Henry James's 1878 novella follows a spirited young American woman whose unconventional behavior scandals the expatriate community in Switzerland and Rome. This fiction explores the cultural clash between American innocence and European social conventions in the Gilded Age.
At the little town of Vevey, in Switzerland, there is a particularly comfortable hotel. There are, indeed, many hotels, for the entertainment of tourists is the business of the place, which, as many travelers will remember, is seated upon the edge of a remarkably blue lake--a lake that it behooves every tourist to visit. The shore of the lake presents an unbroken array of establishments of this order, of every category, from the “grand hotel” of the newest fashion, with a chalk-white front, a hundred balconies, and a dozen flags flying from its roof, to the little Swiss pension of an elder day, with its name inscribed in German-looking lettering upon a pink or yellow wall and an awkward summerhouse in the angle of the garden. One of the hotels at Vevey, however, is famous, even classical, being distinguished from many of its upstart neighbors by an air both of luxury and of maturity. In …Continue reading →
Born in 1843, this American expatriate spent most of his career in Europe, crafting psychologically complex novels that explored the clash between American innocence and European sophistication. His innovative narrative techniques and deep character studies in works like The Portrait of a Lady helped establish the modern literary novel. All works by Henry James →
Browse all Fiction · 19th Century works