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Beginning to read
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If you are new to the writings of Henry James you may well ask “Where do
I begin?” With some twenty novels (depending on how you count), 112
short stories (‘tales’) and an enormous amount of literary and art
criticism and travel writing to choose from, it is indeed a daunting prospect.
On top of this you may feel, as you are currently using the world-wide web,
that the electronic medium itself must be factored into the equation: do you
want to read here or find a printed book?
My answer to these questions is that there’s no time like the present and it’s really quite easy to read online, particularly if you only have to read one short story (and especially if you follow my suggestions for setting your browser to remove links’ underlining and for even text – if the cascading style-sheets are not doing the latter for you!). So why not start with one of the tales on this web-site? Try a really short one like Brooksmith, which dates from the middle of James’s life and takes an wry look at the lot of an ‘upstairs’ servant who has the misfortune to be intelligent – of course in the 21st century we have to make allowances for the fact that James was writing for an upper-middle class audience in the late 19th.
Alternatively you could start with Broken wings, which is also one of the shortest of the tales, about a painter and a novelist who each thought the other was too financially successful to be interested in marrying them. The tale has the advantage of the greater subtlety of James’s so-called ‘late style’, which is truly characteristic, but without your having to retain a complex web (sorry!) of allusions and symbolism across the length of a novel.
If you are already familiar with ‘post-modern’ literature – that is, broadly, literature about itself and the act of reading, for example the work of Italo Calvino or Samuel Beckett – you might like to start with another late tale The story in it which poses and answers the question: what sort of adventure would make an interesting story.
Well, there are three different suggestions for short stories to tackle if you are completely new to James’s fiction. If and when you want to get to grips with something a bit longer, my suggestions are to try one of the humorous longer tales, either The birthplace, about the custodian of a tourist attraction, or The papers which still has lots to tell us about ‘being in the newspapers’.
Finally, when you want to move up to something of novel length, I cannot do better than recommend the novel of James’s which I read first, albeit I was indulging in a (printed) paperback: The spoils of Poynton.
If you want more information about Henry James, don’t forget that all the known scholarly web resources are listed on the Henry James scholar’s Guide to Web Sites.
Please feel free to email me for a discussion about any of the tales I have recommended... I can’t promise always to reply immediately, as my ’net access is only from my workplace but I’ll try to get back to you when I have an evening I can stay late.
this commentary
© 2002-2003
part of
the Ladder : a Henry James website