Henry James's 1897 novel follows young Maisie Farange as she navigates her parents' bitter divorce and subsequent remarriages in Victorian London. Through the perceptive eyes of a child, this psychological fiction explores adult corruption, moral ambiguity, and the gradual loss of innocence in late 19th-century society.
The child was provided for, but the new arrangement was inevitably confounding to a young intelligence intensely aware that something had happened which must matter a good deal and looking anxiously out for the effects of so great a cause. It was to be the fate of this patient little girl to see much more than she at first understood, but also even at first to understand much more than any little girl, however patient, had perhaps ever understood before. Only a drummer-boy in a ballad or a story could have been so in the thick of the fight. She was taken into the confidence of passions on which she fixed just the stare she might have had for images bounding across the wall in the slide of a magic-lantern. Her little world was phantasmagoric--strange shadows dancing on a sheet. It was as if the whole performance had been given for her--a mite of a half-scared infant in a great dim theatre…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 →
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