Louisa Pallant

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Henry James

Louisa Pallant

(written 1887, text of 1890)

Introduction

by Adrian Dover

Another of the rather overlooked tales in the Henry James canon. Overlooked: except by the French in 1982 – see the commentaries section of my bibliography! Perhaps they warmed to the mother-daughter struggle beneath the surface, but I haven’t had a chance to follow up the references yet to find out the attraction. As so often, James cleverly observes this relationship through an interested insider/outsider, and one of the many small joys in reading the tale is keeping enough distance from the narrator to spot his own assumptions and mis-readings. But then, one comes to expect that of James and is disappointed when it is not present or occurs only in small doses. Because of my determination only to present texts here with first edition sources available to me, Louisa Pallant is one of the earliest tales on my Henry James web-site at present. However, as a writer in his forties, James already had his characteristic approach to the reliability of the narrator.

For details of the text sources and subsequent critical discussion see the bibliography. You may be interested in details of a couple of corrections I felt it necessary to make in preparing the source text for its presentation here: these can be found on a separate page, otherwise just start reading.