By Virginia Llewellyn Smith
Taking its identify from James's ambivalent catchphrase, this learn explores primary matters of his fiction. The booklet adopts a latest serious method, but is written for the reader whose curiosity in James isn't really inevitably educational. It examines six key novels and a few brief tales, interrelating them to supply not just an built-in photo of the fiction, yet a few perception of what animates it, and readings that problem fashioned severe assumptions.
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Additional resources for Henry James and the Real Thing: A Modern Reader's Guide
Example text
And a good head, did I say? ' (38) The play on Morris's 'head' makes it a very much more interesting item than the barber's block which holds Catherine mesmerised (her falling for Morris comes over in fact as something almost as absurd as the young man's passion for a hairdresser's dummy in James's slight short story of 1878, 'Rose-Agathe'). What the Doctor gives us is an insight into Morris's literary potential, or capacity to adapt to the requirements of the story. Catherine's failure to recognise this quality in herself or others is implicit in her father's remark that she 'isn't romantic'.
In this way, the Jamesian novel subverts our expectations of nineteenth-century fiction; and its mould was cast - to adopt James's analogy - in The Portrait of a Lady. 38 Henry James and the Real Thing 2. Its celebrated opening scene, set in 'the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon (and written, by coincidence, close to the midpoint of James's life), rather strikingly evokes the scope, and the serene self-confidence, of James's mature fiction. That is the domain of which Isabel might be taking possession as she advances purposefully across the vast lawn at Gardencourt.
Europe was the home, as James's fictions repeatedly seek to demonstrate, of history, art and culture, but also of things taken less account of in New England philosophy: sophistication and guile such as Mrs Penniman's wildest dreams are made of, only practised with quiet professionalism. The effect of the Old World on the inhabitants of the New was of 'being exposed to peculiar influences', as the old Puritan Mr Wentworth puts it in The Europeans (1878) - a little sugared pill of a novel which perfectly encapsulates the theme.