The Ambassadors / Henry James

Title: The Ambassadors 

Author: Henry James

Subjects: Classic; Fiction; Psychological 

It is a masterpiece. It follows the trip of protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether to Europe in pursuit of Chad. A major theme of the novel involves Strether's position as an ambassador. The conflict between personal desire and duty is important to consider when thinking about Strether's psychology. Strether finds his intentions subtly and profoundly transformed as he falls under the spell of the city and of his charge. He is quick to perceive that Chad has been not so much corrupted as refined, gradually realizes that this discovery and acceptance of Chad's unconventional new lifestyle alter his own ideals and ambitions.

The Turn of the Screw / Henry James

Title: The Turn of the Screw 

Author: Henry James

Subjects: Classic; Fiction; Horror; Psychological

The book focuses on a governess who, caring for two children at a remote estate, becomes convinced that the grounds are haunted. Many critics have wondered if the "strange and sinister" were only in the governess's mind and not part of reality. Many critics have tried to determine the nature of the evil hinted at the story, others have argued that the brilliance of an intimate sense of confusion and suspense within the reader.

The Tree of Knowledge / Henry James

I

It was one of the secret opinions, such as we all have, of Peter

Brench that his main success in life would have consisted in his never

having committed himself about the work, as it was called, of his

friend Morgan Mallow. This was a subject on which it was, to the

best of his belief, impossible with veracity to quote him, and it was

nowhere on record that he had, in the connexion, on any occasion and

in any embarrassment, either lied or spoken the truth. Such a triumph

had its honour even for a man of other triumphs--a man who had reached

fifty, who had escaped marriage, who had lived within his means, who

had been in love with Mrs Mallow for years without breathing it, and

who, last but not least, had judged himself once for all. He had so

judged himself in fact that he felt an extreme and general humility

to be his proper portion; yet there was nothing that made him think

so well of his parts as the course he had steered so often through the

shallows just mentioned.

A Light Man / Henry James

"And I--what I seem to my friend, you see--

What I soon shall seem to his love, you guess.

What I seem to myself, do you ask of me?

No hero, I confess."

A Light Woman.--Browning's Men and Women.

April 4, 1857.--I have changed my sky without changing my mind. I resume

these old notes in a new world. I hardly know of what use they are; but

it's easier to stick to the habit than to drop it. I have been at home

now a week--at home, forsooth! And yet, after all, it is home. I am

dejected, I am bored, I am blue. How can a man be more at home than

that? Nevertheless, I am the citizen of a great country, and for that

matter, of a great city. I walked to-day some ten miles or so along

Broadway, and on the whole I don't blush for my native land. We are a

capable race and a good-looking withal; and I don't see why we

shouldn't prosper as well as another.

Mrs. Medwin / Henry James

CHAPTER I

"Well, we ARE a pair!" the poor lady's visitor broke out to her at

the end of her explanation in a manner disconcerting enough. The

poor lady was Miss Cutter, who lived in South Audley Street, where

she had an "upper half" so concise that it had to pass boldly for

convenient; and her visitor was her half-brother, whom she hadn't

seen for three years. She was remarkable for a maturity of which

every symptom might have been observed to be admirably controlled,

had not a tendency to stoutness just affirmed its independence.

Her present, no doubt, insisted too much on her past, but with the

excuse, sufficiently valid, that she must certainly once have been

prettier. She was clearly not contented with once--she wished to

be prettier again.

Flickerbridge / Henry James

CHAPTER I

Frank Granger had arrived from Paris to paint a portrait--an order

given him, as a young compatriot with a future, whose early work

would some day have a price, by a lady from New York, a friend of

his own people and also, as it happened, of Addie's, the young

woman to whom it was publicly both affirmed and denied that he was

engaged. Other young women in Paris--fellow-members there of the

little tight transpontine world of art-study--professed to know

that the pair had "several times" over renewed their fond

understanding. This, however, was their own affair; the last phase

of the relation, the last time of the times, had passed into

vagueness; there was perhaps even an impression that if they were

inscrutable to their friends they were not wholly crystalline to

each other and themselves.

The Story of It / Henry James

CHAPTER I

The weather had turned so much worse that the rest of the day was

certainly lost. The wind had risen and the storm gathered force;

they gave from time to time a thump at the firm windows and dashed

even against those protected by the verandah their vicious

splotches of rain. Beyond the lawn, beyond the cliff, the great

wet brush of the sky dipped deep into the sea. But the lawn,

already vivid with the touch of May, showed a violence of watered

green; the budding shrubs and trees repeated the note as they

tossed their thick masses, and the cold troubled light, filling the

pretty saloon, marked the spring afternoon as sufficiently young.

The two ladies seated there in silence could pursue without

difficulty--as well as, clearly, without interruption--their

respective tasks; a confidence expressed, when the noise of the

wind allowed it to be heard, by the sharp scratch of Mrs. Dyott's

pen at the table where she was busy with letters.

Brooksmith / Henry James

We are scattered now, the friends of the late Mr. Oliver Offord;

but whenever we chance to meet I think we are conscious of a

certain esoteric respect for each other. "Yes, you too have been

in Arcadia," we seem not too grumpily to allow. When I pass the

house in Mansfield Street I remember that Arcadia was there. I

don't know who has it now, and don't want to know; it's enough to

be so sure that if I should ring the bell there would be no such

luck for me as that Brooksmith should open the door. Mr. Offord,

the most agreeable, the most attaching of bachelors, was a retired

diplomatist, living on his pension and on something of his own over

and above; a good deal confined, by his infirmities, to his

fireside and delighted to be found there any afternoon in the year,

from five o'clock on, by such visitors as Brooksmith allowed to

come up.

The Real Thing / Henry James

CHAPTER I.

When the porter's wife (she used to answer the house-bell), announced

"A gentleman--with a lady, sir," I had, as I often had in those days,

for the wish was father to the thought, an immediate vision of

sitters. Sitters my visitors in this case proved to be; but not in

the sense I should have preferred. However, there was nothing at

first to indicate that they might not have come for a portrait. The

gentleman, a man of fifty, very high and very straight, with a

moustache slightly grizzled and a dark grey walking-coat admirably

fitted, both of which I noted professionally--I don't mean as a

barber or yet as a tailor--would have struck me as a celebrity if

celebrities often were striking. It was a truth of which I had for

some time been conscious that a figure with a good deal of frontage

was, as one might say, almost never a public institution. A glance

at the lady helped to remind me of this paradoxical law: she also

looked too distinguished to be a "personality." Moreover one would

scarcely come across two variations together.

The Point of View / Henry James

I. FROM MISS AURORA CHURCH, AT SEA, TO MISS WHITESIDE, IN PARIS.

. . . My dear child, the bromide of sodium (if that's what you call

it) proved perfectly useless. I don't mean that it did me no good,

but that I never had occasion to take the bottle out of my bag. It

might have done wonders for me if I had needed it; but I didn't,

simply because I have been a wonder myself. Will you believe that I

have spent the whole voyage on deck, in the most animated

conversation and exercise? Twelve times round the deck make a mile,

I believe; and by this measurement I have been walking twenty miles

a day. And down to every meal, if you please, where I have

displayed the appetite of a fish-wife. Of course the weather has

been lovely; so there's no great merit.

A Passionate Pilgrim / Henry James

I

Intending to sail for America in the early part of June, I

determined to spend the interval of six weeks in England, to

which country my mind's eye only had as yet been introduced. I

had formed in Italy and France a resolute preference for old

inns, considering that what they sometimes cost the ungratified

body they repay the delighted mind. On my arrival in London,

therefore, I lodged at a certain antique hostelry, much to the

east of Temple Bar, deep in the quarter that I had inevitably

figured as the Johnsonian. Here, on the first evening of my stay,

I descended to the little coffee-room and bespoke my dinner of

the genius of "attendance" in the person of the solitary waiter.

No sooner had I crossed the threshold of this retreat than I felt

I had cut a golden-ripe crop of English "impressions." The

coffee-room of the Red Lion, like so many other places and things

I was destined to see in the motherland, seemed to have been

waiting for long years, with just that sturdy sufferance of time

written on its visage, for me to come and extract the romantic

essence of it.

The Marriages / Henry James

CHAPTER I

"Won't you stay a little longer?" the hostess asked while she held

the girl's hand and smiled. "It's too early for every one to go--

it's too absurd." Mrs. Churchley inclined her head to one side and

looked gracious; she flourished about her face, in a vaguely

protecting sheltering way, an enormous fan of red feathers.

Everything in her composition, for Adela Chart, was enormous. She

had big eyes, big teeth, big shoulders, big hands, big rings and

bracelets, big jewels of every sort and many of them. The train of

her crimson dress was longer than any other; her house was huge; her

drawing-room, especially now that the company had left it, looked

vast, and it offered to the girl's eyes a collection of the largest

sofas and chairs, pictures, mirrors, clocks, that she had ever

beheld.

The Madonna of the Future / Henry James

We had been talking about the masters who had achieved but a single

masterpiece--the artists and poets who but once in their lives had known

the divine afflatus and touched the high level of perfection. Our host

had been showing us a charming little cabinet picture by a painter whose

name we had never heard, and who, after this single spasmodic bid for

fame, had apparently relapsed into obscurity and mediocrity. There was

some discussion as to the frequency of this phenomenon; during which, I

observed, H--- sat silent, finishing his cigar with a meditative air, and

looking at the picture which was being handed round the table. "I don't

know how common a case it is," he said at last, "but I have seen it. I

have known a poor fellow who painted his one masterpiece, and"--he added

with a smile--"he didn't even paint that. He made his bid for fame and

missed it."

Madame de Mauves / Henry James

I

The view from the terrace at Saint-Germain-en-Laye is immense and

famous. Paris lies spread before you in dusky vastness, domed and

fortified, glittering here and there through her light vapours and

girdled with her silver Seine. Behind you is a park of stately symmetry,

and behind that a forest where you may lounge through turfy avenues and

light-chequered glades and quite forget that you are within half an hour

of the boulevards. One afternoon, however, in mid-spring, some five

years ago, a young man seated on the terrace had preferred to keep this

in mind. His eyes were fixed in idle wistfulness on the mighty human

hive before him. He was fond of rural things, and he had come to Saint-

Germain a week before to meet the spring halfway; but though he could

boast of a six months' acquaintance with the great city he never looked

at it from his present vantage without a sense of curiosity still

unappeased. There were moments when it seemed to him that not to be

there just then was to miss some thrilling chapter of experience.

Louisa Pallant / Henry James

I

Never say you know the last words about any human heart! I was once

treated to a revelation which startled and touched me in the nature of a

person with whom I had been acquainted--well, as I supposed--for years,

whose character I had had good reasons, heaven knows, to appreciate and

in regard to whom I flattered myself I had nothing more to learn.

The Jolly Corner / Henry James

CHAPTER I

"Every one asks me what I 'think' of everything," said Spencer Brydon;

"and I make answer as I can--begging or dodging the question, putting

them off with any nonsense. It wouldn't matter to any of them really,"

he went on, "for, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver

way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my 'thoughts' would still be

almost altogether about something that concerns only myself." He was

talking to Miss Staverton, with whom for a couple of months now he had

availed himself of every possible occasion to talk; this disposition and

this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in fact

presented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in the

considerable array of rather unattenuated surprises attending his so

strangely belated return to America. Everything was somehow a surprise;

and that might be natural when one had so long and so consistently

neglected everything, taken pains to give surprises so much margin for

play. He had given them more than thirty years--thirty-three, to be

exact; and they now seemed to him to have organised their performance

quite on the scale of that licence.

Greville Fane / Henry James

Coming in to dress for dinner, I found a telegram: "Mrs. Stormer

dying; can you give us half a column for to-morrow evening? Let her

off easy, but not too easy." I was late; I was in a hurry; I had

very little time to think, but at a venture I dispatched a reply:

"Will do what I can." It was not till I had dressed and was rolling

away to dinner that, in the hansom, I bethought myself of the

difficulty of the condition attached. The difficulty was not of

course in letting her off easy but in qualifying that indulgence. "I

simply won't qualify it," I said to myself. I didn't admire her, but

I liked her, and I had known her so long that I almost felt heartless

in sitting down at such an hour to a feast of indifference. I must

have seemed abstracted, for the early years of my acquaintance with

her came back to me. I spoke of her to the lady I had taken down,

hut the lady I had taken down had never heard of Greville Fane. I

tried my other neighbour, who pronounced her books "too vile." I had

never thought them very good, but I should let her off easier than

that.

Julia Bride / Henry James

I

She had walked with her friend to the top of the wide steps of the

Museum, those that descended from the galleries of painting, and then,

after the young man had left her, smiling, looking back, waving all

gayly and expressively his hat and stick, had watched him, smiling

too, but with a different intensity--had kept him in sight till he

passed out of the great door. She might have been waiting to see if he

would turn there for a last demonstration; which was exactly what he

did, renewing his cordial gesture and with his look of glad devotion,

the radiance of his young face, reaching her across the great space,

as she felt, in undiminished truth. Yes, so she could feel, and she

remained a minute even after he was gone; she gazed at the empty air

as if he had filled it still, asking herself what more she wanted and

what, if it didn't signify glad devotion, his whole air could have

represented.

The Figure in the Carpet / Henry James

I had done a few things and earned a few pence--I had perhaps even

had time to begin to think I was finer than was perceived by the

patronising; but when I take the little measure of my course (a

fidgety habit, for it's none of the longest yet) I count my real

start from the evening George Corvick, breathless and worried, came

in to ask me a service. He had done more things than I, and earned

more pence, though there were chances for cleverness I thought he

sometimes missed. I could only however that evening declare to him

that he never missed one for kindness. There was almost rapture in

hearing it proposed to me to prepare for The Middle, the organ of

our lucubrations, so called from the position in the week of its

day of appearance, an article for which he had made himself

responsible and of which, tied up with a stout string, he laid on

my table the subject.

The Diary of a Man of Fifty / Henry James

Florence, _April 5th_, 1874.--They told me I should find Italy greatly

changed; and in seven-and-twenty years there is room for changes. But to

me everything is so perfectly the same that I seem to be living my youth

over again; all the forgotten impressions of that enchanting time come

back to me. At the moment they were powerful enough; but they afterwards

faded away. What in the world became of them? Whatever becomes of such

things, in the long intervals of consciousness? Where do they hide

themselves away? in what unvisited cupboards and crannies of our being do

they preserve themselves? They are like the lines of a letter written in

sympathetic ink; hold the letter to the fire for a while and the grateful

warmth brings out the invisible words. It is the warmth of this yellow

sun of Florence that has been restoring the text of my own young romance;

the thing has been lying before me today as a clear, fresh page.