Henry James has plagued me for almost half a century. I read him just before college, having heard he was a great writer. Yet, he generally left me cold and a little confused about what he was doing.
However, I did like Washington Square. It was short. His intentions I understood.
Today, Thornfield Hall published A Short Masterpiece: Henry James’s “Washington Square”. She has no doubts about the quality of the work.
In some ways, this novel of manners is not quite Jamesian. It delves into the old New York of his friend Edith Wharton. Both writers were fascinated by the dynamics of courtship and marriage, but James usually traffics more heavily in the complexities of money, while Wharton specializes in intrigues that complicate or nix the marriage plot.
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The question in the Jamesian universe, it seems, is whether fortune and love should marry. Washington Square attacks the question from a startlingly different point-of-view.
sch 4/22
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