Although not included by James in his New York edition, this tale has become quite well known through anthologies of his stories, particularly the slim 1963 Penguin modern classics volume containing Daisy Miller, which remained in print for at least two decades. (A full list of the tale’s reprinting in anthologies can be found on the relevant page of my index to the tales in collections.) The original appearances of The last of the Valerii were in an American magazine in 1874 and in James’s first published book, A passionate pilgrim; and other tales (1875, full details of these are in the accompanying bibliography). Ten years later James revised the text for its first publication in Britain, in the collection Stories revived, which, as well as including more-recent tales, ‘mopped up’ such early stories as James felt worthy of a British audience but which hadn’t already had one. This was an early sign of James’s predilection for revising his work – he was still only just turned forty – although the changes were not as extensive here, after a mere ten years, as they would become when he set about his definitive New York edition. In keeping with the British bias of this website, and with the limited availability of suitable source copies, it is this revised 1885 text which is presented here (see the textual note for further details).
As a relatively early work of James, written when he was 30, it shows his initial responses to the old-world paganism of classical Italy. Although he never settled there, he loved Italy from the first and in the early 1890s briefly considered buying a modest ‘holiday home’ (as we would now call it) in Venice, his favourite Italian city. However, he seems always slightly to have mistrusted the atmosphere of the country as a place to reside permanently. As such the tale has vaguely supernatural overtones – indeed Leon Edel included it in his volume of ‘ghostly tales’ – but it is much more about the history and psychology of a scion of an old-world family with centuries of history. This is emphasised by the use of the un-named American painter as the first-person narrator, observing events rather than falling under the spell of the place and the goddess herself. As an introduction to James’s early style, even in its revised version, The last of the Valerii is a good start, so, rather than say any more than that it is not a long tale, as James’s tales go, I’ll leave you to start reading it.
this introduction
© 2003
part of an etext edition of
The last of the Valerii
on
the Ladder : a Henry James website