Washington Square (20 page)

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About the Book

“
Washington Square
is perhaps the only novel in which a man has successfully invaded the feminine field and produced work comparable to Jane Austen's,” said Graham Greene.

Inspired by a story Henry James heard at a dinner party,
Washington Square
tells how the rakish but idle Morris Townsend tries to win the heart of heiress Catherine Sloper against the objections of her father. Precise and understated, the book endures as a matchless social study of New York in the mid-nineteenth century.

“
Washington Square
has long been beloved by almost all readers,” noted Louis Auchincloss. “The chief beauty of the novel lies in its expression—by background, characterization, and dialogue—of its mild heroine's mood of long-suffering patience. Everything is ordered, polite, still: the charming old square in the pre-brownstone city, the small, innocent, decorous social gatherings, the formal good manners, the quaint reasonableness of the dialogues. . . . James was the poet of cities: New York in
Washington Square
.” Clifton Fadiman agreed: “It has extraordinary charm, deriving from an almost Mozartian combination of sweetness and depth.”

HENRY JAMES

Henry James was born in New York City on April 15, 1843, of Scottish and Irish ancestry. His father, Henry James, Sr., was a whimsical, utterly charming, maddeningly openminded parent—a Swedenborgian philosopher of considerable wealth who believed in a universal but wholly unformed society. He gave both Henry and his elder son, William, an infant baptism by taking them to Europe before they could even speak. In fact, Henry James later claimed that his first memory, dating from the age of two, was a glimpse of the column of the Place Vendôme framed by the window of the carriage in which he was riding. His peripatetic childhood took him to experimental schools in Geneva, Paris, and London. Even back in the United States he was shuffled from New York City to Albany to Newport to Boston and finally to Cambridge, where in 1862 he briefly attended Harvard Law School. “An obscure hurt,” probably to his back, exempted him from service in the Civil War, and James felt he had failed as a man when it counted most to be one and he vowed never to marry.

In search of a possible occupation, the young James turned to literature; within five years it had become his profession. His earliest story appeared in
The Atlantic Monthly
in 1865, when he was twenty-two. From the start of his career James supported himself as a writer, and over the next ten years he produced book reviews, drama and art criticism, newspaper columns, travel pieces and travel books, short stories, novelettes, a biography, and his first novel—
Roderick Hudson
(1876). Late in 1875, following two recent trips to Europe, James settled in Paris, where he met Turgenev, Flaubert, and Zola, and wrote
The American
(1877). In December 1876 he moved to London, where he produced
The Europeans
(1878). Soon afterward he achieved fame on both sides of the Atlantic with the publication of
Daisy Miller
(1879), the book that forever identified him with the “international theme” of the effect of Americans and Europeans on each other.

Yet Henry James aspired to more than the success of
Daisy Miller
. Determined to scale new literary heights, James abandoned the intense social life of his earlier years and, with Balzac as his role model, devoted himself all out to the craft of fiction. Although
The Portrait of a Lady
(1881) was critically acclaimed and sold well, the other novels of James's “Balzac” period—
Washington Square
(1881),
The Bostonians
(1886),
The Princess Casamassima
(1886), and
The Tragic Muse
(1890)—were not popular with the public. As a result, he decided to redirect his efforts and began writing for the stage. In 1895, the disastrous opening night of his play
Guy Domville
—when James came onstage only to be hissed and booed by the London audience—forever ended his career as a playwright.

Rededicating himself to fiction, he wrote
The Spoils of
Poynton
(1897),
What Maisie Knew
(1897),
The Turn of the Screw
(1898), and
The Awkward Age
(1899). Then, as he approached and passed the age of sixty James's three greatest novels appeared in rapid succession:
The Wings of the Dove
(1902),
The Ambassadors
(1903), and
The Golden Bowl
(1904). He spent most of his remaining years at Lamb House, his ivy-covered home in Rye, writing his memoirs and revising his novels for the twenty-four-volume New York Edition of his lifework. When World War I broke out, he was eager to serve his adopted country and threw himself into the civilian war effort. In 1915, after four decades of living in England, James became a British subject, and King George V conferred the Order of Merit on him in January 1916. Henry James died in London on February 28, 1916, and his ashes were buried in the James family plot in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Commenting on the enormous contemporary interest in James, novelist Louis Auchincloss said: “How he would have loved his posthumous fame! One can imagine Emily Brontë and Herman Melville shrugging shoulders, faintly scornful, but James would have bristled with pride at every mention of his name. . . . It is pleasant to think that in the end he had at least a whiff of it and that the silent, grave, bearded young man should have evolved into the portly figure of the rolling, resolute gait, simple in emotion but quick and spontaneous in affection, leaving among his recording disciples a deep impression of majesty, beauty and greatness.”

1997 Modern Library Edition

Biographical note copyright © 1993 by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

Modern Library is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
James, Henry, 1843-1916.
Washington Square/Henry James.
p.   cm.
1. Man-woman relationships—NewYork (State)—New York—Fiction.
2. Fathers and daughters—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.
3. Washington Square (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction.
4. Young women—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.   I. Title.
 [PS2116.W3    1998]
813'.4—dc21         97-25219

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eISBN: 978-0-679-64157-5
v3.0