The Best Short Stories and Novellas of Henry James

Innocent abroad

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Indeed she virtually orders him to pay tribute to her virtue by leaving France immediately.

He obeys her, and does not return when a somewhat melodramatic twist in the plot leaves her free. The narrator tells us in conclusion that "in the midst of all the ardent tenderness of his memory of Madame de Mauves, he has become conscious of a singular feeling, - a feeling for which awe would not be too strong a name".

Leon Edel, James's most authoritative biographer, suggested that this story might have been prompted by James's relationship with Mrs Sarah Butler Wister, noting that her surname echoes the name of the flowering creeper, wisteria, which is mauve in colour. James met this lady, the daughter of the actress Fanny Kemble, during an extended stay in Rome in , and went riding with her in the Campagna, sometimes with her husband, but more often without.

The Best Short Stories and Novellas Of Henry James

She was eight years older than him, but good-looking with exceptionally beautiful hair. His notebooks and letters of the time suggest he enjoyed playing the role of gallant young escort to this attractive woman and was at the same time nervous of getting drawn into a deeper relationship.

It was probably not only morality and propriety that inhibited him, but also his own ambivalent sexuality. He may have put some of his hesitations and scruples into the character of Longmore in the story he wrote a year later. Although he enjoyed the company of women as they enjoyed his and appreciated female beauty, James always drew back from his intimate friendships with women when they threatened to turn into something that involved passion.

Edel believes that at heart he was afraid of women, and Longmore certainly seems to be afraid of Madame de Mauves. By the mids James had decided he would never marry, but dedicate himself to his art. It was a choice adumbrated in "Madame de Mauves" in the brief episode which has no narrative function and is purely thematic when Longmore wanders into the countryside and encounters a young painter whose cheerful demeanour contrasts with his own melancholy.

Was it his work, Longmore wondered, that made him so happy? Was a strong talent the best thing in the world? Longmore sat brooding and asking himself whether it was better to cultivate an art than to cultivate a passion.

If he put this question to himself, James answered in the affirmative. But in the story there is a further twist: Longmore wonders at the couple's casual, guiltless enjoyment of love, and especially at the girl's generous surrender of her virtue and security. By the time, some 10 years later, he wrote "The Siege of London" and "Lady Barberina" , James was what used to be called a "confirmed bachelor".

He was also an established novelist, author of the immensely popular Daisy Miller and the highly acclaimed The Portrait of a Lady, permanently settled in London, with a vast circle of acquaintance and a busy social life. Both stories are about courtship and marriage among the upper classes, but James observes their behaviour with a poised, amused detachment, using it to illustrate aspects of his international theme. These stories are written with elegance and wit, and display a mastery of dialogue that makes one understand why James later thought he could become a playwright, and wonder why he failed so dismally in the attempt.

There is no trace of the personal sexual anxieties which seem to underlie "Madame de Mauves". Perhaps literary success had allayed them, and vindicated for James his choice of a celibate bachelor existence. As so often in James's work, "The Siege of London" is enhanced by the way the story unfolds through the consciousness of characters who are observers rather than protagonists: George Littlemore, a rich, idle, sardonic American, a widower in early middle age who seems to have had enough of marriage, and his younger compatriot, Rupert Waterville, a junior diplomat based in London.

Littlemore reveals that he was acquainted with Mrs Headway in the American south-west. Waterville, much impressed by her looks, asks him if she is "respectable"; Littlemore replies unambiguously that she is not. Mrs Headway, having tried unsuccessfully to shake off the reputation she acquired in her western career in New York, has come to try her luck in Europe, where she has attracted the interest of Sir Arthur, a handsome nonentity, who "went about looking very fresh and fair, as if he took a bath every hour or two".

She has hopes of marrying him. The main narrative question is: It keeps the reader in a state of increasing suspense, as the action moves from France to England, and the efforts of Sir Arthur's mother to break up the match become more frantic. The character of Nancy Headway is presented entirely through her speech, body-language, and clothes which she takes several hours to put on. There is no need for us to have access to her private consciousness.

The Top 10 Henry James Novels

She candidly admits what she is, and what she wants, to her American compatriots, who for their part seem hampered and repressed by the rigid code of "respectability" to which they subscribe there is a suggestion that Waterville is in love with "this shining, smiling, rustling, chattering daughter of the Territories" himself, but dare not admit it. Nancy is a type of American woman that in real life James would have avoided like the plague, but he does her imaginative justice, and it is hard not to admire her spirit.

In this case it is a rich American man who takes his English bride back to America - with unhappy consequences. I have to say that for me there is no ambiguity. If the ghosts are not the reality, then the story loses so much of its power to frighten and loses its meaning about the powers of good and evil that exist— a dominant theme that comes through clearly a number of times.

That last line in the story sweeps the reader into the stark reality of it all. If I were to read it again with the intention of the governess hallucinating all this, it weakens the story and would leave me disappointed.

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