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A New England Winter

by

tutorial, commentary, and study resources

A New England Winter first appeared in magazine form in The Century Magazine for August—September 1884. It was then reprinted in book form amongst Tales of Three Cities in England and America in 1884. The setting for this tale is the New England capital of Boston, Massachusetts: the other two cities in the collection were New York and London.

New England Winter

A New England winter scene

A New England Winter – plot summary

Part I.   Susan Daintry, a fastidious Boston widow, is awaiting a visit from her son Florimond, who has been studying art in Paris for six years. She is intensely concerned with the moral issues arising from microscopic niceties of protocols regarding her servant girl.

Part II.   She visits her sister-in-law Lucretia, whose furnishings she inspects in a critical manner. The two women are subtly competitive with each other in terms of social ‘correctness’. Susan wants Lucretia to accept Rachel Torrence (Florimond’s cousin) as a lodger over the winter months in order to tempt him to stay at home – even though she would not wish Florimond to marry her. Lucretia thinks it would be wrong to make use of Rachel in this way.

Part III.   In the days that follow however, both women change their minds, feeling that they have been in the wrong. Lucretia writes to Susan, offering alternative accommodation for Rachel. The letter crosses with a message from Susan apologising for having asked for the favour.

Part IV.   When Florimond arrives at his mother’s house, he becomes increasingly critical of the disruption caused by his sister’s children. There are serious social protocols considered about the order of precedence in which people should visit each other. Florimond walks through a wintry Boston landscape to his aunt’s house.

Part V.   Florimond egotistically tells his aunt all about his life in Paris, in an affected manner. She recommends that he meet Rachel, secretly hoping that the girl’s influence will challenge his pretensions, because Rachel is a spirited girl. Lucretia also secretly hopes that Florimond will fall in love with Rachel and be snubbed by her.

Part VI.   Florimond becomes a habitué of a relative Mrs Pauline Mesh, and falls under the spell of Rachel, who becomes the celebrity of the winter season. He begins to see positives in Boston life and society. However, Mrs Mesh starts to tire of Rachel’s company. Susan Daintry arrives at Mrs Mesh’s house to find her son there, and feels guilty for what might be perceived as ‘spying’ on him. She is still in the dark regarding Florimond’s intentions. Rachel turns up and jousts verbally with Florimond. Later, his mother questions him about Rachel, but he is non-committal in his responses.

Part VII.   Florimond increasingly appreciates the visual life of Boston, and travels to Cambridge. Lucretia worries about the relationship between Florimond and Rachel, but Rachel suddenly declares that she is due to go back to Brooklyn. She explains that she has been keeping Florimond occupied from a sense of duty whilst he is secretly enamoured of Pauline Mesh. Lucretia insists that Rachel come to stay with her.

Susan Daintry arrives at Lucretia’s with the stale news that Rachel is going back to New York – and all her winter’s worries are over. Lucretia reveals to her the latest true state of affairs. Florimond continues to visit Pauline Mesh’s house, and nothing changes – until Susan Daintry decides to go to Europe for the summer, and takes Florimond with her.

Principal characters
Mrs Susan Daintry a Boston widow
Beatrice her servant
Florimon Daintry a young impressionist painter who lives in Paris
Joanna Merriman Susan’s daughter-in-law with six children
Miss Lucretia Daintry Susan’s sister-in-law
Rachel Torrance Florimond’s cousin, a poor would-be painter from New York
Mrs Pauline Mesh a relative of the Daintry family from Baltimore
Study resources

A New England Winter The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

A New England Winter The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

A New England Winter Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon UK

A New England Winter Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon US

A New England Winter A New England Winter – paperback edition – Amazon UK

A New England Winter A New England Winter – paperback edition – Amazon US

A New England Winter A New England Winter – read the original publication

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

A New England Winter

A New England Winter – further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

A New England Winter Buy the book at Amazon UK
A New England Winter Buy the book at Amazon US

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

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

© 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.

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

A Passionate Pilgrim

by

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

A Passionate Pilgrim first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly during March—April 1871. Its first presentation in book form was in A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales published by Osgood in Boston 1875.

A Passionate Pilgrim

Oxford University

A Passionate Pilgrim – critical commentary

Travelogue

Quite apart from the subject of this tale, the settings are like a snapshot albumn of Henry James’s love affair with England – a relationship which was to culminate with his taking out British citizenship in 1915, shortly before his death.

The scenes are all very traditional – the English city inn (pub) with its mahogany snugs; Hampton Court Palace and its gardens; an English country estate with stately home and portraits of ancestors; Oxford University with ancient grey buildings and lawned courtyards.

Ghost story

The tale has an on-off relationship with conventional listings of James’s ghost stories – but it certainly qualifies as a variation on his exploration of this genre. Sloane is a person who is in a feverish state, somewhere between life and death. And whilst in this state, confronted with concrete evidence of his connections with the family, he both identifies with the ghost of an ancestor and imagines himself to be one ghost who can haunt another. Shortly after this he ‘encounters’ the vision of his ancestor.

As he approaches death, he believes that he has attended Oxford University in the form of his historical relative, and can ‘remember’ how things were then. Since Oxford clings to its traditions so fiercely, very little will have changed in the intervening hundred years or so.

Parallels

When Sloane takes to his Bath chair, he is pushed around by the old man who turns out to have a very similar life history. He too was once prosperous, but has fallen from grace. He too has a well-to-do relative who is not helping him. Searle’s gift of his last five pounds seals the bond between them.

Study resources

A Passionate Pilgrim The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

A Passionate Pilgrim The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

A Passionate Pilgrim Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon UK

A Passionate Pilgrim Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon US

A Passionate Pilgrim A Passionate Pilgrim – eBook formats at Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

A Passionate Pilgrim

A Passionate Pilgrim – plot summary

Part I.   An un-named narrator is staying in London, en route from Europe to America. He describes the traditional interior of an old city-centre inn. Two fellow Americans dine in an adjacent cubicle. Mr Searle is lean, sickly, and disappointed regarding a claim on some property in England. Mr Simmons has been making enquiries on his behalf, and failed. He offers to take Searle back to the USA at his own expense, but the offer is refused. Searle says he will stay in England until his last remaining money runs out, and he dies.

Next day the narrator goes to Hampton Court where he meets Mr Searle. They have lunch together, and Searle relates his story. He was a young man of fine tastes who fell on hard times. Knowing that there was an old family claim to an English estate, he dispatched Simmons who at first gave him hope, but the previous night has revealed that he has no claim at all. Searle is now bankrupt, and the property is owned by Richard Searle, a distant relative. The narrator offers to help him double-check his claim.

Part II.   They travel to Lackley Park in a picture-book English setting and visit the Hall. The housekeeper shows them round. Searle spots a portrait of an older relative Clement Searle who he closely resembles, and reveals himself as a member of the family. They also meet Miss Searle, his distant cousin. Searle feels himself at home, and even the household dogs take a liking to him. The narrator makes romantic connections between the two cousins.

Part III.  The two visitors are enthusiastically invited to stay, but when they then meet the owner Richard Searle he is not sympathetic to either of them. Richard Searle tells them the history of his ancestor Clement. He had a secret lover, a clergyman’s daughter, who was with child which died when the Searle family rejected her. Clement Searle died at sea, en route to America. The house is haunted by the ghost of the clergyman’s daughter. Feeling a very close family connection, Searle proposes himself as the ghost of Clement Searle to haunt her in return. He becomes tipsy and unguarded.

The narrator promotes Searle to his cousin, but they are challenged by Richard Searle about the claim on his property which solicitors have revealed to him. There is a general argument, and Richard Searle accuses his relative of making false claims and trying to corrupt his sister. The narrator and Searle are thrown out, and on their way back to the inn Searle reveals that his cousin has offered to marry him. Later that night Searle sees the ghost of his relative Margaret. Next morning he believes he has the distinction of being a man who is also a ghost.

Part IV.  The two men travel to Oxford where Searle begins to imagine that he is Clement Searle, who attended the University a hundred years or more previously. He goes into raptures about the buildings, grounds, and traditions as if he knows them all well. He begins to fraternise with the current undergraduate students and starts to drink heavily. Searle grows weaker and takes to a Bath chair. They hire an old man to push him round: he too has fallen socially. He has a well-to-do brother and wishes he could go to America, where he thinks he could make good. Searle advises him that they are both failures in life, and gives him his last five pounds.

Searle appears to be near death. The narrator sends a note to his cousin Miss Searle. He gives Searle’s few remaining effects to the old man to pay for his passage to America. Miss Searle arrives with the news that her brother has been killed in a fall from his horse. Searle thinks she is wearing mourning clothes on his own behalf, and dies.

Principal characters
I the un-named outer-narrator
Clement Searle a lean and sickly American
John Simmons his associate
Richard Searle the owner of Lackley Hall
Miss Searle Searle’s distant cousin
Rawson a down and out old man

A Passionate Pilgrim - Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

A Passionate Pilgrim Buy the book at Amazon UK
A Passionate Pilgrim Buy the book at Amazon US

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

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

© 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 Problem

by

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

A Problem first appeared in The Galaxy magazine in June 1868. It was not reprinted during his lifetime, and next appeared in the collection Eight Uncollected Stories of Henry James published by Rutgers University Press in 1950.

A Problem

A Problem – critical commentary

This tale is not much more than a sentimental anecdote, told in very general terms with very little attempt to provide concrete historical detail or even a realistic setting. James was only twenty-five years old and in his apprenticeship phase, writing for popular magazines such as The Galaxy. Even he seemed to be aware of the shortcomings in his work at that time:

I write little & only tales, which I think it likely I shall continue to manufacture in a hackish manner, for that which is bread. They cannot of necessity be very good; but they shall not be very bad.

The tales was illustrated in the magazine (as was quite common at that time) by a sentimental engraving by popular illustrator W. J. Hennessy. It depicts the moment Emma and David are reconciled observed by the rather vacuous clergyman, Mr Clark.

The only other point of note is the manner in which James depicts the two native American Indians in the tale. One is a rather squalid young woman, and the other is her even more negatively portrayed mother, who David believes has been drinking. When the mother addresses the daughter she “said something in her barbarous native gutterals”. It is interesting to see how James portrays native Americans, Afro-Americans, and Jews in his work: he certainly does not win any prizes for political correctness.

A Problem – study resources

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

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

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

A Problem 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 Problem

A Problem – plot summary

On the last day of her honeymoon, newlywed Emma has her fortune told by an Indian squaw. She predicts that Emma will have a child within a year – and that it will die. Emma does have a child which falls ill – but then revives.

She then tells her husband David about an earlier prediction that she would marry twice. He in his turn tells her of a prediction made earlier in his career that he would marry twice. Both of them begin to worry more and more about the congruence of the two prophecies.

Emma starts to become jealous, whilst David becomes more nervous and anxious. He becomes friendly with a single woman called Julia and confides in her about the prophecies. Julia thinks she will help by going to visit Emma, but Emma resents the intrusion of another woman into her affairs.

She leaves David and goes back with their child to live with her mother. Six months later David receives word that his daughter has died. When he visits the house, he and Emma are reconciled by a visiting clergyman – and are thus ‘married’ twice.

Principal characters
Davi a young American man
Emma a young American woman, his wife
Julia a single friend of David’s
Mr Clark a clergyman
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 Round of Visits

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

A Round of Visits first appeared in the English Review in April-May 1910. It was the last completed short story Henry James ever produced. Like other tales he wrote around that time, it deals with the issue of returning to his native America after a long period of living in Europe. James had left the ‘old’ traditional New York of the 1870s, and he was rather taken aback by the ‘new’ America he found on revisiting twenty-five years later.

New York 1909

New York in 1909

A Round of Visits – critical commentary

New American money

This is a story about new American wealth and the modern mega-city. James paints a picture of a cold and hostile New York – a place of bad weather, an influenza outbreak, and streets filled with a strange mixture of emptiness and vehicles which emit horrible screeching noises.

Montieth has lost money. His capital has been accumulated under the supposedly honorable circumstances of ‘old’ New York society. But he has lingered too long in Europe, and the money has been snatched up by a representative of the new, speculative venture capitalists who make money out of other people’s money – in Bloodgood’s case, by absconding with it.

Mrs Folliott has also lost money – but Montieth suspects she has plenty more (as he has). The implication is that American capitalism has been in a boom period. And Winch too has ‘splendidly improved’. Montieth is impressed with his sumptuous accommodation. But it turns out to be wealth accumulated corruptly – in the same way as Bloodgood has done.

James wasn’t exactly short of money himself (his grandfather had been one of the first US millionaires), but he was surprised by the huge fortunes that had been accumulated by American capitalists in the last two decades of the nineteenth century whilst he had been away in Europe.

His reflections on these recent American developments are not very positive, and it is significant that within a few years (and as an act of solidarity during war time with the country he had made his home) he took out English citizenship in 1915.

Structure

In his study of the tales, Henry James: a study of the short fiction, Richard A. Hocks offers an extended and in-depth analysis of James’s irony in this story, and in particular the manner in which the structure of the narrative supports the reversals of expectation that take place:

The formal integrity, too, of A Round of Visits is another illustration of just how much James by the end had furthered the development of American short fiction as a work of art in the course of his career. The seven divisions of the tale are halved by the transitional fourth section (in which no visit occurs), providing a structural balance between the first and final three segments. The first three, moreover, are unified by a repetitive pattern of expectation and rebuff in the encounters with the hotel doctor, Mrs Folliott, and Mrs Ash. The transitional section, with Montieth again outside in the street, has him deciding to reverse his search for sympathy and follow the supposed ‘will of Providence’. The last three sections, in Winch’s apartment, trace the reversal and twistings of Montieth’s expectations and judgements with results even more drastically unexpected than those accumulated in the first three sections.

A Round of Visits – study resources

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

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

A Round of Visits Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

A Round of Visits Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

A Round of Visits A Round of Visits – Digireads reprint – Amazon UK

A Round of Visits A Round of Visits – eBook at Project Gutenberg

A Round of Visits A Round of Visits – read the story on line

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

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

A Round of Visits

A Round of Visits – plot summary

Part I. Mark Montieth arrives in New York amidst a snowstorm after an absence of ten years living in Paris. He discovers that his old friend Phil Bloodgood has absconded with all the proceeds of money left in trust to him. Montieth falls ill with flu for a few days, then decides to leave his hotel.

Part II. However, he meets Mrs Folliott, who has also lost money entrusted to Bloodgood. Thinking she might offer a sympathetic ear, Montieth actually becomes bored by her complaints about her own loss, and he is glad to accept an invitation to a lunch party. There he meets a pretty young woman who encourages him to visit an old friend Newton Winch, who is also ill with flu.

Part III. Montieth goes to visit Mrs Ash, an old friend from his days in Paris, hoping she will give him a sympathetic ear. But she oppresses him with a non-stop account of the separation from her husband, who is carrying on with Mrs Folliott.

Part IV. He wanders in a rather bleak and hostile New York evening and reflects charitably upon the egoism of other people – then decides to visit his old friend who is sick.

Part V. Newton Winch turns out to be a sophisticated, successful, and very welcoming. Montieth is struck and very impressed by the enormous improvement in his appearance and behaviour.

Part VI. Winch is entirely sympathetic to Montieth’s financial loss and heaps criticism on Bloodgood, but Montieth expresses a certain sympathy for him, and says he would even like to meet him.

Part VII. Winch takes a passionate interest in his friend’s plight, and implores him to keep ‘talking to him’, and by his nervousness gives Montieth reason to think that something is wrong. It transpires that Winch has been guilty of the same sort of pecuniary fraudulent dealing as Bloodgood, and is waiting any moment to be arrested. There is a theatrical knock at the door. Montieth goes to answer it, and whilst he is there, Winch shoots himself.

Principal characters
Mark Montieth an American bachelor
Phil Bloodgood his handsome third cousin and former classmate and close friend
Mrs Folliott an American society woman
Mrs Florence Ash an American society woman, Montieth’s friend in Paris
Mr Newton Winch a rich American old friend of Montieth’s

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

Henry James 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 2012

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.

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

A Scandal in Bohemia

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tutorial, study resources, web links, and further reading

A Scandal in Bohemia was first published in July 1891 in The Strand Magazine with illustrations by Sydney Paget. As a stand-out character and detective hero, Sherlock Holmes had first appeared in Conan Doyle’s earlier novel A Study in Scarlet (1887) – but it wasn’t until the monthly stories appeared that the fictional character began to seize the public’s imagination. This effect was amplified by the publication in America in 1892 of these thirteen monthly episodes as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. This began a popularity for the figure of Holmes which continues to this day. There have been any number of radio, stage, and film adaptations of the stories, and there is currently a very successful television series in which the stories are transposed into present day settings.

A Scandal in Bohemia

A Scandal in Bohemia – critical commentary

Mise en scene

The setting, characters, and historical context of the story are all convincingly realistic. The story is set in a London that is thoroughly recognisable. Holmes lives in Baker Street in Marylebone, and Irene Adler in St John’s Wood. Many other places are mentioned – Edgware Road, Regent Street, and Charing Cross – and because they actually exist they help to establish realistic setting. Generations of tourists have walked up and down Baker Street searching for 221B – which is an invention on Conan Doyle’s part.

Watson gives an exact date at the start of the story – 20th March 1888. The king is from Bohemia, which was a separate state as part of the Austro-Hungarian empire during the nineteenth century – and still exists as part of the Czech Republic. He arrives in a ‘brougham’ – a Victorian horse carriage; and the driver is paid ‘half a guinea’. These details correspond to the historical picture we have of the world around that time and therefore make the background to the story seem credible.

The story is populated by a married doctor plus his friend and former flat-mate, an amateur detective. The other characters include a foreign aristocrat and an opera singer. Although Sherlock Holmes has unusually developed skills and Kings are not exactly commonplace, these characters form part of a world which seems reasonable, not unlike our own. They help to make the fictional world Conan Doyle offers us realistic.

The story begins in the streets of London, then continues to Holmes’ first floor apartment with its bachelor accoutrements of cigars and drinks cabinet. It moves on to the mews where servants are working, then a church in the Edgware Road and the avenue where Briony Lodge is situated. It reaches its climax inside the drawing room of the ‘bijou villa’ from which Irene Adler has recently decamped, and it ends as Watson and Holmes take to the streets of London again. All of these locations help to create a perfectly credible milieu.

The construction of character

The principal point of interest in the Sherlock Holmes stories and the reason that they have been so popular is the character of Holmes himself. The complete character study of Holmes can be best constructed from details about him which are scattered throughout the stories. However, from A Scandal in Bohemia alone we learn that he has an international reputation as a detective and is well known amongst European royalty. He has acute powers of observation and an ability to interpret visual data (see below). He is a master of disguise, and is able to transform his demeanour and actions into those of the person he is imitating.

In addition, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of society backed up by an archive of information on crime he keeps on index cards. He alternates between periods of lassitude which he spends in brooding reflection, and periods of dynamic activity in pursuit of his client’s problems.

Watson describes him as a man who ‘loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul’ – which tells us that he is radically independent. He also has a ‘cold, precise, admirably balanced mind’. He is an intellectual, one who sneers at ‘the softer passions’ – which is what makes his admiration for Irene Adler such an exception. He is also given to offering witty, epigrammatic apercus such as “When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to the thing she values most … A married woman grabs at her baby – an unmarried one reaches for her jewel box”.

Holmes is philosophical, brilliant, charismatic, benevolent and enigmatic. At the end of the story he shows a lofty disregard for the King by ignoring his handshake, and his non-materialistic values are revealed when he chooses the photo over the proffered emerald and gold ring.

One rather surprising detail we learn about him is that he is a cocaine addict – what we might today call ‘an occasional user’. Fortunately, this does not seem to hamper his powers as a detective, but it does reinforce the idea that he a social ‘outsider’. We learn in a later story that he also plays the violin. All of this adds up to making him a fascinating and complex individual. If we add to this picture his lean, angular appearance, the deerstalker hat, and the meerschaum pipe, it is not surprising that he has become an iconic figure in popular culture.

Deduction or induction?

But of course the most amazing thing about Holmes is the manner in which he able to combine acute observation with profound intelligence and an incisive system of reasoning to reach revealing insights and surprisingly deft conclusions. It is a method of ratiocination clearly modeled on Edgar Allen Poe’s detective Auguste Dupin.

Holmes analyses the watermarks of the paper on which the King has written his introductory note, and works out from the abbreviations that the paper has been produced in Bohemia. Then he goes on to look at the message itself and observes that though the writing is in English, it uses a distinctively German syntax – with a verb at the end of the sentence.

Amongst critics there is often disagreement on the question of Holmes’ methods of detection. He observes very small details of a person’s physical appearance or clothing, and from these details arrives at a general understanding of their occupation, their habits, or their recent movements. This method of detection illustrates his acute powers of observation and often reveals his encyclopedic knowledge of arcane topics – such as being able to recognise the ashes of different brands of cigar.

In Watson’s narrative, he calls Holmes’ method ‘deduction’ – “I could not help laughing at the ease with which he explained his process of deduction.” Watson (and by implication Conan Doyle) is employing the term in its everyday sense of seeing a relationship between one thing and another which doesn’t at first seem to be connected to it.

But the method, strictly speaking, is ‘induction’ – a form of reasoning which derives general principles from specific observation. This is also known as ‘bottom up’ reasoning. Holmes notices on Watson’s finger the marks of silver nitrate, which was originally used as a disinfectant and to cauterise wounds. From this he reasons that Watson has probably resumed his former occupation as a doctor.

Deductive reasoning works the other way round – and is known as ‘top down’ logic. This starts from a general principle then works down to a specific instance. All men are mortal; Socrates was a man; therefore Socrates was mortal. Another term for this process is ‘inference’. This is a minor issue – and many people accept and use the term ‘deduction’ for both forms of reasoning.

Close reading

Close reading is not a skill that can be acquired in just a few minutes. It requires detailed attention to language, wide literary experience, and concentrated reflection on the technical minutiae of texts. These strands of analysis need to be brought together many times over. The skill also involves consideration of a text in at four levels – linguistic, semantic, structural, and cultural. That is – the words of a text in their grammatical sense; what the words mean in the context of the story; what links they might have with the overall structure of the work; and the broader meanings of the text in terms of cultural history.

In one sense close reading is quite like the analytic method used by Sherlock Holmes himself. It squeezes the maximum amount of meaning out of quite small observations. For instance what follows is a close reading of the opening sentence of the story: ‘To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman’. And in fact my observations will focus on just two words in the sentence ‘is’ and ‘the‘.

Linguistic. The use of the present tense – ‘she is’ – strikes an interesting note here. Most fiction is narrated in the past tense, but the present tense is sometimes used to give a sense of immediacy and urgency. This effect is reinforced here by the brevity and directness of the sentence. It starts the story on a bright note.

Semantic. The term ‘is’ also suggests something else here – that the high regard and rivalry between Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler has originated in the past but is still going on in the fictional present of the story. This is reinforced by the addition of the adverb ‘always’. Yet we learn from Watson at the end of the paragraph that she is the late Irene Adler. It is not clear if this means she is dead or that the episode recorded in the story simply took place in the past. Either way, the fact remains that she continues to have an influence on him

Structural. The opening sentence of the story is rather neatly echoed by the sentence with which it ends: ‘When he speaks of Irene Adler … it is always under the honourable title of the woman. This small structural link using repetition introduces an element of symmetry or pattern into the narrative, making it coherent and satisfying. It is an indication that the story is well designed.

Cultural. At the end of the Victorian and the beginning of the Edwardian period there were a number of male writers who produced work which featured a woman who is idealised, inaccessible, mysterious, and often either beautiful or cruel – or both. One thinks of Rider Haggard’s She (1886-87) or many of the stories of Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham.

This was a period in which women were becoming more socially and personally assertive – claiming the right to own property and the right to vote for instance. Holmes’ reverence for Irene Adler – a talented, enterprising, and clever woman – reflects this broader historical development, all in just two words – ‘the woman’.

A Scandal in Bohemia – study resources

A Scandal in Bohemia The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

A Scandal in Bohemia The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

A Scandal in Bohemia The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Penguin – Amazon UK

A Scandal in Bohemia The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Penguin – Amazon US

A Scandal in Bohemia The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Wordsworth – Amazon UK

A Scandal in Bohemia The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Wordsworth – Amazon US

A Scandal in Bohemia Sherlock Holmes – 1939 classic DVD box set – Amazon UK

A Scandal in Bohemia Sherlock – 2014 DVD box set – Amazon UK

A Scandal in Bohemia – explanatory notes
gasogene a soda syphon
vizard a half mask covering just the eyes
cabinet photograph small portrait, which replaced the visiting card
John Hare a famous English actor-manager
iodoform antiseptic compound of iodine
A Scandal in Bohemia – plot summaries

Short summary

Sherlock Holmes, a famous detective, is commissioned by the King of Bohemia to retrieve a potentially compromising photograph from Irene Adler, his former mistress. Holmes sets out in disguise to search her house but is sidetracked when he becomes caught up as a witness at her wedding. Later he returns and tricks her into revealing the hiding place. When he goes back next day however she has left a note saying she perceived his ruse and has emigrated, taking the photograph with her.

Long summary

Doctor Watson calls on his old flat mate in Baker Street, London. Sherlock Holmes is a famous detective with amazing powers of observation. They are visited by the hereditary King of Bohemia who is about to be married but is being blackmailed by Irene Adler, an opera singer with whom he has had an affair. She is threatening to reveal a compromising photograph.

Next day Watson visits Holmes who has been making a reconnaissance of Adler’s house whilst in disguise. Holmes learns that Adler has an admirer Godfrey Norton who is a lawyer. Norton and Adler leave the house hurriedly and Holmes follows them to a church, where he is pressed into acting as a witness to their marriage.

Holmes plans to make an illegal entry into the house the same night, and enlists Watson’s help. Disguised as a clergyman, he is at the house when a pre-arranged fight breaks out in the street. He dashes to protect Adler, and appears to be badly injured. He is taken into the house to recover, where he signals to Watson, who throws a smoke bomb into the house and raises the cry of ‘Fire!’. Ten minutes later, as they leave, Holmes explains how Adler revealed the hiding place of the photo.

Next morning the King accompanies them to Adler’s house, but she has already left England, never to return. She has left a letter for Holmes explaining that she recognised him and his methods, and she has retained the photo as a guarantee against any future action from the King.

A Scandal in Bohemia – further reading

Biography

John Dickson Carr, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, London: John Murray, 1949.

Michael Coren, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, London: Bloomsbury, 1995.

John L/ Lellenberg, The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.

Andrew Lycett, Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008.

Pierre Nordon, Conan Doyle: A Biography, London: John Murray, 1966.

Hesketh Pearson, Conan Doyle – His Life and Work, London: Methuen, 1943.

Julian Symons, Portrait of an Artist: Conan Doyle, London: Whizzard Press, 1979.

Criticism

Don Richard Cox, Arthur Conan Doyle, New York: Ungar, 1985.

Owen Dudley Edwards, The Quest for Sherlock Holmes, Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1983.

Trevor Hall, Sherlock Holmes: Ten Literary Studies, London: Duckworth, 1969.

Michael and Mollie Hardwick, The Sherlock Holmes Companion, London: John Murray, 1962.

Howard Haycraft, The Art of the Mystery Story, Caroll & Graf Publishers, 1983.

Harold Orel (ed), Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Hall & Co, 1992.

Julian Symons, Bloody Murder, London: Faber, 1972.

Robin Winks, The Historian as Detective, London: Harper Collins, 1969.

Jaqueline A. Yaffe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Boston: Twayne, 1967.

A Scandal in Bohemia – web links

A Scandal in Bohemia Sherlock Holmes at Wikipedia
Comprehensive biographical notes on the detective, extracted from all the stories and novels.

A Scandal in Bohemia The Sherlock Holmes Society of London
An active literary and social society with special events, a journal, meetings, newsletter, and shop.

A Scandal in Bohemia Discovering Sherlock Holmes
Repository at Stanford University – includes facsimile reproductions of stories from the original Strand Magazine

© Roy Johnson 2016

More 19C Authors
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A Silver Dish

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tutorial, study guide, web links, and further reading

A Silver Dish (1984) is one of five pieces in the collection Him with his Foot in his Mouth. The story was first published in The New Yorker for 25 September, 1978. The four other stories in the collection are Cousins, What Kind of Day Did You Have?, Him with his Foot in his Mouth, and Zetland: By A Character Witness.

A Silver Dish

A Silver Dish – commentary

This story is essentially one of ethnic and religious allegiance. Woody Selbst, like many of Saul Bellows’ other protagonists, is the son of Jewish immigrants to America. His father Morris is a non-believing Jew, and his mother is a Christian convert who has brought up her son Woodrow in an environment of evangelical proselytising.

Woody appears to be religiously neutral—he respects his mother and is very sceptical about his father, who is a gambler, a womaniser, and a completely improvident parent. His father even cheats Woody out of his hard-earned part time savings in order to desert the family, and believes he is offering Woody a useful lesson in life—to trust nobody.

Pushing this dubious behaviour even further, his father pressures Woody into asking for financial support from his philanthropic sponsor the pious Mrs Skoglund. Despite his father’s tales of needing to repay for someone else’s misdeeds, Woody knows full well that his father is probably going to use the money to settle his own gambling debts—yet he assists him in this fraudulent enterprise.

The story reaches its emotional climax when his father steals a silver dish from Mrs Skoglund while they are in her house asking for financial assistance. Woody is shocked by his father’s outrageous anti-social behaviour, and the two of them become locked in an Oedipal fight on the floor.

His father claims to have replaced the silver dish before they leave the house, but Woody is quite right – his father lies to him, steals the silver dish and pawns it. As a result of this theft Woody is expelled from the seminary where he is a student as Mrs Skoglund’s protégé.

Nevertheless, when his father is later dying, Woody visits the hospital and climbs into the bed where his father is in his death throes—to hold him and prevent him pulling out the needles that are helping to keep him alive. It is his father to whom he gives his final allegiance – not his mother and the Christian fundamentalism she represents.

Father and son

Throughout the story Woody appears to be in conflict with his father. The improvident Morris deserts his family when Woody is young, and he sets up an irregular relationship with Halina, a Polish woman. He virtually steals from his own son, lies to him, and drags him into the hugely embarrassing episode of the stolen dish. At each stage he rationalises his bad behaviour as valuable (negative) lessons in life for his son.

And yet Woody’s life turns out to be a close parallel to that of his father. Following the theft of the bowl, Woody lies to the people at the mission: ‘He denied that he or Pop had touched Mrs Skoglund’s property. The missing object – he didn’t even know what it was – had probably been misplaced, and they would be very sorry on the day it turned up’. And as an adult in the narrative present of the story, Woody also has an ex-wife and a mistress, just like his father. He is also a risk-taker – smuggling hashish back through customs after his African holiday.

Religion

In religious terms the story is one of Woody’s choice between Christianity and Judaism. Christianity is the institutional religion of the country in which he lives – America. Judaism is the religion of his family’s cultural heritage as recent immigrants. This split is also echoed in his own family. His mother is a Christian convert, whilst his father is a non-believing Jew.

Woody has even been educated and converted to Christianity as a child – and bears witness in the services he attends. But it is significant that he is paid, bribed to do so. ‘He was often sent by Aunt Rebecca to get up and tell a churchful of Scandinavians that he, a Jewish lad, accepted Jesus Christ. For this she paid him fifty cents.’ Even more significant is that the goal of the mission is to convert Jews – as it has done in his own case.

In the narrative present of the story Woody is drinking coffee on a Sunday morning in his apartment above his office, surrounded by the clamour of church bells: ‘the Ukrainian, Roman Catholic, Greek, Russian, African Methodist churches’. These are all branches of Christian belief, and it is against this summons to church attendance and Christian belief that he makes his final decision:

It wouldn’t conclude as Mrs Skoglund, bribing him to round up Jews and hasten the Second Coming, imagined it, but in another way. This was his clumsy intuition.

Moreover, his choice is made explicitly between the two religious options represented by his parents. Despite his mother’s virtues, and despite his father’s shortcomings, it is his father’s influence to which Woody gives his allegiance:

He was like a horseman from Central Asia, a bandit from China. It was Mother, from Liverpool, who had the refinement, the English manners. It was the preaching Reverend Doctor in his black suit. You have refinements, and all they do is oppress you? The hell with that.

A Silver Dish – resources

A Silver Dish A Silver Dish – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Silver Dish A Silver Dish – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Silver Dish A Saul Bellow bibliography

A Silver Dish Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Silver Dish Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Silver Dish Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz UK

A Silver Dish Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

A Silver Dish

A Silver Dish – plot synopsis

Woodrow (Woody) Selbst is a sixty year old Chicago building tile contractor with an ex-wife and a mistress. He has recently buried his father Morris. As a boy Woody was educated partly as a Christian, and his mother is an evangelical proselyte.

Surrounded by the sound of church bells on a Sunday morning, Woody confronts his grief in recollections of his youth during the Depression. His father deserted the family, and even cheated Woody out of his part-time savings to fund the escape.

Woody recalls a winter snowstorm when his father insists on visiting the devout Mrs Skoglund, Woody’s patroness, to scrounge some money from her. Woody is reluctant and sceptical when Morris gives Mrs Skoglund a hard luck story about his business, claiming that he is trustworthy. Mrs Skoglund leaves them whilst she seeks guidance in prayer.

Whilst she is absent Morris steals a silver dish from her display cabinet. Woody is mortified with embarrassment and tries to retrieve the dish. The two of them scuffle and fall to the floor. Mrs Skoglund returns and gives them a cheque. Morris tells Woody he has replaced the dish.

A few days later it is revealed that he was lying, and Woody is expelled from the seminary in disgrace. His father has pawned the dish, and many years later confesses that he spent the money betting on horses. He also claims that he did his son a favour in separating him from Christian zealots.

As an adult Woody looks after his mother and his invalid sisters. His final recollection is his father’s death in hospital, when he climbs into Morris’s bed and holds him whilst he is dying.

A Silver Dish – characters
Woodrow (Woody) Selbst a Chicago building tile contractor
Morris Selbst Woody’s improvident father
Mrs Selbst Woody’s mother, an evangelical Christian
Halina Morris’s Polish mistress
Mrs Aase Skoglund Woody’s Swedish benefactor, a widow

© Roy Johnson 2017

More on Saul Bellow
More on the novella
More on short stories
Twentieth century literature

A Simple Melody

by

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

A Simple Melody was probably written around 1925 and is one of a number of short stories by Virginia Woolf set at a party in the Westminster home of Richard and Clarissa Dalloway, the hosts of the central social event in her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925).

A Simple Melody

John Crome 1768-1821

A Simple Melody – critical commentary

The narrative is presented almost entirely from George Carslake’s point of view, with no authorial comment to cast any interpretive light on how his character might be viewed. Certainly, like all the other guests who feature in these Mrs Dalloway’s Party sketches, he is locked into his own thoughts in an entirely solipsistic manner. He doesn’t engage with any of the other guests at all – except in his imagination.

And even though he comes close to serious topics for reflection, such as the nature of religious belief, his musings are on the whole completely banal, escapist, and trivial. He is searching for over-simplified explanations of social phenomena which he finds threatening.

One of the most interesting secondary aspects of the story is that it features cameo appearances of characters from the other short sketches in the Mrs Dalloway’s Party sequence.

Prickett Ellis, the middle-aged solicitor from The Man who Loved his Kind, appears as ‘that angry looking chap with the toothbrush moustache’, and as he glances round the room, George Carslake sees Mabel Waring, the central figure from The New Dress:

Just as he was thinking this, he saw Mabel Waring going away, in her pretty yellow dress. She looked agitated, with a strained expression and fixed unhappy eyes for all she tried to look animated.

We know from that story that Mabel Waring feels her new yellow dress is a fashion choice disaster which has resulted in her social humiliation, yet Carslake thinks of it as ‘pretty’, which confirms that her agitation is a self-induced sense of insecurity.

Similarly, he spots Stuart Elton, the protagonist of Happiness, another character who is self-absorbed, disatends to the people around him, and is alienated by his own egoism. Yet George Carslake sees him quite differently:

Mr Carslake saw him [Stuart Elton] standing alone lifting a paper knife up in his hands and looking at it in a very strange way … For underneath, though people seeing him casually would never believe it, Stuart was the gentlest, simplest of creatures, content to ramble all day with quite undistinguished people, like himself …

This poses an interpretive problem. The separate story Happiness establishes Stuart Elton as vain, rude, and emotionally costive. So – do we take George Carslake’s reading of him as accurate? – or does it reflect a limitation in Carslake’s understanding of other people?

The possible solution to this conundrum is to recognise that there is always a potential mismatch between what people think about themselves and how they are perceived by others.

A Simple Melody – study resources

A Simple Melody The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

A Simple Melody The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

A Simple Melody The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

A Simple Melody The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

A Simple Melody Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

A Simple Melody Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

A Simple Melody Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

A Simple Melody The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

A Simple Melody The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

A Simple Melody 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 Simple Melody

A Simple Melody – story synopsis

George Carslake, a bachelor barrister, is in the company of Miss Merewether at Clarissa Dalloway’s party, and is comforting himself by regarding a genre painting of a heath on the wall. He fantasises about walking back to Norwich with Queen Mary and some of the people at the party, his thoughts rambling inconsequently over what they might talk about. He generalises about religious belief and seems to be searching for a sense of communication in order to escape his feelings of emptiness and isolation.

To the other guests he appears to be alert and gracefully composed, but in fact his thoughts are riven with uncertainties, and whilst he is physically present in the drawing room, his mind is elsewhere – walking back to Norwich. He wants to comfort himself with the idea that all people are essentially the same, but he cannot escape the realisation that all social interaction reveals differences.

A Simple Melody – characters
George Carslake a bachelor barrister
Miss Merewether a guest at Mrs Dalloway’s party
Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Virginia Woolf

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

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

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

Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

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

A Smile of Fortune

by

a harbour tale

A Smile of Fortune is one of Joseph Conrad’s lesser-known long stories. He was essentially a nineteenth century writer who anticipated and then lived into the modernist age of the early twentieth century, helping to shape its spirit of uncertainty, anxiety, and moral ambiguity. Even his own life and works share the contradictions of the era. He is best known as an author of mannish sea tales, yet he only achieved success with a novel set largely on dry land which had a woman as its central character (Flora Barral in Chance).

A Smile of FortuneHe is now regarded as a great figure in the tradition of the English novel, yet he was Polish, and English was his third language. He’s also regarded as something of a conservative, yet his political views were scathingly radical (see The Secret Agent).

A Smile of Fortune comes from his mature period (1911) and features the familiar Conradian device of a young sea captain who is confronted by a puzzling ethical dilemma. The first person narrator is a confirmed bachelor given to a philosophic approach to life, but whom Conrad cleverly makes vulnerable to the duplicities of the more experienced people around him.

He arrives at an island in the Indian Ocean to take on a cargo of sugar, but is also given an open invitation by his ship’s owners to do trade with a local merchant.

The trader turns out to have a brother, and the two of them have diametrically opposed characters: one is socially well respected, but is a brute; the other is a social outcast who wishes to ingratiate himself with the unnamed narrator.

For reasons he himself cannot fully understand, the captain opts for the outcast and allows himself to be drawn into his domestic life whilst waiting for his ship to be made ready. The principal attraction for this delay is a mysterious young woman, who might be the trader’s daughter, with whom the young captain becomes romantically obsessed.

The trader meanwhile is encouraging the captain’s attentions, whilst trying to lure him into a speculative commercial venture. It’s as if the young man is being lured and tempted on two fronts – the erotic and the pecuniary.

In typically modernist fashion, this conflict reaches an unexpected and ambiguous resolution which despite the captain’s commercial profit leads to his resigning his commission and heading back home.

Formally, it’s a long short story, rather than a novella such as The Secret Sharer and The Shadow Line with which it is frequently collected. And in terms of achievement, it seems to me to fall between the level of those excellent longer tales and the often embarrassingly bad short stories which Conrad turned out at the height of his commercial success.

It’s a story full of symbols and half-concealed inferences which is crying out for (at least) Freudian analysis, and can certainly be added to the list of lesser-known tales which deserve interpretive attention from anyone who admires Conrad’s achievement.

© Roy Johnson 2008

A Smile of Fortune Buy the book at Amazon UK

A Smile of Fortune Buy the book at Amazon US

Joseph Conrad, A Smile of Fortune, London: Hesperus Press, 2007, pp.79, ISBN 184391428X

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
Joseph Conrad complete tales

A Summing Up

by

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

A Summing Up is one of a number of short stories by Virginia Woolf set at a party in the Westminster home of Richard and Clarissa Dalloway, the hosts of the central social event in her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925). The story was first published in A Haunted House (1944) and then later reprinted with the collection of stories and sketches Mrs Dalloway’s Party published by the Hogarth Press in London in 1973.

A summing Up

houses in Westminster

A Summing Up – critical commentary

Like all the other stories in the Mrs Dalloway’s Party sequence, this is principally a study in social alienation, egoism, and the life of the imagination. It is yet another example of people interacting politely in what appears on the surface to be a civilized manner, whilst the narrative reveals the emotional and intellectual chasms that separate them.

Bertram Pritchard is an almost comic study of the crashing bore, even though he is ‘an esteemed civil servant and a Companion of the Bath.’

Written down what he said would be incredible — not only was each thing he said in itself insignificant, but there was no connection between the different remarks.

Sasha Latham on the other hand is ‘tall [and] handsome’ but inwardly feels lacking in confidence. Disattending to her fellow guest, she retreats into a series of imaginative speculations concerning the nature and the history of society.

There is no overt criticism of Pritchard, only deeply ironic counterpoint. Sasha Latham even manages to feel sympathetic towards him as she searches through a jumble of memories and sense impressions for some sort of meaningful insight.

And she finds it – very briefly – in the vision of a tree she sees in the garden. She also realises that the revelation might come by accident, and it does as she feels that the human soul ‘is by nature unmated, a widow bird; a bird perched aloft on that tree’ – before the revelation is shattered both by Pritchard guiding her back to what he sees as their social duty in the house, and by the inarticulate shriek she hears from the city that surrounds them.

A Summing Up – study resources

A Summing Up The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

A Summing Up The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

A Summing Up The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

A Summing Up The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

A Summing Up Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

A Summing Up Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

A Summing Up Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

A Summing Up The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

A Summing Up The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

A Summing Up 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 Summing Up – story synopsis

Bertram Pritchard and Sasha Latham are guests at an evening party given by Clarissa Dalloway in central London. They stroll together in the small garden in the shadow of Westminster. He is a civil servant and a complete bore: she is uncertain about herself, but the story is articulated largely from her point of view.

Because Bertram Pritchard is a non-stop talker about trivialities, she stops listening to him and thinks instead of how there is now a civilized society where once there were swamps. She admires the courage and the sophistication of other people to succeed in society – even Bertram Pritchard.

They look over the garden wall, and she becomes conscious of the fact that they are in the middle of a busy city. Then they sit and talk to people she doesn’t actually know, and her thoughts drift back to fragments of what she learned at school. She wonders which of her impressions of the world are the most accurate. She has a visionary experience that the human soul is single and unattached. But at that precise moment an inarticulate cry sounds from within the city, and her vision escapes into the night.

A Summing Up – characters
Bertram Pritchard an ‘esteemed’ civil servant and bore
Mrs Sasha Latham a guest at the party
Clarissa Dalloway a society hostess
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 triptych 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

 

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

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

Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

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

A Theft

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

A Theft (1987) is one of three stories in the collection Something to Remember Me By. It was originally intended for magazine publication, but was rejected as being too long. Saul Bellow took the unusual step of publishing it as a single volume – directly as a paperback book. The two other stories in the collection are Something to Remember Me By and The Bellarosa Connection.

A Theft

A Theft – commentary

The main theme

The story (or novella) is largely a character study of Clara Velde – her deep emotional conflicts, erratic behaviour, and her problematic relationships with the people close to her. But the most important feature, which unites all these elements, is the complexity of her feelings for ex-lover Ithiel (Teddy) Regler.

Teddy is an intelligent and impressive figure in his own right, but so far as Clara is concerned he is all men; he is the man; but he has remained beyond her reach, unobtainable. This might explain why she has had so many failed marriages. But she has one tangible link that expresses the bond she feels between them. He has given her an expensive emerald ring that she treasures and provides the story with its central symbol.

When she first loses the ring she feels that her world has come apart. She has three children, a successful career, and a loyal but ineffectual husband, Wilder. But after twenty years she still regards Teddy as her soul mate. The ring is a powerful emblem of what he means to her and the love they once shared (which curiously enough, is not really dramatised, even in her retrospective musings).

The ring is recovered, but then disappears again when it is stolen by the boyfriend of her au pair, a petty crook from Haiti. Clara more-or-less fires the au pair Gina, but then immediately feels guilty about how rashly she has acted. Once again she feels that a cornerstone of her identity has been removed, and she flies to Washington where Teddy gives her the support that she needs.

Gina the au pair recovers the ring from her boyfriend and returns it via Clara’s daughter Lucy, who completes the transaction without question or fuss. Clara is not only relieved, but feels she has learned a valuable lesson about herself from the much younger woman.

‘I do seem to have an idea of who it is that’s in the middle of me. There may not be more than one in a million, more’s the pity, that do have. And my own child possibly one of those.

It is a moment of catharsis that draws the very loose ends of the story together. But for all the moral and existential anxiety that arises from these twin episodes, it is worth noting that the only theft which remains outstanding at the conclusion to the story is Clara’s. When the ring first goes missing, she claims on her insurance policy – sixteen thousand dollars – but does not return the money when the ring turns up again in her bedroom. This particular theft is left unexamined.

Weaknesses

The early part of the story concerns Clara’s incontinent confessions about her private life and loves to her assistant Laura Wong. These confidences are largely about her continued enthusiasm for former lover Teddy Regler. But Ms Wong hardly features at all in the latter part of the story – so she is introduced for no meaningful purpose.

The same is true of the early scenes describing Clara’s meetings with Giangiacomo and Spontini in Italy. The fictional character Giangiacomo is a thinly disguised portrait of the Italian radical Giangiacomo Feltrinelli – best known as the publisher of Boris Pasternack’s Doctor Zhivago. The character is introduced, but then blows himself up whilst trying to dynamite power lines. [This was one interpretation of Feltrinelli’s controversial death in 1972.] There seems very little connection between this slightly larger-than-life character and the main theme of the story.

In the case of Spontini, his significance is reduced to a single incident. When he is driving Clara in his car she threatens to ward off his wandering hands with the red hot element of a dashboard cigarette lighter. She goes on later to make him the third of her four husbands – but he too never emerges again in the story with any significance, and it is difficult to understand why he is named and included.

Saul Bellow is rightly celebrated as a writer who can bring fictional characters alive by carefully observed physical details, idiosyncratic speech patterns, and a Dickensian sense of comic exaggeration. These approaches to fictional entertainment work well in the expansive scope of novels—which Henry James called ‘large loose baggy monsters’. But these vivid but inconsequential characters can unbalance the more restrained and delicate requirements of the short story and the novella.

Bellow gives the impression in A Theft of writing that is lower his usual standard. For instance, there is a glaring technical flaw part way through the narrative. The story is told almost exclusively from Clara’s point of view. Even passages that switch briefly into third person omniscient narrative mode have Clara as a point of focus. But following an argument between Clara and Teddy, the narrative suddenly switches from her point of view to his when he leaves her and checks into a hotel:

He went to the bed and sat on the edge but did not lie down. It was not in the cards for him to sleep that night. The phone rang—it was a mean sound, a thin rattle—and Etta said: “Clara has swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. She called me and I sent the ambulance.”

The only justification for this sudden change of perspective is that it allows the shock of her attempted suicide to be seen from his point of view. After this the story switches back again to Clara to give a brief history of her first three marriages.

A Theft – resources

A Theft A Theft – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Theft A Theft – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Theft A Saul Bellow bibliography

A Theft Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Theft Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Theft Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz UK

A Theft Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

A Theft

A Theft – plot summary

Clara Velde is a successful fashion advisor with three children living on Park Avenue in New York City. She has been married four times, but is mostly enthusiastic about her former lover Ithiel (Teddy) Regler. She hires a young Viennese girl Gina Wegman as an au pair, and she confides personal concerns to Laura Wong, her design assistant.

She recalls meeting revolutionary Giangiacomo in Italy, and is pursued by Spontini (who later becomes one of her husbands). When Teddy takes a secretary to South America on a business trip, she moves Frenchman Jean-Claude into his apartment. Clara and Teddy are reconciled, but when he does the same again on another foreign trip, Clara tries to commit suicide. She survives, and goes on to a career of serial matrimony.

She marries four times, and Teddy marries three. She loses the expensive ring he once bought her, claims on the insurance, then finds it but does not repay the insurance money.

When Teddy’s third wife leaves him, Clara goes to Washington to offer comfort. On returning to New York she finds the au pair Gina has had a party with her Haitian lover and lots of friends. Clara is suspicious, and when she discovers that her emerald ring is missing she assumes the boyfriend has stolen it. She orders Gina to return it next day – or leave. She feels devastated again by the loss, but then guilty about her peremptory dismissal of Gina.

Clara visits her psychiatrist, then meets Teddy, who recommends a private investigator. Some time later the ring suddenly reappears on her bedside table. Clara thinks Gina has replaced it, and wishes to thank and reward her. She meets Gina who explains that she returned the ring by giving it to Lucy, her daughter.

A Theft – principal characters
Clara Velde a successful business woman and fashion advisor
Wilder Velde Clara’s lazy fourth husband
Laura Wong Clara’s assistant and confidante
Ithiel (Teddy) Regler a government diplomat, Clara’s former lover
Gina Wegman a young Viennese au pair girl
Bobby Steinsalz Teddy’s lawyer
Lucy Clara’s eldest daughter
Gottschalk a private investigator
Dr Gladstone Clara’s psychiatrist
Mike Spontini an oil tycoon, Clara’s third husband

© Roy Johnson 2017

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