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An Unwritten Novel

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An Unwritten Novel was mentioned in Virginia Woolf’s diary entry for 26 January 1920. It was first published in the London Mercury in July 1920 and reprinted in Monday or Tuesday (1921). It was also later collected in A Haunted House (1944).

An Unwritten Novel

Virginia Woolf

An Unwritten Novel – critical commentary

This is a short modernist fiction that celebrates the life of the imagination, and points to its shortcomings. As a narrator, Woolf was in the habit of thinking aloud and talking to herself, as well as to her imaginary readers. Here she takes the process one stage further by ‘talking’ to her own fictional creations.

She also shows the process of the artistic imagination at work, raising doubts about its own creations, asking questions, and posing alternative interpretations. She even develops lines of narrative then backtracks on them as improbable or cancels them as invalid, mistaken interpretation, or rejects them as inadequate.

In other words, the very erratic process of ratiocination – all the uncertainties, mistakes, hesitations – are reproduced as part of her narrative. She even addresses her own subject, silently, from within the fictional frame, and reflects on fictional creations which ‘die’ because they are rejected as unacceptable:

Let’s dodge to the Moggridge household, set that in motion. Well, the family boots are mended on Sundays by James himself. He reads Truth. But his passion? Roses — and his wife a retired hospital nurse — interesting — for God’s sake let me have one woman with a name I like! But no; she’s of the unborn children of the mind, illicit, none the less loved … How many die in every novel that’s written — the best, the dearest, while Moggridge lives.

This is also another of her early experimental stories in which it is virtually impossible not to conceptualise the narrator as someone like Woolf herself, travelling between her two homes in central London and Lewes (which is mentioned in the story). In one sense it is Woolf allowing readers a glimpse into the mind of the novelist, shaping fictions out of everyday observations.

And even if the imagined character, in this case, turns out to be (within its own fictional construction) not a true interpretation of the events ‘behind’ the overt narrative – then no matter. Minnie Marsh’s is no less convincing as an imaginary construct of the narrator’s imagination, even if (beyond the frame of the story) she goes off to have a completely happy and fulfilling engagement with her son.

An Unwritten Novel – study resources

An Unwritten Novel The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

An Unwritten Novel The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

An Unwritten Novel The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

An Unwritten Novel The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

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

An Unwritten Novel Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

An Unwritten Novel Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

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

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

An Unwritten Novel 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

An Unwritten Novel An Unwritten Novel – an alternative reading

An Unwritten Novel

An Unwritten Novel – story synopsis

An un-named first-person narrator is travelling on a commuter train between London and the south coast. Whilst reading the Times, the narrator notices a woman opposite with an unhappy expression, and thinks that her character can be interpreted, especially from the expression in her eyes. The woman becomes agitated, and the narrator begins to echo her gestures.

The narrator begins to imagine that this woman (who is given the name Minnie Marsh) is paying a visit to her sister-in-law (Hilda). The family group are imagined at the dinner table, at which the narrator pushes her imagination forward, to avoid the inessential details. Minnie goes upstairs to unpack her meagre belongings, and stares out in a despairing state across the rooftops of an Eastbourne suburb on December afternoon, and thinks of God.

The narrator finds difficulty in fully imagining God, but comes up with the idea that Minnie has committed some sort of crime. The question is, what sort of crime would a woman such as Minnie commit? The narrator settles on a scene where Minnie lingers in a Croydon draper’s shop and arrives home late to discover that her baby brother has died from scalding.

The narrator then checks her construction with the figure in the railway carriage, who is pretending to be asleep. The scene returns to Eastbourne, where the petty constraint of her sister-in-law’s house drive Minnie outdoors.

The narrator wonders if she is capturing the essence of the woman, and likens the effort to that of a hawk flying over the Sussex Downs. The story then loops back to pick up where it left off. Minnie takes a boiled egg and starts eating it in her lap.

The narrator loses grasp of the story and realises that something must be done to maintain its interest. Rhododendrons and commercial travellers are considered, then she invents a salesman James Moggeridge who takes his meals with the Marshes on a particular day when he is in Eastbourne. Moggeridge’s home life is predicated, then rejected as being unsuitable.

The narrator thinks of Minnie looking back over the events of the imaginary scene, then darning a hole in her glove. Imagining that Minnie would be disappointed not to be met at the station, the narrator offers to help her with her luggage.

But it transpires that the woman is being met by her son, and the narrator realises that the invented biography was quite inaccurate. Nevertheless, the narrator goes on observing people and ends on a note of celebration for the life of the imagination.

Monday or Tuesday – first edition

Monday or Tuesday - first edition

Cover design by Vanessa Bell

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Virginia Woolf

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

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

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

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

Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

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

Ancestors

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tutorial, synopsis, commentary,  and study resources

Ancestors was probably written in 1923 – between the composition of Jacob’s Room (1922) and Mrs Dalloway (1925). It was first published in the magazine The Criterion in April 1923 – edited by fellow Bloomsburyite T.S. Eliot. It is one of a number of short stories Virginia Woolf wrote which feature guests at a party given by Clarissa Dalloway at her home in Westminster.

Ancestors

Virginia Woolf

Ancestors – critical commentary

Biography

This is another of Woolf’s stories in which there is more or less a complete absence of authorial comment to guide the reader’s interpretation. However, it is quite clear that Mrs Valliance is romanticising her ‘ancestors’ and that we are being invited to see her disdain for younger contemporaries in a critical light.

But it is also possible that Virginia Woolf is celebrating the rich cultural life she inherited from her own parents. After all, her mother was a society beauty and model for some of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and her father was a celebrated Victorian intellectual, with colleagues ranging from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Henry James and Thomas Hardy. We note that Mrs Vallance’s father is some sort of public figure who she expects Jack Renshaw to know, and his friends are Sir Duncan Clement and a Greek scholar – just the sort of people with whom Leslie Stephen surrounded himself.

Mrs Vallance also seems to be an even more precocious version of Virginia Woolf herself: ‘She had read all Shelly between the ages of twelve and fifteen’. The connection is once more the biographical link between Woolf and her father, who gave her free access to his library as a child. It might also be borne in mind that Virginia Woolf never went to school in the sense we think of that term today. She was ‘home educated’

We know that Woolf regarded over-attention to dress as rather frivolous, and she was often criticised for her own choice of clothes. But on the other hand, she did write for Vogue, and when young she did play cricket. However, it would seem to be wrong to draw the parallels between Mrs Vallance and Virginia Woolf too closely, for Mrs Vallance at one point thinks ‘She could not bear to walk in London and see the children playing in the streets’ and it is difficult to think of anyone who has celebrated walking in the streets of London more memorably that Virginia Woolf, particularly in the case of her celebrated character, Clarissa Dalloway.

Geography

Mrs Vallance’s memories of her idyllic family life are located in Scotland according to the text- and yet the story creates no sense of such a location. It is not evoked or represented in any way. This is rather like To the Lighthouse which is supposed to be set in the Hebrides, when it is quite clear from what we know of Virginia Woolf’s life and the places she lived that the setting is based on St Ives and the nearby Godrevy lighthouse.

This is odd – because Woolf marvelously evoked the places in which she lived and worked – central London, the Sussex countryside, even the ‘suburbs’ of Richmond. She was also quite well-travelled considering the difficulties of inter-nation travel at the time she lived. But these fictional excursions into locations she didn’t actually know do not work at all.

Ancestors – study resources

Ancestors The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

Ancestors The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

Ancestors The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

Ancestors The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Ancestors Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Ancestors The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

Ancestors The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

Ancestors 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

Ancestors

Ancestors – the text

Mrs Vallance, as Jack Renshaw made that silly, rather conceited remark of his about not liking to watch cricket matches, felt that she must draw his attention somehow, must make him understand, yes, and all the other young people whom she saw, what her father would have said; how different her father and mother, yes and she too were from all this; and how compared to really dignified simple men and women like her father, like her dear mother, all this seemed to her so trivial.

‘Here we all are,’ she said suddenly, ‘cooped up in this stuffy room while in the country at home — in Scotland’ (she owed it to these foolish young men who were after all quite nice, though a little under-sized, to make them understand what her father, what her mother and she herself too, for she was like them at heart, felt).

‘Are you Scotch?’ he asked.

He did not know then, he did not know who her father was; that he was John Ellis Rattray; and her mother was Catherine Macdonald.

He had stopped in Edinburgh for a night once, Mr Renshaw said.

One night in Edinburgh! And she had spent all those wonderful years there — there and at Elliotshaw, on the Northumbrian border. There she had run wild among the currant bushes; there her father’s friends had come, and she only a girl as she was, had heard the most wonderful talk of her time. She could see them still, her father, Sir Duncan Clements, Mr Rogers (old Mr Rogers was her ideal of a Greek sage), sitting under the cedar tree; after dinner in the starlight. They talked about everything in the whole world, it seemed to her now; they were too large minded ever to laugh at other people. They had taught her to revere beauty. What was there beautiful in this stuffy London room?

‘Those poor flowers,’ she exclaimed, for petals of flowers all crumpled and crushed, a carnation or two, were actually trodden under foot, but, she felt, she cared almost too much for flowers. Her mother had loved flowers: even since she was a child she had been brought up to feel that to hurt a flower was to hurt the most exquisite thing in nature. Nature had always been a passion with her; the mountains, the sea. Here in London, one looked out of the window and saw more houses — human beings packed on top of each other in little boxes. It was an atmosphere in which she could not possibly live; herself. She could not bear to walk in London and see the children playing in the streets. She was perhaps too sensitive; life would be impossible if everyone was like her, but when she remembered her own childhood, and her father and mother, and the beauty and care that were lavished on them —

‘What a lovely frock!’ said Jack Renshaw, and that seemed to her altogether wrong — for a young man to be noticing women’s clothes at all.

Her father was full of reverence for women but he never thought of noticing what they wore. And of all these girls, there was not a single one of them one could call beautiful — as she remembered her mother, — her dear stately mother, who never seemed to dress differently in summer or winter, whether they had people or were alone, but always looked herself in lace, and as she grew older, a little cap. When she was a widow, she would sit among her flowers by the hour, and she seemed to be more with ghosts than with them all, dreaming of the past, which is, Mrs Vallance thought, somehow so much more real than the present. But why. It is in the past, with those wonderful men and women, she thought, that I really live: it is they who know me; it is those people only (and she thought of the starlit garden and the trees and old Mr Rogers, and her father, in his white linen coat smoking) who understood me. She felt her eyes soften and deepen as at the approach of tears, standing there in Mrs Dalloway’s drawing-room, looking not at these people, these flowers, this chattering crowd, but at herself, that little girl who was to travel so far, picking Sweet Alice, and then sitting up in bed in the attic which smelt of pine wood reading stories, poetry. She had read all Shelly between the ages of twelve and fifteen, and used to say it to her father, holding her hands behind her back, while he shaved. The tears began, down in the back of her head to rise, as she looked at this picture of herself, and added the suffering of a lifetime (she had suffered abominably) — life had passed over her like a wheel — life was not what it had seemed then — it was like this party — to the child standing there, reciting Shelly; with her dark wild eyes. But what had they not seen later. And it was only those people, dead now, laid away in quiet Scotland, who had known her, who knew what she had it in her to be — and now the tears came closer, as she thought of the little girl in the cotton frock, how large and dark her eyes were; how beautiful she looked repeating the ‘Ode to the West Wind’; how proud her father was of her, of how great he was, and how great her mother was, and how when she was with them she was so pure so good so gifted that she had it in her to be anything. That if they had lived, and she had always been with them in that garden (which now appeared to her the place the place where she had spent her whole childhood, and it was always starlit, and always summer, and they were always sitting out under the cedar tree smoking, except that somehow her mother was dreaming alone, in her widow’s cap among her flowers — and how good and kind and respectful the old servants were, Andrewes the gardener, Jersy the cook; and old Sultan, the Newfoundland dog; and the vine, and the pond, and the pump — and Mrs Vallance looking very fierce and proud and satirical, compared her life with other people’s lives and if that life could have gone on for ever, then Mrs Vallance felt none of this — and she looked at Jack Renshaw and the girl whose clothes he admired — could have had any existence, and she would have been oh perfectly happy, perfectly good, instead of which here she was forced to listen to a young man saying — and she laughed almost scornfully and yet tears were in her eyes — that he could not bear to watch cricket matches!

Ancestors

Virginia Woolf (left) Vanessa Bell (right)

Ancestors – story synopsis

Mrs Vallance is at a party in London at the house of Clarissa Dalloway. She is irritated by the attitudes of a young man Jack Renshaw who says he doesn’t like to watch cricket matches and passes admiring comments on a younger woman’s dress. She soothes her irritation with a series of of reminiscences about her parents, whose cultivation she sees as superior to her current surroundings. She resuscitates nostalgic images of reverential figures in after-dinner conversations on summer nights conducted under big trees in starlight.

She feels that her parents have instilled in her a sense of beauty, and that they understood her in a way that her present company does not. Even the household servants of her childhood are romantically summoned, and she wishes the whole of this idealised past life could have continued unabated, to spare her from the current discomfort.

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Virginia Woolf

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

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

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

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

Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia Woolf 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 2013

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

At Isella

by

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

At Isella first appeared in The Galaxy Magazine for August 1871. Its first appearance in book for was as part of the collection Travelling Companions published in New York by Boni and Liveright in 1919, three years after James’s death.

At Isella

Simplon Pass 1919 – by John Singer Sargeant

At Isella – critical commentary

This tale is little more than a travelogue and study in landscape word-painting, coupled to an anecdote. The first part of the story is a vivid and romantic account of travelling through the Alps in southern Switzerland, towards the Italian border. The narrator emphasises the rugged grandeur of the Saint Gothard, the Furka, and the Simplon passes; and he keeps before him a romanticised view of everything lush, comfortable, and welcoming that he feels lying in wait for his arrival in Italy.

The second part of the story is his meeting with the mysterious woman going in the opposite direction for roughly similar reasons – to join someone she loves. The only element approaching a story or plot is that the reader is given every reason to believe that the narrator will turn out to be the victim of a confidence trick. The mysterious woman takes his money without offering any evidence to support her story of an irate husband being in hot pursuit to catch her. But in fact the husband turns up the next morning – so our ‘expectations’ in terms of traditional narratives are thwarted.

However, it has to be said that the effect is somewhat bathetic. There is no lesson for the narrator or anyone else to draw from the episode. The Italian inn-keeper lies to assist the woman in flight from her husband – but that is all.

At Isella – study resources

At Isella The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

At Isella The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

At Isella Complete Stories 1864—1874 – Library of America – Amazon UK

At Isella 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

At Isella

At Isella – plot summary

An un-named narrator gives a rather critical account of Switzerland, which he is leaving to spend some time in northern Italy. He climbs the Saint Gothard Pass road, stays with clergymen in a hospice, then descends into Lombardy via the Simplon Pass.

When he reaches Isella, he meets an Italian woman travelling in the opposite direction. They dine together, and he speculates on her age and social background. She reveals that she has been unhappy in Italy. He delivers a romantic encomium to the country, then reveals that he is en route to meet his fiancée in Florence. She is running away from her husband and going to meet a friend in Geneva.

She tell him her background story – how her brother was killed, then she met and loved his best friend the artist Ernesto. But her father forced her to marry a man three years previously who turned out to be a ‘brute’. She has corresponded with Ernesto, who is now ill in Geneva.

She has run away from her husband, but does not have the money for her fare to Switzerland. The narrator gives her the money, and she departs immediately. Next day her husband turns up looking for her, but the inn-keeper denies she has been there.

Principal characters
I an un-named American narrator
— an un-named Italian woman
Bonifazio the Italian inn-keeper at Isella

At Isella - Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

Autres Temps

by

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

Autres Temps first appeared in the Century Magazine in July— 1911. It was originally published under a different (and more obvious) title of Other Times, Other Manners. The story was subsequently included in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction, Xingu published in 1916.

Autres Temps

Autres Temps – critical commentary

Europe and America

The story has elements of what Edith Wharton’s friend and fellow author Henry James called the ‘International Theme’. Although Autres Temps is not concerned with tensions between Europe and America, it is significant that the geographic axis of the story is Florence in Italy and New York in America.

Mrs Lidcote has retreated to live in Europe following her own social disgrace, which we are led to believe is a marital rupture and elopement with another man. She has been forced into this dis-location because of the social opprobrium her actions have brought upon her in very conservative nineteenth century American upper-class society.

It was very common for people in America and England to retreat to the more tolerant locations of European cities following any sort of scandal or disgrace – or even for reasons of financial hardship. As late as 1897 Oscar Wilde had fled Britain to live in France following his trial and imprisonment following his failed libel case against the Marquis of Queensbury.

Mrs Lidcote is confronted with the manners and morals of the ‘new’ New York after exposure to her daughter and friends, rather than the ‘old’ New York in which she had been raised. Symbolically, she retreats to Florence where she can at least be sure of consistency.

It is worth noting that her retreat is not caused by any shock she feels at their apparently laissez faire attitude to divorce and re-marriage, but because they have embraced their own new freedoms without examining or calling into question examples of censure in the past. As she puts it very pithily – ‘society is much too busy to revise its own judgements’.

What has she done?

Mrs Lidcote has been living in exile in Florence for eighteen years, ostracised by fashionable New York society because of a former indiscretion. So what exactly did she do? The text does not make this entirely explicit – but there are certain clues.

First, she fears that Leila might make the same mistake that she made. Leila has divorced one husband an married another. In Mrs Lidcote’s eyes she has gambled her social reputation for the sake of personal happiness – which is what we take it Mrs Lidcote did.

But Mrs Lidcote still has her married name, from which we can infer that she left her husband for another man – but did not get married to him. Furthermore, she mentions how social ostracism can have very damaging consequences:

She had had what she wanted, but she had had to pay too much for it. She had had to pay the last bitterest price of learning that love has a price: that it is worth so much and no more. She had known the anguish of watching the man she loved discover this first, and of reading the discovery in his eyes.

Since these events were ‘a long time past’ and it appears that she has been living alone in Florence, there is an inference that her lover capitulated to social convention and abandoned their relationship, leaving her doubly isolated.

These were all live issues for Edith Wharton herself. She had begun an affair with Times correspondent W. Morton Fullerton in 1908, moved to live in France in 1911 (the same year at Autres Temps was published) and divorced her husband Edward (Teddy) Wharton the following year.

Sheep’s clothing?

Beset as she is by a selfish and ambitious daughter, dubious relatives (Suzy Suffern, who dresses in dead people’s clothes) and a society which shows no sympathy to her plight, Mrs Lidcote has yet one supporter who offers loyalty and understanding. Franklin Ide has been a friend and admirer for many years, and he reassures her that times and attitudes have changed – “It’s all right”, he repeats, and seems to be correct. He goes out of his way to renew the appeal he wishes to make to her (which is not made explicit).

But when examined more closely, he turns out to be a empty shell. All his appeals to Mrs Lidcote are made in private, outside the society to which they both belong – on holiday in Switzerland and in the New York hotel room where she stays on arrival and departure. And of course when she finally accepts the idea of socialising with some of her contemporaries, he is exposed as a conventionalist, because he is embarrassed and does not want to be seen with her. So at best he is fraud, but at worst he is a snake in the grass who all the time has been proposing an illicit relationship.

So Mrs Lidcote triumphs morally over those who are trying to decieve her – her daughter Leila and her ‘admirer’ Franklin Ide. She reduces them both to a state of acute confusion (they both blush) by forcing them to confront the truth of their hypocrisy and double standards. But she has spent the entire story cooped up in rooms – at the hotel, and in her daughter’s house – and it has to be said that in the end she is going back to a state of confinement in her Florentine apartment. She is ‘in the right’, but there is still a price to pay.

Autre Temps – study resources

Autres Temps The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon UK

Autres Temps The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon US

Autres Temps Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Autres Temps Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Autres Temps - eBook edition Autres Temps – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Autres Temps

Autres Temps – story synopsis

Part I.   Mrs Lidcote is returning to America from Florence, where she has been living for eighteen years. She has received the news that her daughter Leila has divorced her husband Horace Pursh and married Wilbour Barkley. She fears that Leila will be ostracised by New York society as she was herself in the past for a similar social indiscretion. On board the Utopia she is snubbed by ambassador’s wife Mrs Lorrin Boulger, but is reassured by an old friend Franklin Ide, who tells her that everything will be all right.

Part II.   She is met in New York by her cousin Suzy Suffern who reveals that the old social conventions of upper-class society have been replaced by more liberal attitudes. There is no longer any need for her to fear social censure. Mrs Lidcote has some years before received hints of a romantic kind from Franklin Ide, but she has not taken them up because she thought her negative reputation would damage his happiness (as it had done in her previous history). Now that times have changed and Leila doesn’t need her mother’s protection any more, Franklin Ide renews his expressions of interest.

Part III.   Leila has house guests when Mrs Lidcote arrives there, and she keeps her mother at a distance emotionally whilst expressing a exaggerated concern for her welfare. Mrs Lidcote reflects on the sacrifices she had to make for her chance of love and happiness, compared with the ease with which Leila takes everything for granted.

Part IV.   Mrs Lidcote is urged to stay in her guest room and rest – because it becomes apparent that Leila has invited older guests to dinner. They include Mrs Lorrin Boulger, because Leila wants to secure a diplomatic appointment for her new husband in Italy. Mrs Lidcote is offended by this treatment, sees a challenge, at first refuses to stay in her room.

Part V.   Leila arrives in haste, trying to prevent her mother appearing at dinner. Once again she pretends an overwhelming concern for her mother’s comfort – but Mrs Lidcote exposes her deviance and hypocrisy, causing her deep embarrassment. Having triumphed in this way, Mrs Lidcote then declares that she will stay in her room until all the guests have departed after the weekend.

Part VI.   The following Monday she announces that she is returning immediately to Florence. Franklin Ide intercepts her in her New York hotel. She explains to him how shabbily she was treated. He tries to persuade her she is wrong and offers himself to her again, but when she puts him to the concrete test of meeting some mutual friends together, he is deeply embarrassed and unable to face the social challenge.

Principal characters
Mrs Lidcote a middle-aged American divorcee and expatriate
Leila her recently divorced and re-married daughter
Suzy Suffern her cousin, who dresses in mourning
Mrs Lorrin Boulger the wife of an American ambassador
Franklin Ide old friend and suitor to Mrs Lidcote

Video documentary

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edith Wharton's writing

Edith Wharton’s writing

Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the CountryThe Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.

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Edith Wharton - The House of MirthThe House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.

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Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

© Roy Johnson 2014

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

Because of the Dollars

by

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

Because of the Dollars was written in 1914, and first appeared as part of Joseph Conrad’s collection Within the Tides published by J.M. Dent and Sons in 1915. The other stories in the volume were The Partner, The Inn of the Two Witches, and The Planter of Malata.

Because of the Dollars

Because of the Dollars – critical commentary

This story features a very typical Conradian dramatic situation – an honourable protagonist in an isolated and vulnerable position, threatened by ruthless villains, and usually with the added complication of a woman on hand for whom the hero feels a gentlemanly sense of responsibility. It’s a situation he used in novels from Lord Jim (1900) to Victory (1915). In this instance there is the additional consideration of a sick child thrown into the plot.

Fortunately for Davidson, he is at least armed with a revolver, and his prime foe the Frenchman has the disadvantage of having no hands. This however does not stop him killing the innocent woman in question, Laughing Anne, who ironically has tied the seven pound weight to his arm stump with which he kills her.

But even after he survives the attempt to rob him of his dollars, his travails are not over. Honourably taking it on himself to look after Laughing Anne’s son Tony, he runs up against the suspicions and ire of his own wife. She suspects that the child is Davidson’s. This is an interesting point, since Laughing Anne is more or less a prostitute, and she does know Davidson from the past. The connection is not impossible, but does not seem to be substantiated by anything else in the text.

Moreover, Mrs Davidson has been flagged up by Hollis earlier in the story as a less than completely sympathetic character:

What I noticed under the superficial aspect of vapid sweetness was her convex, obstinate forehead, and her small, red pretty, ungenerous mouth.

Davidson himself however is universally regarded as ‘a good man’ – so the tale is a cautionary reminder that even good men may suffer misfortune and injustice in pursuit of doing The Right Thing.

Because of the Dollars – study resources

Because of the Dollars Because of the Dollars – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

Because of the Dollars Because of the Dollars – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

Because of the Dollars The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook –

Because of the Dollars Because of the Dollars – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Because of the Dollars Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

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

Because of the Dollars Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Because of the Dollars Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Because of the Dollars

Because of the Dollars – plot summary

Part I.   An un-named outer narrator and his friend Hollis see captain Davidson on the harbour front of an Eastern port. Hollis relates the background story of his character and life, explaining why he is known as ‘a good man’ . Davidson is the commander of the Sissie , which is owned by a Chinaman. When a new printing of dollars is issued, Davidson collects packages of the old silver dollars from people in the ports where he calls. His wife thinks that transporting currency might be dangerous, but he believes that nobody else can take his place. He also wishes to call on Bamtz, a loafer who has taken up with fellow drifter, Laughing Anne. When Davidson first called at the remote island of Mirrah he was recognised by Anne as an old friend. She explains that she has settled with Bamtz for the sake of her child Tony.

Part II.   In a quayside bar the blackmailer Fector overhears Davidson’s plans to collect in the old dollars, and he recruits thugs Niclaus and the Frenchman (who has no hands). After collecting dollars, Davidson arrives late at night at the Bamtz house to find the three men with Bamtz, waiting for him. Anne’s son Tony is ill with a fever. Whilst she and Davidson attend to him she warns him about the Frenchman, who that day has asked her to tie a seven pound weight to the stumpt of his right arm.

At night the thugs attack the ship to steal the silver, but Davidson is armed with a revolver and scares them off. The Frenchman realises that Anne has given their plans away, and in the melee that ensues he bludgeons her to death with the weight. Davidson feels that she has somehow died to save him, and he feels guilty. However, he rescues the child.

Davidson buries Anne at sea and gives the child to his wife to look after. However, his wife suspects that the child is actually his, and she turns against both of them. Eventually, even though he tells her the whole story, she leaves him and goes back to her parents. The boy is sent to a church school in Malacca, where he eventually does well and plans to become a missionary. Davidson is left alone with nobody – which is where the story began.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

Because of the Dollars – principal characters
I an un-named outer narrator
Hollis his friend
Davidson commander of the Sissie
Bamtz a loafer with a beard
Laughing Anne a drifter from Saigon – a ‘painted woman’
Fector a blackmailer and ‘journalist’
Niclaus a dead beat
the Frenchman a thug with no hands

Joseph Conrad - manuscript page

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

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

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad Lord JimLord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
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Joseph Conrad Heart of DarknessHeart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
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© Roy Johnson 2013

Joseph Conrad web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
Joseph Conrad complete tales

Benvolio

by

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

Benvolio first appeared in magazine form in The Galaxy for August 1875. It was then reprinted in book form amongst The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales in 1879.

Benvolio

Benvolio – critical commentary

The fairy tale

James playfully opens this story with the sentence “Once upon a time (as if he had lived in a fairy tale) there was a very interesting young man”. Thus he simultaneously quotes a traditional fairy tale and pretends to distance himself from it. But what follows piles up one cliché of the genre after another

There is no attempt whatever to locate the character or events within the framework of realistic fiction. No place names or geographic location are specified. The names of the characters are either generic (the Professor, the Countess) or are ‘invented’ (Benvolio – which is not actually his real name).

All the details of the story are from the stock repertoire of the fairy tale: the Countess has a ‘court’ and she takes Benvolio to her country estate where there is ‘bear hunting’; messages arrive on ‘parchment’. None of the interaction of the characters is dramatised: everything is given in generalized summary (‘as the years went by’). The young women are beautiful; the Professor is naturally a wizened old man; and journeys to the other side of the world are accounted for within a single sentence.

The atmosphere of a late Renaissance period is reasonably well summoned up (not unlike Virginia Woolf’s similar efforts in Orlando) – with the exception of minor anachronisms such as mention of bookshops, publishers, and magazines.

Theme

But to what end? It is very difficult to say if James was exploring any serious theme or ideas in this tale or not. The principal issue (which he drags out to inordinate length) is Benvolio’s divided attraction to the worldly glamour offered by the Countess and the somewhat puritanical life of research and editorship symbolised by Scholastica.

The only way of making sense of this is to take a reading (supported by so many other of James’s tales) which sees this as a psychological exploration of what James himself saw as the dangers that women represented to him as a writer.

He knew that the worldly life of dinner parties and invitations from aristocratic ladies to weekends at country estates took him away from his work – though it gave him a great deal of his material in terms of gossip and anecdotes. On the other hand, marriage to a bluestocking or a librarian might lead to the drying up of his inspiration. After all, as soon as Benvolio settles with his scholastic muse, his talent evaporates.

In this reading Benvolio is yet another cautionary tale against the dangers of women and emotional commitment. Whatever sense is made of the story, it is without doubt one of the most laboured, repetitive, and unsuccessful in all of James’s hundred-plus tales.

Benvolio – study resources

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

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

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

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

Benvolio Benvolio – eBook versions at Gutenberg

Benvolio Benvolio – facsimile of original text

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

Benvolio

Benvolio – plot summary

Part I.   Benvolio is a rich, poetic young man who is full of contradictions. He lives in comfort, writes, and reflects philosophically. But he gradually becomes blas&eacute and feels that he needs more purpose in his life. He decides that he will write about great ideas and truths, and begin to engage with the world.

Part II.   He engages with a beautiful and rich widow, the Countess, then falls in love with her – but will not propose marriage. She is much sought after, and cannot understand his reticence. He doesn’t think she has all the qualities required in a wife. She decides to keep him at bay, and he discovers that other women are not nearly as interesting. One romantic night he breaks into her castle to see her – but still does not propose. So she leaves him.

Part III.   Benvolio stays at home during the summer months. He buys a Venetian painting, then becomes enchanted with a girl who sits in his shared back garden. He thinks she might be reading one of his own books. But when rain sets in he pines for the Countess. When he sees the girl in a bookshop he impulsively offers to deliver all the books she has ordered.

Part IV.   He delivers the books and meets the girl and her father, the Professor, an old blind man. They live in an adjacent house owned by the Professor’s brother, who is a miser. Benvolio engages in philosophic discussions with the Professor, and he grows to rate highly the qualities of the girl, Scholastica.

Part V.   However, he also perceives limitations in Scholastica and goes back to the court of the Countess, where he develops his talent for dramatic poetry. He writes a masterpiece in which the Countess is the star. On going back home he returns to his back garden and feels guilty that he has neglected his neighbours. He tells Scholastica all about the Countess.

Part VI.   He also tells the Countess all about Scholastica, and feels personally divided between the studious and social life. His new comedy is a great success. The Countess becomes jealous of his attentions to Scholastica. She proposes a winter holiday on her estate where Benvolio finally declares his complete love for her. But when they return to town they quarrel. He wishes to marry, but she is not sure, and suggests that they travel.

Part VII.   He takes a cold leaving of Scholastica and travels in Italy with the Countess. However, they quarrel over Scholastica again and he returns home alone to discover that the Professor has died. He offers to help Scholastica edit the Professor’s papers. Meanwhile her uncle gives her an allowance but threatens to cut it off if she marries ‘a poet’. Benvolio meets the Countess again and writes new verse dramas.

Then Scholastica’s uncle withdraws her allowance. The Countess arranges for Benvolio to be sent on a diplomatic mission, and engineers a job abroad for Scholastica. However, Benvolio tells the Countess that her main attraction was as a contrast to Scholastica, and after six months he sails off to bring Scholastica back home. But his subsequent literary productions are ‘dull’.

Principal characters
Benvolio a rich and poetic young man (not his real name)
Madam the person to whom the story is addressed
The Countess a beautiful young widow (not her real name)
The Professor a learned and blind old man
Scholastica his pretty young daughter, ‘a learned maiden’ (not her real name)

James and Wharton go Motoring

Henry James travelling with Edith Wharton

Benvolio journeys with the Countess?

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

Broken Wings

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

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

Broken Wings

Broken Wings – critical commentary

The story is quite unusual for James. It is almost romantic, certainly elegiac, and as delicate in tone as anything outside the most poignant scenes in his major novels.

It’s also a very tightly controlled and very touching study in two people coming to terms with their lack of success – and all the more so for the fact that they were once lionized by society. But with a well orchestrated structure in such a short piece, as they progressively reveal their vulnerability, they rediscover the original attraction they felt for each other.

In one sense it’s a very sceptical study of the relationship between commerce, fashionability, and art. Both Straith and Mrs Harvey cannot quite understand why they have been invited to a society weekend at Mundham. The truth is that they have been invited because they were once successful – but both of them realise that they no longer what they once were. They can keep up a pretence, but it is emotionally and practically demanding.

Both have been successful artists in the past, but now she writes articles for three and nine pence whilst he is reduced to producing dress design sketches for four and sixpence, and he hasn’t sold a painting for three years. They have lost their fashionability, or as Straith puts it “We are simply the case of being had enough of”.

Mrs Harvey warns Lady Claude that she will make ‘nothing’ from writing, even though she herself is the author of eight or ten novels that previously had brought her five thousand pounds a year. This is James showing the other side of the tapestry of artistic endeavour and social success. In a gesture of solidarity with his two characters he calls them ‘these two worn and baffled workers’.

Structure

It is a beautifully structured piece of work – five short separate scenes in which the truth of their state of affairs is revealed to the reader as they uncover the truth to each other. The forward movement of the narrative is also delicately balanced by movements in the opposite direction.

They start off as socially successful artists, but their apparent worldly success is gradually stripped away and they end up reconciled to their lack of prestige. But at the same time they rediscover the love they once had for each other – at a time before the temporal frame of the story.

Broken Wings – study resources

Broken Wings The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Broken Wings The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Broken Wings Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Broken Wings Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

Broken Wings Broken Wings – Digireads reprint edition – Amazon UK

Broken Wings Broken Wings – eBook formats at Gutenberg Consortia

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

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

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

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

Broken Wings

Broken Wings – plot summary

Part I. Stuart Straith, an artist, is a guest at a weekend party in an English country house. He circulates cautiously amongst fellow guests, warily conscious of another guest Mrs Harvey, who is mixing with celebrities.

Part II. Later the same evening Mrs Harvey, a literary woman, exchanges confidences with Lady Claude. She reveals to Lady Claude that she is not wealthy, that she finds Straith attractive, and that Lady Claude’s ambition to write novels will not make her any money.

Part III. Straith and Mrs Harvey meet at the theatre where they both agree to re-open what is obviously an old relationship. She claims to be unsuccessful, and senses that he is unhappy. He claims to be ‘beyond’ unhappiness.She offers to help him by promoting his work in her regular journalism.

Part IV. She visits him at his studio where it emerges that their previous relationship foundered on misconceptions on both their parts. They had both enjoyed a certain amount of artistic success, yet thought themselves unworthy of the other. However, when they compare notes on their current status, it is obvious that both of them are struggling.

Part V. Straith visits her new smaller flat where they lay bare their unsuccessful situations, and agree not to pretend any longer. They have been keeping up appearances in a way that kept them apart from each other, and they have also been trading on reputations which no longer reflect their true artistic status. They feel a bitter-sweet relief at having the courage not to pretend any longer to be ‘successful’ and having to circulate in society, and this gesture of solidarity re-unites them emotionally.

Principal characters
Mundham an English country house and estate
Stuart Straith an artist
Mrs Harvey a widow and lady novelist
Lady Claude a would-be novelist

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

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

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

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

Henry James 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

Brooksmith

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Brooksmith first appeared in Harper’s Weekly and Black and White in May 1891 – a sure sign that Henry James was attentive to the commercial opportunities of simultaneous publication – getting paid for the same story twice over.

James has always been known as a writer of refined sensibility, with a prose style renowned for its demanding complexities and subtelties of meaning; but it is often forgotten that he was a full-time writer who made a considerable part of his income from professional contracts with publishers. Despite the aesthetic demands he sometimes made of his readers, he had one eye closely on the literary marketplace.

Brooksmith

Brooksmith – critical commentary

Brooksmith is not much more than a light character sketch, but it is composed in a delicately constructed arc – of the narrator’s appreciation of Brooksmith’s position in society. It starts from the narrator’s realization that Offord’s salon owes its success to Brooksmith’s sensitive ministrations. Brooksmith has become sufficiently attuned to Offord’s sophisticated culture that he is able to anticipate his needs.

Then as Offord himself declines the narrator becomes even more appreciative of Brooksmith as they form a complicit understanding of their relative positions. The narrator also begins to worry about Brooksmith’s future prospects. He realises it will be almost impossible to locate employment offering such a cultivated milieu.

The arc reaches its peak on the death of Offord, and from that point onwards Brooksmith begins his slow decline. He goes from one lower status position to another, at each step sliding down the social scale, until he disappears from society altogether. The narrator’s conclusion (which seems somewhat callous) is that ‘he had indeed been spoiled’.

Brooksmith – study resources

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

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

Brooksmith Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Brooksmith Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon US

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

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Brooksmith Brooksmith – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Brooksmith

Brooksmith – plot summary

An anonymous narrator reflects on the successful salon maintained by his friend Oliver Offord, a retired diplomat. He wonders how the success is created and concludes that it is the subtle and tactful influence of Offord’s butler, Brooksmith.

When Offord falls ill and receives fewer visitors, the narrator begins to worry what will become of Brooksmith, who is so much a part of the establishment. When Offord dies, Brooksmith is left eighty pounds, but his employment and role disappear.

The narrator encounters Brooksmith amongst the staff at various other houses, and always feels a sympathetic sadness thatBrooksmith is working at a level which demeans his true value. Brooksmith eventually falls ill, but the narrator is still unable to help him.

Brooksmith gradually falls down the social order of the servant class and is last encountered as a casual waiter-on at a society dinner. No more is heard of him until a poor relative visits the narrator to report that Brooksmith has simply disappeared, and is presumed dead.

Principal characters
I the anonymous narrator
Oliver Offord a bachelor and retired diplomat
Brooksmith his butler and intimate friend (35)

Henry James - the author of Brooksmith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Henry James

Henry James 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, and it has rightly gained a reputation as an oustanding example of the literary genre.
Daisy Miller Buy the book from Amazon UK
Daisy Miller Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2013

Henry James – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Bunner Sisters

by

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

Bunner Sisters was written in 1891, but wasn’t published until 1916 in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction Xingu and Other Stories. Technically, it has very strong claims to be classified as a novella, rather than a short story, but it is usually listed with her shorter works to keep it separate from the novels.

Bunner Sisters

Old New York

Bunner Sisters – critical commentary

Literary naturalism

There was a literary vogue towards the end of the nineteenth century for naturalism – which is characterised by a concentration on everyday, unheroic subjects, often seeking to expose the poverty and misery of existence in contrast to the romantic and heroic treatment of life in traditional fiction. Naturalism as a literary mode was underpinned by a belief in determinism – that social conditions and heredity were the primary forces shaping human character. It was also strongly influenced by two other important philosophic features of late nineteenth century society – the decline of religious belief and the powerful influence of Darwinism and its popular manifestation in the idea of ‘the survival of the fittest’.

Both of these ideas led the adherents of naturalism to emphasise a pessimistic view of life, and they also took the opportunity to expose the harsher and degenerate sides of society, including poverty, crime, prostitution, and corruption in general. There was also a marked tendency amongst naturalistic works to focus on the life of big cities. Writers who epitomised this literary trend included Emile Zola (France), Theodore Dreiser (USA), Stephen Crane (USA) and George Gissing (UK) – all of whom were at the height of their fame when Edith Wharton started writing.

Bunner Sisters certainly includes many of these ideas. Although it seems to begin in a mildly satirical manner, its trajectory is grimly pessimistic as things go from bad to worse in the two sisters’ lives. Their business slowly dries up; they are preyed upon by a man who turns out to be an opium addict; and he eventually ruins Evelina’s life, which in turn leaves Ann Eliza destitute.

These naturalistic tendencies are worth noting, because they were still present in Edith Wharton’s work when she came to write her first major novel, The House of Mirth in 1905. Lily Bart falls from a much greater social height than Ann Eliza and Evelina Bunner, but she ends in a similar fashion – destitute, ill, and exhausted with self-sacrifice.

Bunner Sisters – study resources

Bunner Sisters Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Bunner Sisters Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Bunner Sisters - eBook edition Bunner Sisters – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

Bunner Sisters - eBook edition Bunner Sisters – AudioBook format at librivox

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Bunner Sisters

Bunner Sisters – plot summary

Part I.   Ageing sisters Ann Eliza and Evelina Bunner maintain a millinery shop in a seedy and run down area of New York. They live in straightened circumstances, and on the occasion of Evelina’s birthday, her sister buys her a cheap clock.

Part II.   She has bought the clock from an equally run down shop in the neighbourhood run by bachelor Herman Ramay, who she decides to pursue when the clock stops working. She goes to the local market, hoping to meet him there, but doesn’t. A lifetime of co-operative self-sacrifice and renunciation begins to crumble as the two women secretly become competetive regarding Mr Ramay.

Part III.   Mr Ramay calls to check the clock they have bought, but nothing transpires from the visit.

Part IV.   They then entertain Miss Mellins, a dressmaker from upstairs, whereupon Mr Ramay visits again. Ann Eliza is jealously concerned that he is visiting to see her younger sister.

Part V.   Mr Ramay visits more frequently, but divides his time there between long silences and lengthy autobiographical anecdotes. He takes Evelina to a stereopticon; spring arrives; and he invites them both to Central Park, along with Miss Mellins. Ann Eliza is forbearing on her sister’s behalf.

Part VI.   The sisters wish to transfer their meagre earnings into another bank. Ann Eliza calls for advice on Mr Ramay, who seems to have been ill.

Part VII.   Mr Ramay takes them on an excursion to his friend Mrs Hochmuller in Hoboken. Over dinner they discuss Mr Ramay’s illness – which he denies. Then Evelina and Mr Ramay go for a walk in the countryside. Shortly afterwards Mr Ramay calls to the shop and proposes marriage to Ann Eliza, but she tells him she cannot think of marrying. She is secretly ecstatic at this major event in her life, and disappointed that she cannot reveal it to her sister.

Part VIII.   Mr Ramay then goes on an excursion with Evelina, who returns to announce that she is engaged to Mr Ramay. Ann Eliza prepares herself for being left alone when her sister moves to live at Mr Ramay’s shop. However, Mr Ramay gets the offer of a job in St Louis, though he does not have enough money to risk transferring there. Ann Eliza gives her sister her half of their joint savings.

Part IX.   Left on her own, Ann Eliza feels very lonely, and Evelina writes from St Louis to say that she is lonely because Mr Ramay is out at work all day. Then the letters cease, and Ann Eliza learns that Mr Ramay has been dismissed by his employers. She cannot afford to visit St Louis and look for her sister, and meanwhile the business goes downhill.

Part X.   Anna goes to seek help from Mrs Hochmuller in Hoboken, but when she gets there she discovers that Mrs Hochmuller left some time before. She contracts fever as a result of the journey and is in bed for over a week. When she recovers she visits Mr Ramay’s old employers, only to be told that he was dismissed for taking drugs.

Part XI.   Months pass by, then one day Evelina suddenly appear at the shop. She is in a very bad way, and recounts her tale of Mr Ramay’s opium addiction, the birth and death of her child, and Ramay’s running away with young Linda Hochmuller. Evelina was reduced to begging in the streets.

Part XII.   Evelina continues to be very ill, and Anna has to borrow money from Miss Mellins to pay the doctor’s bill. Anna loses her faith in Providence and feels that self-sacrifice does not automatically transfer good or benefit to its intended recipient. The doctor recommends hospital for Evelina, but Anna prefers to keep her at home. Evelina reveals that during her troubles she has converted to Catholicism.

Part XIII.   Evelina gets steadily worse (with consumption) and believes her Catholic faith will permit her to be reunited with her baby in heaven. When Evelina dies, Anna gives up the shop, sells the last of her effects, and faces a bleak and unknown future.

Bunner Sisters – principal characters
Ann Eliza Bunner elder sister in a millinery shop
Evelina Bunner her younger sister
Miss Mellins their upstairs neighbour, a dressmaker
Herman Ramay a German immigrant clock-maker
Mrs Hochmuller washerwoman friend of Ramay
Linda Hochmuller her young daughter

Video documentary

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edith Wharton's writing

Edith Wharton’s writing

Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the CountryThe Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon US

Edith Wharton - The House of MirthThe House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon US

Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

© Roy Johnson 2014

Edith Wharton – short stories
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Chronicles of Bustos Domecq

by

short stories, satirical sketches, and parodies of criticism

Chronicles of Bustos Domecq (1979) is a collection of short fiction that Jorge Luis Borges wrote in collaboration with his fellow Argentinean, the novelist Adolfo Bioy Casares. Both of them wrote stories, reviews, and skits for a variety of newspapers and literary journals – particularly Sur, founded by their friend Victoria Ocampo in 1931.

Their stories explore the playful, imaginative, and sometimes fantastic relationship between fiction and reality which Borges was to make his hallmark in works such as the famous collection of stories Fictions. His collaborator Casares was a writer, journalist, and translator best known for his science fiction novel The Invention of Morel

Chronicles of Bustos Domecq

Jorge Luis Borges

Honorio Bustos Domecq was an Argentinean man of letters. A brief note on Domecq written by Dr Gervasio Montenegro (Argentine Academy of Letters) acts as an introduction and preface to the stories. This preface itself arouses our suspicions, for it is written in an absurdly inflated and self-regarding manner. Montenegro showers praise on his own achievements as a writer, and damns the work of Domecq with praise so faint it is almost insulting. It is no surprise to learn that both Domecq and Montenegro are entirely fictitious.

Homage to Cesar Paladion is a biographical sketch of the Argentinean writer whose ‘poetical method’ was inspired by the fact that T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound quoted from Baudelaire, Verlaine, and The Odyssey in their work. Paladion took this approach one step further by ‘appropriating’ entire works from other writers. He had books such as The Hound of the Baskervilles and Uncle Tom’s Cabin printed under his own name and at his own expense.

In another story a newspaper reporter goes to interview Ramon Bonavena, the author of a six-volume masterwork called North-Northwest. When asked to give an account of the work’s genesis for his admiring readers, Bonavena explains that he set out with the idea of a large scale historical drama exposing social injustices in the province where he lived. However, when faced with legal difficulties, he decided to limit his subject matter – and chose to write about the objects on the right-hand corner of his desk.

The skill in the telling of these stories lies in a combination of conceptual manipulation, structural artifice, and stylistic flair. The credibility of the essential concept behind each story is established by reference to real places and real people. This material is then blended with quite credible life histories that are actually fictitious.

The absurdity of each proposition is usually concealed until the story is well under way – by which time the reader is prepared to entertain it as acceptable. And once the absurdity is revealed, the story is short enough to prevent the conceit becoming tedious.

A study of the poetical works of F.J.C.Loomis traces the development of his publications from his breakthrough Bear in 1911, through Pallet, Beret, Scum, Moon, and Perhaps? which was published posthumously following his death from dysentery in 1931. Bustos Domecq explains that Loomis’s particular genius was for an exact match between the title of his works and their contents. He points out that “The words Uncle Tom’s Cabin do not readily communicate to us all the details of its plot.” In the case of Loomis all the common poetical trappings of metaphor, symbol, rhythm, and alliteration are stripped away to create an exact match between title and content – because each text consists of just the single word of its title.

G.A.Baralt is an Argentinean attorney who has written a multi-volume study of the Brotherhood Movement. This movement is based on the observation that at any given time, all over the world, some people will be doing exactly the same thing. This could be anything from getting out of bed to striking a match. At the conclusion of the story Baralt is compiling, as a supplement to the main study – a list of all possible Brotherhoods, including those who thought about a particular topic two minutes ago, or those who three minutes ago forgot about it.

Some of the stories are amazingly prophetic, given some of the more absurd ‘developments’ in modern art in recent decades. The tales deal with what we would now call ‘happenings’ (random gatherings of people) uninhabitable architecture, ‘concave’ sculpture (composed from the space between objects) and the work of an ‘abstract’ artist all of whose canvases are covered in black shoe polish.

Bustos Domecq emerges as a comic figure in his own right from the stories he relates. As an occupational sideline he sells tickets for events that don’t take place, orders drinks he doesn’t pay for, and publishes (strictly by subscription in advance) the work of a worthless poet. He is pompous, self-regarding, and his literary style is amusing in itself – filled with creaking and orotund journalese, recent archaisms, irrelevances, and non-sequiturs.

The weaker examples of this collection lapse into silliness and mere whimsy, but the basic approach is quite subtle – given that the stories contain amusingly absurd ideas and are related by not only an unreliable narrator but one with an off-beat, almost bizarre literary style.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2015

Jorge Luis Borges, Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, New York: E.P.Dutton, 1979, pp.143. ISBN: 0525080473

Jorge Louis Borges links

Chronicles of Bustos Domecq Jorge Luis Borges – biography

Chronicles of Bustos Domecq Borges Center – University of Pittsburgh

Chronicles of Bustos Domecq BBC Radio 4 audio documentary

Chronicles of Bustos Domecq Paris Review – Interview

More on Jorge Luis Borges
Twentieth century literature
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