX.   Mason finally has enough strength to attend a party, where he is a big social success in the company of Caroline and her friend Edith Stapleton. However, this episode is followed by another collapse of his health. He changes his will in favour of his friend doctor Knight, and dies shortly afterwards.

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get in touch

info@mantex.co.uk

Content © Mantex 2016