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The Awkward Age
The Awkward Age is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in Harper's Weekly in 1898-1899 and then as a book later in 1899.
Making her debut in London society, Nanda Brookenham is being groomed for the marriage market. Thrust suddenly into the superficial circle that surrounds her mother, the innocent but independent-minded young woman even finds herself in competition with Mrs Brookenham for the affection of the man she admires. Only an elderly bachelor, Mr Longdon, is immune to this world of scheming, and determines to rescue Nanda from its influences out of loyalty to the deep love he once felt for her grandmother. In The Awkward Age, James explores the English character, and the clash between old and new money with a light and subtly ironic touch to create a devastating critique of society and its machinations.
Excerpt:
That young lady, in this relation, was certainly a figure to have offered a foundation for the highest hopes. As slight and white, as delicately lovely, as a gathered garden lily, her admirable training appeared to hold her out to them all as with precautionary finger-tips. She presumed, however, so little on any introduction that, shyly and submissively, wait- ing for the word of direction, she stopped short in the centre of the general friendliness till Mrs Brookenham fairly became, to meet her, also a shy little girl — put out a timid hand with wonder-struck, innocent eyes that hesitated whether a kiss of greeting might be dared. ‘Why, you dear, good, strange “ickle” thing, you haven’t been here for ages, but it is a joy to see you, and I do hope you’ve brought your doll!’ — such might have been the sense of our friend’s fond murmur while, looking at her up and down with pure pleasure, she drew the rare creature to a sofa. Little Aggie presented, up and down, an arrangement of dress exactly in the key of her age, her complexion, her emphasized virginity. She might have been prepared for her visit by a cluster of doting nuns, cloistered daughters of ancient houses and educators of similar products, whose taste, hereditarily good, had grown, out of the world and most delightfully, so queer as to leave on everything they touched a particular shade of distinction. The Duchess had brought in with the child an air of added confidence for which, in a moment, an observer would have seen the grounds, the association of the pair being so markedly favourable to each. Its younger member carried out the style of her aunt’s presence quite as one of the accessory figures effectively thrown into old portraits. The Duchess, on the other hand, seemed, with becoming blandness, to draw from her niece the dignity of a kind of office of state — hereditary governess of the children of the blood. Little Aggie had a smile as softly bright as a southern dawn, and the friends of her relative looked at each other, according to a fashion frequent in Mrs Brooken- ham’s drawing-room, in free communication of their happy impression. Mr Mitchett was, none the less, scantly diverted.
Making her debut in London society, Nanda Brookenham is being groomed for the marriage market. Thrust suddenly into the superficial circle that surrounds her mother, the innocent but independent-minded young woman even finds herself in competition with Mrs Brookenham for the affection of the man she admires. Only an elderly bachelor, Mr Longdon, is immune to this world of scheming, and determines to rescue Nanda from its influences out of loyalty to the deep love he once felt for her grandmother. In The Awkward Age, James explores the English character, and the clash between old and new money with a light and subtly ironic touch to create a devastating critique of society and its machinations.
Excerpt:
That young lady, in this relation, was certainly a figure to have offered a foundation for the highest hopes. As slight and white, as delicately lovely, as a gathered garden lily, her admirable training appeared to hold her out to them all as with precautionary finger-tips. She presumed, however, so little on any introduction that, shyly and submissively, wait- ing for the word of direction, she stopped short in the centre of the general friendliness till Mrs Brookenham fairly became, to meet her, also a shy little girl — put out a timid hand with wonder-struck, innocent eyes that hesitated whether a kiss of greeting might be dared. ‘Why, you dear, good, strange “ickle” thing, you haven’t been here for ages, but it is a joy to see you, and I do hope you’ve brought your doll!’ — such might have been the sense of our friend’s fond murmur while, looking at her up and down with pure pleasure, she drew the rare creature to a sofa. Little Aggie presented, up and down, an arrangement of dress exactly in the key of her age, her complexion, her emphasized virginity. She might have been prepared for her visit by a cluster of doting nuns, cloistered daughters of ancient houses and educators of similar products, whose taste, hereditarily good, had grown, out of the world and most delightfully, so queer as to leave on everything they touched a particular shade of distinction. The Duchess had brought in with the child an air of added confidence for which, in a moment, an observer would have seen the grounds, the association of the pair being so markedly favourable to each. Its younger member carried out the style of her aunt’s presence quite as one of the accessory figures effectively thrown into old portraits. The Duchess, on the other hand, seemed, with becoming blandness, to draw from her niece the dignity of a kind of office of state — hereditary governess of the children of the blood. Little Aggie had a smile as softly bright as a southern dawn, and the friends of her relative looked at each other, according to a fashion frequent in Mrs Brooken- ham’s drawing-room, in free communication of their happy impression. Mr Mitchett was, none the less, scantly diverted.
166 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1899
About the author
Henry James
4,363 books3,501 followersHenry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to Impressionist painting.
His novella The Turn of the Screw has garnered a reputation as the most analysed and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely adapted work in other media. He wrote other highly regarded ghost stories, such as "The Jolly Corner".
James published articles and books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a young man, and eventually settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1915, a year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916. Jorge Luis Borges said "I have visited some literatures of East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic compendium of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James."
He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to Impressionist painting.
His novella The Turn of the Screw has garnered a reputation as the most analysed and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely adapted work in other media. He wrote other highly regarded ghost stories, such as "The Jolly Corner".
James published articles and books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a young man, and eventually settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1915, a year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916. Jorge Luis Borges said "I have visited some literatures of East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic compendium of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James."
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November 29, 2017In the previous Henry James book I read, the main character, Christopher Newman, visited the Louvre, and being a bit overwhelmed by the profusion of pictures, he simply sat on a bench in front of one of them for the whole afternoon.
Just as he'd been happy to ignore the rest of the paintings in the huge gallery, Newman was happy that day to ignore the major part of Veronese's 'The Marriage at Cana’, and simply focus on a little scene in the corner of the painting which satisfied his conception of what a splendid banquet should be. In the left-hand corner of the picture is a young woman with yellow tresses confined in a golden head-dress; she is bending forward and listening, with the smile of a charming woman at a dinner-party, to her neighbor...
We can easily forgive Newman his narrow focus because, at first glance, the painting is a confusion of movement and detail. Veronese depicted a huge variety of people here, all in the act of doing, listening or speaking. And though the theme is inspired by the miracle of the changing of water into wine, it is set in Veronese's own time and peopled with characters he must have known or heard of. While Jesus and his mother Mary (portrayed in contrast to everyone else as immobile icons) are in the very centre of the painting, they are not the main focus. Instead, it is the finely dressed musicians in the foreground who attract immediate attention. The group are said to represent the most noted Venetian artists of the time, Veronese himself on the left playing the viola, then Bassano fingering a flute, Tintoretto playing the violin, and Titian on the cello.
Reading a Henry James novel is like viewing such a painting section by section; the author forces us to pause and pay attention to the details. We can't skim quickly and pass on. No, we have to stop and sit on the bench day after day and give ourselves up to each section in turn. We have to be patient, to see where the perspective leads us and what can be noticed on the way. We have to guess the significance of this or that element, to follow the play of light and shadow, to notice the figure that is turned towards us, the other that is turned away, and the one that might represent the artist inserted in his own work (in this book, I recognised strong similarities between one of the main characters and James himself).
And just as Veronese offers a variety of physiognomies in his painting, Henry James offers a variety of types whose descriptions render them as clear to our eyes as if they'd been painted.
Harold: his smooth fair face where the lines were all curves and the expression all needles…
Mr. Cashmore: who would have been very red-haired if he had not been very bald, showed a single eye-glass and a long upper lip…
Edward Brookenham: seemed to bend for sitting down more hinges than most men...he had a pale cold face, marked and made regular, made even in a manner handsome, by a hardness of line in which, oddly, there was no significance, no accent. Clean-shaven, slightly bald, with unlighted grey eyes and a mouth that gave the impression of not working easily, he suggested a stippled drawing by an inferior master…
Lord Petherton: a man of five-and-thirty, whose robust but symmetrical proportions gave to his dark blue double-breasted coat an air of tightness that just failed of compromising his tailor, had for his main facial sign a certain pleasant brutality, the effect partly of a bold handsome parade of carnivorous teeth, partly of an expression of nose suggesting that this feature had paid a little, in the heat of youth, for some aggression at the time admired and even publicly commemorated…
Mr. Mitchett: had so little intrinsic appearance that an observer would have felt indebted for help in placing him to the rare prominence of his colorless eyes...Dressed on the other hand not as gentlemen dress in London, he excited [attention] by the exhibition of garments that had nothing in common save the violence and the independence of their pattern...There was comedy therefore in the form of his pot-hat and the color of his spotted shirt, in the systematic disagreement, above all, of his coat, waistcoat and trousers. It was only on long acquaintance that his so many ingenious ways of showing he appreciated his commonness could present him as secretly rare…
The Duchess: was a person of no small presence, filling her place, however, without ponderosity, with a massiveness indeed rather artfully kept in bounds. Her head, her chin, her shoulders were well aloft, but she had not abandoned the cultivation of a “figure” or any of the distinctively finer reasons for passing as a handsome woman. She was secretly at war moreover, in this endeavour, with a lurking no less than with a public foe, and thoroughly aware that if she didn’t look well she might at times only, and quite dreadfully, look good…
So, as we read this novel, we become the spectators at a parade of larger than life figures whom we observe with keen interest and frequent amusement. In the course of the novel, Henry James refers to an unknown spectator/observer who in turn watches the characters and catches the expressions that flit across their faces: Our spectator would probably have found too much earnestness in her face to be sure if there was also candour...
And this, A supposititious spectator would certainly on this have imagined in the girl's face the delicate dawn of a sense that her mother had suddenly become vulgar...
Or this, An observer at all initiated would fairly have hung on his lips...
We become that unknown spectator when we read the book just as we become spectators at Veronese's banquet while viewing his painting; we notice each and every expression that the artist has caught. However, we're not the only observers of Veronese's scene. If we look at the left hand corner again, we see that the figures in the painting are watching each other. 'He' watches 'she', and 'she' watches another 'she' who is watching someone else.
In The Awkward Age, the characters also watch each other constantly. The old watch the young, the women watch the men, the men watch the girls and the girls watch each other. There are important things at stake here, things like property, wealth and young girls' reputations.
And to further the parallel with Veronese's painting, the main theme of this book is marriage, and there is great emphasis placed on the need for an adequate sum of money to launch a couple on their married life with the necessary trimmings. Things like good wine for the wedding feast, for example. But this is where the comparison with 'The Wedding at Cana' ends. There are no miracles in this book. This is a Henry James work and the only miracles depicted are the depictions themselves.
Just as he'd been happy to ignore the rest of the paintings in the huge gallery, Newman was happy that day to ignore the major part of Veronese's 'The Marriage at Cana’, and simply focus on a little scene in the corner of the painting which satisfied his conception of what a splendid banquet should be. In the left-hand corner of the picture is a young woman with yellow tresses confined in a golden head-dress; she is bending forward and listening, with the smile of a charming woman at a dinner-party, to her neighbor...
We can easily forgive Newman his narrow focus because, at first glance, the painting is a confusion of movement and detail. Veronese depicted a huge variety of people here, all in the act of doing, listening or speaking. And though the theme is inspired by the miracle of the changing of water into wine, it is set in Veronese's own time and peopled with characters he must have known or heard of. While Jesus and his mother Mary (portrayed in contrast to everyone else as immobile icons) are in the very centre of the painting, they are not the main focus. Instead, it is the finely dressed musicians in the foreground who attract immediate attention. The group are said to represent the most noted Venetian artists of the time, Veronese himself on the left playing the viola, then Bassano fingering a flute, Tintoretto playing the violin, and Titian on the cello.
Reading a Henry James novel is like viewing such a painting section by section; the author forces us to pause and pay attention to the details. We can't skim quickly and pass on. No, we have to stop and sit on the bench day after day and give ourselves up to each section in turn. We have to be patient, to see where the perspective leads us and what can be noticed on the way. We have to guess the significance of this or that element, to follow the play of light and shadow, to notice the figure that is turned towards us, the other that is turned away, and the one that might represent the artist inserted in his own work (in this book, I recognised strong similarities between one of the main characters and James himself).
And just as Veronese offers a variety of physiognomies in his painting, Henry James offers a variety of types whose descriptions render them as clear to our eyes as if they'd been painted.
Harold: his smooth fair face where the lines were all curves and the expression all needles…
Mr. Cashmore: who would have been very red-haired if he had not been very bald, showed a single eye-glass and a long upper lip…
Edward Brookenham: seemed to bend for sitting down more hinges than most men...he had a pale cold face, marked and made regular, made even in a manner handsome, by a hardness of line in which, oddly, there was no significance, no accent. Clean-shaven, slightly bald, with unlighted grey eyes and a mouth that gave the impression of not working easily, he suggested a stippled drawing by an inferior master…
Lord Petherton: a man of five-and-thirty, whose robust but symmetrical proportions gave to his dark blue double-breasted coat an air of tightness that just failed of compromising his tailor, had for his main facial sign a certain pleasant brutality, the effect partly of a bold handsome parade of carnivorous teeth, partly of an expression of nose suggesting that this feature had paid a little, in the heat of youth, for some aggression at the time admired and even publicly commemorated…
Mr. Mitchett: had so little intrinsic appearance that an observer would have felt indebted for help in placing him to the rare prominence of his colorless eyes...Dressed on the other hand not as gentlemen dress in London, he excited [attention] by the exhibition of garments that had nothing in common save the violence and the independence of their pattern...There was comedy therefore in the form of his pot-hat and the color of his spotted shirt, in the systematic disagreement, above all, of his coat, waistcoat and trousers. It was only on long acquaintance that his so many ingenious ways of showing he appreciated his commonness could present him as secretly rare…
The Duchess: was a person of no small presence, filling her place, however, without ponderosity, with a massiveness indeed rather artfully kept in bounds. Her head, her chin, her shoulders were well aloft, but she had not abandoned the cultivation of a “figure” or any of the distinctively finer reasons for passing as a handsome woman. She was secretly at war moreover, in this endeavour, with a lurking no less than with a public foe, and thoroughly aware that if she didn’t look well she might at times only, and quite dreadfully, look good…
So, as we read this novel, we become the spectators at a parade of larger than life figures whom we observe with keen interest and frequent amusement. In the course of the novel, Henry James refers to an unknown spectator/observer who in turn watches the characters and catches the expressions that flit across their faces: Our spectator would probably have found too much earnestness in her face to be sure if there was also candour...
And this, A supposititious spectator would certainly on this have imagined in the girl's face the delicate dawn of a sense that her mother had suddenly become vulgar...
Or this, An observer at all initiated would fairly have hung on his lips...
We become that unknown spectator when we read the book just as we become spectators at Veronese's banquet while viewing his painting; we notice each and every expression that the artist has caught. However, we're not the only observers of Veronese's scene. If we look at the left hand corner again, we see that the figures in the painting are watching each other. 'He' watches 'she', and 'she' watches another 'she' who is watching someone else.
In The Awkward Age, the characters also watch each other constantly. The old watch the young, the women watch the men, the men watch the girls and the girls watch each other. There are important things at stake here, things like property, wealth and young girls' reputations.
And to further the parallel with Veronese's painting, the main theme of this book is marriage, and there is great emphasis placed on the need for an adequate sum of money to launch a couple on their married life with the necessary trimmings. Things like good wine for the wedding feast, for example. But this is where the comparison with 'The Wedding at Cana' ends. There are no miracles in this book. This is a Henry James work and the only miracles depicted are the depictions themselves.
September 28, 2014
She remained alone for ten minutes, at the end of which her reflections – they would have been seen to be deep – were interrupted by the entrance of her husband. The interruption was indeed not so great as if the couple had not met, as they almost invariably met, in silence: she took, at all events to begin with, no more account of his presence than to hand him a cup of tea accompanied with nothing but cream and sugar. Her having no word for him, however, committed her no more to implying that he had come in only for his refreshment than it would have committed her to say: ‘Here it is, Edward dear – just as you like it; so take it and sit down and be quiet.’ No spectator worth his salt could have seen them more than a little together without feeling how everything that, under his eyes or not, she either did or omitted rested on a profound acquaintance with his ways. They formed, Edward’s ways, a chapter by themselves, of which Mrs Brook was completely mistress and in respect to which the only drawback was that a part of her credit was by the nature of the case predestined to remain obscure.
Mrs. Brookenham, referred to in the novel as Mrs. Brook, is an aging beauty. A woman at an awkward age, past her prime, yet still vibrantly lovely. She is witty, manipulative, and a deliciously adroit schemer. She has control of her husband, as you can see from the quote above, he is but a bit of furniture that she moves about to better suit her current needs. She has a social group of men and women who are trapped in the webbing of her social adeptness. She is shallow, but by no means stupid. The story revolves around what to do with Nanda, the daughter of the Brookenham’s.
Tea time the new battlefield.
Mrs. Brook is friends with the Duchess who has a daughter named Aggie. I’m using the term friends rather loosely as it is quite evident from a few conversations between the two that they are old rivals battling once again to achieve the best marriages for their daughters. Vanderbank, a civil servant and the only character in this book that seems to have a job, is rather handsome and solid of character. He is in the early running for a husband for Nanda, but as the plot advances it becomes murky as to whether he is in love with Mrs. Brook or Nanda. The real crux comes when it becomes clear that Mrs. Brook is unsure if she will keep the hapless Vanderbank for herself or encourage him to marry her daughter. Compromising circumstances exist when you have a “friend” that with a few well placed words in the proper setting could destroy your already precarious reputation. To square up accounts the Duchess is also compromised with a relationship with Lord Petherton.
”Lord Petherton, a man of five-and-thirty, whose robust but symmetrical proportions gave to his dark blue double-breasted coat an air of tightness that just failed of compromising his tailor, had for his man facial sign a certain pleasant brutality, the effect partly of a bold, handsome paracle of carnivorous teeth, partly of an expression of nose suggesting that this feature had paid a little, in the heat of youth, for some aggression at the time admired and even publicly commemorated. He would have been ugly, he substantively granted, had he not been happy; he would have been dangerous had he not been warranted. Many things doubtless performed for him this last service, but none so much as the delightful sound of his voice, the voice, as it were, of another man, a nature reclaimed, supercivilized, adjusted to the perpetual ‘chaff’ that kept him smiling in a way that would have been a mistake and indeed an impossibility, if he had really been witty.”
Things start to sort themselves out and then James decides to throw one more fly into the ointment. Mr. Longdon returns to society after a thirty year hiatus. In that time, obviously not spending his money on high society, he has piled up a considerable fortune. He takes a liking to Vanderbank, instantly does not trust Mrs. Brooks, and becomes enamored with Nanda. Mr. Longdon and Nanda, as part of an allusion to the title of this novel, are at awkward ages for consummating a relationship. Even though in that time period vast differences in ages were rarely a problem if there was plenty of money to match with the beauty of the young lady. Longdon is not interested in Nanda for a wife, but sees her more as a ward that needs to be shielded from her own mother. Nanda is the spitting image of her grandmother. Longdon when he was in society had a bit of a crush on the grandmother and seeing Nanda sends the blood coursing faster through his veins.
”Your resemblance to your grandmother is quite prodigious.”
“That’s what I wish you’d tell me about--your recollection of her and your wonderful feeling about her. Mother has told me things, but that I should have something straight from you is exactly what she also wants. My grandmother must have been awfully nice”, the girl rambled on, “and I somehow don’t see myself as the same sort of person.”
“Oh, I don’t say you’re in the least the same sort; all I allude to,” Mr. Longdon returned, “is the miracle of the physical heredity. Nothing could be less like her than your manner and your talk.”
Nanda looked at him with all honesty, “They’re not so good, you must think.”
He hung fire an instant, but was as honest as she. “You’re separated from her by a gulf--and not only of time. Personally, you see, you breathe a different air.”
Mr. Longdon makes it clear that he will settle a vast fortune on Nanda if Mr. Vanderbank will consent to marry her. This sets off a flurry of activity among the social set that leaves Vanderbank cold to the idea.
Harold?
Nanda has a brother named Harold, a ne’er do well that actually provides a bit of comedy in the novel. He has a knack for putting the touch on his mother’s friends for five pounds here and five pounds there. Any money left about is vacuumed into his pocket. He is a product of his mother and knows how to manipulate the grand manipulator. Mr. Cashmore, you’d have to be wealthy with a name like that, does give Harold some money, but then threatens to tell his mother. Harold explains the circumstances.
”She knows all about wants--no one has more than mamma.”
Mr. Cashmore stared, but there was amusement in it too. “So she’ll say it’s all right?”
“Oh no; she’ll let me have it hot. But she’ll recognize that at such a pass more must be done for a fellow, and that may lead to something--indirectly, don’t you see? for she won’t tell my father, she’ll only, in her own way, work on him--that will put me on a better footing, and for which therefore at bottom I shall have to thank you.
This entire novel is almost entirely set in one drawing room or another. I had difficulty guessing the motivations of the characters because almost all the information is given to us through the course of conversations. At times it is hard to follow, but the deeper I delved into the novel I was able to make the adjustments to keep up with the acerbic sabre slashes and the double meanings that hung heavy on every conversation.
Henry James feeling out of sorts after the public reception to his plays.
Henry James was recovering from the shock of failing as a playwright when he wrote The Awkward Age. He had taken up plays after the disappointing sales of his novel The Tragic Muse. He swore he’d never write another novel. After being booed and hissed at the conclusion of the showing of one of his plays, he then announced he was done with plays. As we know turning his back on writing novels or plays did not last very long.
If you are looking to read a Henry James I would not start with this one. I would recommend The Portrait of a Lady or The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers for your first dance with Henry James. On the flap of the Everyman’s edition, that I read, they refer to this book as “one of his greatest and gentlest masterpieces”. James has a well deserved reputation of leaving his characters and readers distraught and unhappy at the conclusion of his novels. In the case of The Awkward Age things did not work out the way one would hope. The characters may not be happy, but James, feeling gentle I presume after his own humbling experience at the hands of the public, does leave them with room to achieve some fashion of happiness.
Make me smile, I dare you.
Mrs. Brookenham, referred to in the novel as Mrs. Brook, is an aging beauty. A woman at an awkward age, past her prime, yet still vibrantly lovely. She is witty, manipulative, and a deliciously adroit schemer. She has control of her husband, as you can see from the quote above, he is but a bit of furniture that she moves about to better suit her current needs. She has a social group of men and women who are trapped in the webbing of her social adeptness. She is shallow, but by no means stupid. The story revolves around what to do with Nanda, the daughter of the Brookenham’s.
Tea time the new battlefield.
Mrs. Brook is friends with the Duchess who has a daughter named Aggie. I’m using the term friends rather loosely as it is quite evident from a few conversations between the two that they are old rivals battling once again to achieve the best marriages for their daughters. Vanderbank, a civil servant and the only character in this book that seems to have a job, is rather handsome and solid of character. He is in the early running for a husband for Nanda, but as the plot advances it becomes murky as to whether he is in love with Mrs. Brook or Nanda. The real crux comes when it becomes clear that Mrs. Brook is unsure if she will keep the hapless Vanderbank for herself or encourage him to marry her daughter. Compromising circumstances exist when you have a “friend” that with a few well placed words in the proper setting could destroy your already precarious reputation. To square up accounts the Duchess is also compromised with a relationship with Lord Petherton.
”Lord Petherton, a man of five-and-thirty, whose robust but symmetrical proportions gave to his dark blue double-breasted coat an air of tightness that just failed of compromising his tailor, had for his man facial sign a certain pleasant brutality, the effect partly of a bold, handsome paracle of carnivorous teeth, partly of an expression of nose suggesting that this feature had paid a little, in the heat of youth, for some aggression at the time admired and even publicly commemorated. He would have been ugly, he substantively granted, had he not been happy; he would have been dangerous had he not been warranted. Many things doubtless performed for him this last service, but none so much as the delightful sound of his voice, the voice, as it were, of another man, a nature reclaimed, supercivilized, adjusted to the perpetual ‘chaff’ that kept him smiling in a way that would have been a mistake and indeed an impossibility, if he had really been witty.”
Things start to sort themselves out and then James decides to throw one more fly into the ointment. Mr. Longdon returns to society after a thirty year hiatus. In that time, obviously not spending his money on high society, he has piled up a considerable fortune. He takes a liking to Vanderbank, instantly does not trust Mrs. Brooks, and becomes enamored with Nanda. Mr. Longdon and Nanda, as part of an allusion to the title of this novel, are at awkward ages for consummating a relationship. Even though in that time period vast differences in ages were rarely a problem if there was plenty of money to match with the beauty of the young lady. Longdon is not interested in Nanda for a wife, but sees her more as a ward that needs to be shielded from her own mother. Nanda is the spitting image of her grandmother. Longdon when he was in society had a bit of a crush on the grandmother and seeing Nanda sends the blood coursing faster through his veins.
”Your resemblance to your grandmother is quite prodigious.”
“That’s what I wish you’d tell me about--your recollection of her and your wonderful feeling about her. Mother has told me things, but that I should have something straight from you is exactly what she also wants. My grandmother must have been awfully nice”, the girl rambled on, “and I somehow don’t see myself as the same sort of person.”
“Oh, I don’t say you’re in the least the same sort; all I allude to,” Mr. Longdon returned, “is the miracle of the physical heredity. Nothing could be less like her than your manner and your talk.”
Nanda looked at him with all honesty, “They’re not so good, you must think.”
He hung fire an instant, but was as honest as she. “You’re separated from her by a gulf--and not only of time. Personally, you see, you breathe a different air.”
Mr. Longdon makes it clear that he will settle a vast fortune on Nanda if Mr. Vanderbank will consent to marry her. This sets off a flurry of activity among the social set that leaves Vanderbank cold to the idea.
Harold?
Nanda has a brother named Harold, a ne’er do well that actually provides a bit of comedy in the novel. He has a knack for putting the touch on his mother’s friends for five pounds here and five pounds there. Any money left about is vacuumed into his pocket. He is a product of his mother and knows how to manipulate the grand manipulator. Mr. Cashmore, you’d have to be wealthy with a name like that, does give Harold some money, but then threatens to tell his mother. Harold explains the circumstances.
”She knows all about wants--no one has more than mamma.”
Mr. Cashmore stared, but there was amusement in it too. “So she’ll say it’s all right?”
“Oh no; she’ll let me have it hot. But she’ll recognize that at such a pass more must be done for a fellow, and that may lead to something--indirectly, don’t you see? for she won’t tell my father, she’ll only, in her own way, work on him--that will put me on a better footing, and for which therefore at bottom I shall have to thank you.
This entire novel is almost entirely set in one drawing room or another. I had difficulty guessing the motivations of the characters because almost all the information is given to us through the course of conversations. At times it is hard to follow, but the deeper I delved into the novel I was able to make the adjustments to keep up with the acerbic sabre slashes and the double meanings that hung heavy on every conversation.
Henry James feeling out of sorts after the public reception to his plays.
Henry James was recovering from the shock of failing as a playwright when he wrote The Awkward Age. He had taken up plays after the disappointing sales of his novel The Tragic Muse. He swore he’d never write another novel. After being booed and hissed at the conclusion of the showing of one of his plays, he then announced he was done with plays. As we know turning his back on writing novels or plays did not last very long.
If you are looking to read a Henry James I would not start with this one. I would recommend The Portrait of a Lady or The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers for your first dance with Henry James. On the flap of the Everyman’s edition, that I read, they refer to this book as “one of his greatest and gentlest masterpieces”. James has a well deserved reputation of leaving his characters and readers distraught and unhappy at the conclusion of his novels. In the case of The Awkward Age things did not work out the way one would hope. The characters may not be happy, but James, feeling gentle I presume after his own humbling experience at the hands of the public, does leave them with room to achieve some fashion of happiness.
Make me smile, I dare you.
September 25, 2019
Scene One
My old mate Henry James will rescue me from this blizzard of unlovable novels I have been trudging through – now, where did I get up to? What were the last ones I read by The Master? Ah yes –
The Spoils of Poynton (1897) – classic stuff
What Maisie Knew (1898) – brilliant
The Turn of the Screw (1898) – unsurpassed
So the next one is The Awkward Age (1899) – oh boy, looking forward to this.
Scene Two (a week later)
Can’t…. do it…. any…more…unh….. what's happening.....
(Crash.)
Scene Three (a hospital ward)
- So how far did you get?
- I think page 88, doctor.
- You know, you’re lucky to be alive. They say you were reading The Awkward Age all on your own, you hadn’t told anyone you were going to do it, very unwise.
- It all went dark. What happened, doctor?
- Your brain was starved of oxygen. Very common with readers of late James. We have whole wards here dedicated just to people who attempted The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove. Even careful readers who use portable oxygen tanks with inhalers, as all the literary guides advise, often collapse around about page 150. It’s the clauses and the lack of knowing who all the he’s and she’s refer to, and the bizarre extended metaphors –
- Yes, yes, now I remember – oh, the clauses –
- There now, take it easy. Look, here’s a Raymond Chandler, read that and you’ll be out of here in no time.
*****
There’s an online commentary (https://mantex.co.uk/the-awkward-age/) that says this about The Awkward Age :
He goes to endless lengths in spinning a web of subtleties regarding social relationships – but the characters are so vacuous and insignificant that there is little incentive for the reader to keep track of it all. Page after page is filled with vapid posturing, insincere flattery, snobbish one-upmanship, desperately contrived bon mots, and strained metaphors. Lots of energy is expended by the characters making very oblique references to other people, usually via the use of ambiguous pronouns. It is not clear who they are talking about – both to readers and their interlocutors. The novel would be at least one third shorter if the characters made the subjects of their statements clear.
It’s all true. Check it out :
“I didn’t know she even particularly knew him.”
“It’s exactly what she would like to prevent anyone’s knowing, and her coming here to be with him when she knows I know she knows – don’t you see? - that he’s to be here, is just one of those calculations that are subtle enough to put off the scent a woman who has but half a nose.”
The characters also gush and simper over each other in an especially revolting manner. Mrs Brookenham is talking to a 35 year old guy :
You’re the most delicate thing I know, and it crops up, in the oddest way, in the intervas of your depravity. Your talk’s half the time impossible; you respect neither age nor sex nor condition; one doesn’t know what you’ll say or do next. Yet there’s in the midst of all this, and in the depths of you, a little deep-down delicious niceness, a sweet sensibility, that one has actually, one’s self, shocked as one perpetually is at you, quite to hold one’s breath and stay one’s hand for fear of ruffling or bruising.”
It's frankly unreadable. I raise my hat and make a sweeping bow to the good readers who give out 4 and 5 stars to this one, they are made of tougher stuff than me. I'm sure there's a poignant tale in here of young girls' lives twisted by the hideousness of their parents' demands, a kind of next-stage What Maisie Knew but it's too hard to penetrate Henry's insane carapace to find it.
Farewell, Henry. It was great while it lasted.
My old mate Henry James will rescue me from this blizzard of unlovable novels I have been trudging through – now, where did I get up to? What were the last ones I read by The Master? Ah yes –
The Spoils of Poynton (1897) – classic stuff
What Maisie Knew (1898) – brilliant
The Turn of the Screw (1898) – unsurpassed
So the next one is The Awkward Age (1899) – oh boy, looking forward to this.
Scene Two (a week later)
Can’t…. do it…. any…more…unh….. what's happening.....
(Crash.)
Scene Three (a hospital ward)
- So how far did you get?
- I think page 88, doctor.
- You know, you’re lucky to be alive. They say you were reading The Awkward Age all on your own, you hadn’t told anyone you were going to do it, very unwise.
- It all went dark. What happened, doctor?
- Your brain was starved of oxygen. Very common with readers of late James. We have whole wards here dedicated just to people who attempted The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove. Even careful readers who use portable oxygen tanks with inhalers, as all the literary guides advise, often collapse around about page 150. It’s the clauses and the lack of knowing who all the he’s and she’s refer to, and the bizarre extended metaphors –
- Yes, yes, now I remember – oh, the clauses –
- There now, take it easy. Look, here’s a Raymond Chandler, read that and you’ll be out of here in no time.
*****
There’s an online commentary (https://mantex.co.uk/the-awkward-age/) that says this about The Awkward Age :
He goes to endless lengths in spinning a web of subtleties regarding social relationships – but the characters are so vacuous and insignificant that there is little incentive for the reader to keep track of it all. Page after page is filled with vapid posturing, insincere flattery, snobbish one-upmanship, desperately contrived bon mots, and strained metaphors. Lots of energy is expended by the characters making very oblique references to other people, usually via the use of ambiguous pronouns. It is not clear who they are talking about – both to readers and their interlocutors. The novel would be at least one third shorter if the characters made the subjects of their statements clear.
It’s all true. Check it out :
“I didn’t know she even particularly knew him.”
“It’s exactly what she would like to prevent anyone’s knowing, and her coming here to be with him when she knows I know she knows – don’t you see? - that he’s to be here, is just one of those calculations that are subtle enough to put off the scent a woman who has but half a nose.”
The characters also gush and simper over each other in an especially revolting manner. Mrs Brookenham is talking to a 35 year old guy :
You’re the most delicate thing I know, and it crops up, in the oddest way, in the intervas of your depravity. Your talk’s half the time impossible; you respect neither age nor sex nor condition; one doesn’t know what you’ll say or do next. Yet there’s in the midst of all this, and in the depths of you, a little deep-down delicious niceness, a sweet sensibility, that one has actually, one’s self, shocked as one perpetually is at you, quite to hold one’s breath and stay one’s hand for fear of ruffling or bruising.”
It's frankly unreadable. I raise my hat and make a sweeping bow to the good readers who give out 4 and 5 stars to this one, they are made of tougher stuff than me. I'm sure there's a poignant tale in here of young girls' lives twisted by the hideousness of their parents' demands, a kind of next-stage What Maisie Knew but it's too hard to penetrate Henry's insane carapace to find it.
Farewell, Henry. It was great while it lasted.
February 21, 2019
Henry James loosens the corset of convention in a comedy
of ambiguous desires and ambitions. Plenty of matrimonial
talk goes round in discreet, repetitive circles; the tenor is
always tender. A vivid worldling of 'a certain age' (41) ponders her daughter's future while manipulating a boring husby, protecting
her rotter of a son and managing a beau that the heroine-daughter fancies. Salonistas insist on keeping up appearances. A tea party falls apart when it's revealed that someone there is reading scandalous French novel. Emotional resolution is offered by a passionate friend, known as 'the old man' -- an easily shocked Jamesian standin -- who wants someone to love, just as James recognized this desperate need in himself. It's a circus, sighs the hostess, in which they must all perform: "That is how we earn our living." Henry James performs as a prissy busybody.
of ambiguous desires and ambitions. Plenty of matrimonial
talk goes round in discreet, repetitive circles; the tenor is
always tender. A vivid worldling of 'a certain age' (41) ponders her daughter's future while manipulating a boring husby, protecting
her rotter of a son and managing a beau that the heroine-daughter fancies. Salonistas insist on keeping up appearances. A tea party falls apart when it's revealed that someone there is reading scandalous French novel. Emotional resolution is offered by a passionate friend, known as 'the old man' -- an easily shocked Jamesian standin -- who wants someone to love, just as James recognized this desperate need in himself. It's a circus, sighs the hostess, in which they must all perform: "That is how we earn our living." Henry James performs as a prissy busybody.
January 29, 2013
I read this years ago, but rereading it now, I see that I made nothing of it at the time. THIS time, going very carefully, making sure not to get lost in the intricate layers of the dialogue, I found an extraordinary, extraordinarily sad story, whose young heroine's coming of age consists not in moving into adulthood but in assuming moral and emotional responsibility for her own parents -- who never parented her and whose parent she herself becomes -- and the man she continues to love even when his utter worthlessness is made most clear to her.
I couldn't help reading this in light of what a contemporary therapist would make of it all, it's such a perfect presentation, in the guise of a drawing-room/countryhouse novel of manners, of what happens when children are forced to maturity too early, and find themselves relied on and betrayed by those they should most trust to be protecting and launching them into adult life.
The story here feels at first like one that's entirely of its time -- it's just before the turn of the 20th century; London manners and mores are in flux, and the problem is how, in a "fast" circle of friends, a mother can bring her unmarried daughter into the drawing room without expurgating the talk. The solution that everyone seems to feel is right is to marry the daughter off. Much is made of the kind of innocence girls were brought up to in the past, and how that innocence is being fast eroded in the last decades of the 19th century. But the innocence James is really writing about, the innocence and experience -- are completely contemporary, or timeless.
I want also to convey that this book is great fun to read. It DOES require a lot of attention; if your mind wanders for a second, you're lost. Its best effects are missed if you don't bear down. James always writes for the really attentive careful reader (I realize I'm complimenting myself here, but why the fuck not), and with every easter egg you find in the grass as you go along, the rewards feel greater and greater. James' prose to me always has a crunchy-chewy feel to it that I find myself craving, and than which no other writer can be substituted when the craving hits.
This probably isn't the book to start off reading James with, but this, along with "What Maisie Knew", may be my two secret favorites, in that they're part of his oeuvre that are often overlooked between the triumph of "A Portrait" and those three late heavy-weight novels that are so praised and which it took me years of "training" to be able to read and understand -- only in the last 3 years, after decades of circling back to them and falling off.
I couldn't help reading this in light of what a contemporary therapist would make of it all, it's such a perfect presentation, in the guise of a drawing-room/countryhouse novel of manners, of what happens when children are forced to maturity too early, and find themselves relied on and betrayed by those they should most trust to be protecting and launching them into adult life.
The story here feels at first like one that's entirely of its time -- it's just before the turn of the 20th century; London manners and mores are in flux, and the problem is how, in a "fast" circle of friends, a mother can bring her unmarried daughter into the drawing room without expurgating the talk. The solution that everyone seems to feel is right is to marry the daughter off. Much is made of the kind of innocence girls were brought up to in the past, and how that innocence is being fast eroded in the last decades of the 19th century. But the innocence James is really writing about, the innocence and experience -- are completely contemporary, or timeless.
I want also to convey that this book is great fun to read. It DOES require a lot of attention; if your mind wanders for a second, you're lost. Its best effects are missed if you don't bear down. James always writes for the really attentive careful reader (I realize I'm complimenting myself here, but why the fuck not), and with every easter egg you find in the grass as you go along, the rewards feel greater and greater. James' prose to me always has a crunchy-chewy feel to it that I find myself craving, and than which no other writer can be substituted when the craving hits.
This probably isn't the book to start off reading James with, but this, along with "What Maisie Knew", may be my two secret favorites, in that they're part of his oeuvre that are often overlooked between the triumph of "A Portrait" and those three late heavy-weight novels that are so praised and which it took me years of "training" to be able to read and understand -- only in the last 3 years, after decades of circling back to them and falling off.
October 17, 2021
Penultimate James!!! After this I need to find a copy of his ghost stories and I've read all da James from all of my lists! OMG! What a relief
Hallelujah I am finished with the misogynist that is Henry James.
Hallelujah I am finished with the misogynist that is Henry James.
July 29, 2018
Every so often I feel this urge to read something classic to offset the tawdry "dime-store" novels I'm typically devouring. This time it's a novel by Henry James. This was his last novel before James's "final period" of three very difficult and demanding novels.
This book of manners at the end of the the 19th century in London isn't something I'd recommend to anyone who isn't already familiar with Henry James. It's an exercise in style over plot. In this case, exploring a corrupt social circle of friends almost entirely through dialog. Which means lots and lots of talking around the plot instead of getting to the meat of it. It's a book that demands a lot from the reader.
This is a book best appreciated by English literature professors or English majors. I can't imagine anyone else happily subjecting themselves to such a difficult and somewhat less than rewarding book. I'm not sure why I did it. But there you are, as James would say.
This book of manners at the end of the the 19th century in London isn't something I'd recommend to anyone who isn't already familiar with Henry James. It's an exercise in style over plot. In this case, exploring a corrupt social circle of friends almost entirely through dialog. Which means lots and lots of talking around the plot instead of getting to the meat of it. It's a book that demands a lot from the reader.
This is a book best appreciated by English literature professors or English majors. I can't imagine anyone else happily subjecting themselves to such a difficult and somewhat less than rewarding book. I'm not sure why I did it. But there you are, as James would say.
October 22, 2019
O piesa de teatru acest roman, de fapt. Totul este expus prin dialoguri, scenele sunt de interior, cu una sau doua exceptii in care ii surprindem pe participanti intr-o gradina sau in alt decor exterior. Parcurgerea acestei carti presupune ceva efort, multa atentie; daca nu tii pasul cu dialogurile ei incalcite, nu vei intelege nimic si va trebui sa reiei paragraful pentru a te lamuri.
Acest roman ne expune, in toata splendoarea lor, viata si preocuparile diverselor personaje importante si mai putin importante, aristocratice si mai putin aristocratice, de toate varstele, care se 'invart' in acelasi cerc social. Intrigile, ipocrizia, dialogurile si intalnirile lungi si inutile sunt nelipsite, la fel ca si barfele si preocuparea pentru viata personala a celorlalti. Toti se preocupa de ceea ce fac si nu fac ceilalti, fara a privi in propria 'ograda'. Personajele dialogheaza mult insa, in general, fara a spune in mod direct exact ceea ce gandesc si fara a reusi sa isi lamureasca aspectele vietii personale, ceea ce ma face sa observ inutilitatea acestei agitatii generale. Totul este incalcit, ipocrit, lipsit de discretie.
Interesant tablou al societatii londoneze a acelor vremuri, care m-a trimis cu gandul la Dostoievski si Caragiale si m-a facut sa zambesc.
O experienta interesanta acest roman, foarte diferit de ceea ce am citit pana acum de Henry James.
Acest roman ne expune, in toata splendoarea lor, viata si preocuparile diverselor personaje importante si mai putin importante, aristocratice si mai putin aristocratice, de toate varstele, care se 'invart' in acelasi cerc social. Intrigile, ipocrizia, dialogurile si intalnirile lungi si inutile sunt nelipsite, la fel ca si barfele si preocuparea pentru viata personala a celorlalti. Toti se preocupa de ceea ce fac si nu fac ceilalti, fara a privi in propria 'ograda'. Personajele dialogheaza mult insa, in general, fara a spune in mod direct exact ceea ce gandesc si fara a reusi sa isi lamureasca aspectele vietii personale, ceea ce ma face sa observ inutilitatea acestei agitatii generale. Totul este incalcit, ipocrit, lipsit de discretie.
Interesant tablou al societatii londoneze a acelor vremuri, care m-a trimis cu gandul la Dostoievski si Caragiale si m-a facut sa zambesc.
O experienta interesanta acest roman, foarte diferit de ceea ce am citit pana acum de Henry James.
Read
September 1, 2023Care ar putea fi acea vârstă ingrată și în același timp delicată dacă nu e vârsta în care trebuie să te căsătorești acum ori niciodată. Romanul deschide paginile unei societăți londoneze pline de farmec, dar și de ipocrizie la rândul său, a cărui subiect domină în toată gravitatea sa o posibilă căsătorie a Nandei Brokenham.
Pare un roman dens și plin, dar tot atât de gol și pustiu. Cred că e unul dintre romanele dificile citite de mine, iar dificultatea sa se remarcă prin abuzul nestingherit ale dialogurilor lungi, pline de vorbe alese și împachetate frumos, prezente de la o pagină la alta. Discuțiile acestor personaje se concentrează doar pe un singur subiect, incertitudinea măritișului. Iar complexitatea romanului crește odată cu mulțimea tuturor detaliilor și replicilor cu mesaje ascunse și duse doar pană la jumătate încât poți oricând să pierzi pasul și să rămâi debusolat.
În esență se zugrăvește o societate preocupată numai de viitorul celor din jur. Prietenia, familia și valorile lor sunt duse de la o extremă la alta, iar intriga sporește intensitatea unui absurd iminent.
Pare un roman dens și plin, dar tot atât de gol și pustiu. Cred că e unul dintre romanele dificile citite de mine, iar dificultatea sa se remarcă prin abuzul nestingherit ale dialogurilor lungi, pline de vorbe alese și împachetate frumos, prezente de la o pagină la alta. Discuțiile acestor personaje se concentrează doar pe un singur subiect, incertitudinea măritișului. Iar complexitatea romanului crește odată cu mulțimea tuturor detaliilor și replicilor cu mesaje ascunse și duse doar pană la jumătate încât poți oricând să pierzi pasul și să rămâi debusolat.
În esență se zugrăvește o societate preocupată numai de viitorul celor din jur. Prietenia, familia și valorile lor sunt duse de la o extremă la alta, iar intriga sporește intensitatea unui absurd iminent.
Read
December 1, 2022DNF at p.170
I am telling myself I may get back to this one one day, but I am just saying this because I still have a hard time DNFing books :D Which is silly, I know.
It's not that this is a bad book (of course it's not), but it is definitely not for me. I'm not interested in the characters, the dialogue is long and boring, often cryptic. And I am not up to 200 more pages of it.
This is my second book by Henry James. I did not love the first one I read (Daisy Miller) but I am not giving up this author yet, I still want to try the Portrait of a Lady.
Just not yet ;)
I am telling myself I may get back to this one one day, but I am just saying this because I still have a hard time DNFing books :D Which is silly, I know.
It's not that this is a bad book (of course it's not), but it is definitely not for me. I'm not interested in the characters, the dialogue is long and boring, often cryptic. And I am not up to 200 more pages of it.
This is my second book by Henry James. I did not love the first one I read (Daisy Miller) but I am not giving up this author yet, I still want to try the Portrait of a Lady.
Just not yet ;)
November 22, 2015
This novel marks yet one more qualitative shift upward in James's art. There is so much going on in this novel that it is really impossible to usefully describe in a review format like this (and ironically this novel began as an idea for a short story!). Suffice it to say, this is a deceptively difficult novel to fully comprehend. The prose is almost entirely a series of dialogues between the characters, and the lure for the reader of today is to allow yourself to be drawn into the interchange of conversation without really thinking or questioning what the readers are saying (or sometimes what they are even talking about). James does not give the reader much help in the task of finding the information behind the chatter; characters are often described as talking "cheerfully" or "gaily" and James leaves the meta-conversational text at that level; in other words, he deliberately misleads the reader into complacently assuming attitudes on the part of his characters that they, in fact, do not have. This is a brilliant piece of psychological fictional craft that allows the most cruel and (sometimes inadvertent) neglect by some characters against others to go almost entirely unnoticed at the surface level of the text. If the reader has done the work of puzzling out the feelings and events that underlie the conversations, though, the climax (which I believe comes within the last 5 pages of the novel) is devastating and incredibly moving. I realize even this review will strike some as vague and unhelpful, but I think I need to reread the novel because I'm not sure, even now, that I fully understand what happens in it. It's a very brilliant bit of writing on James's part.
May 1, 2021
Ok ok 4 stars because I’m too chicken to give Henry 3 (or, whisper it, 2). My rationale is any book which makes me think must be worth something.
I’m still puzzling it out. I’ll have to read the last few chapters again. Very near the end, there is a chapter where all the characters repeatedly comment on the momentous events of the previous chapter, and in retrospect this particular chapter would appear to have been somewhat climactic in the novel as a whole. I had read it entirely innocent of any particular significance - it seemed to at the time just another social chit chat chapter (90% of this novel is set in aristocratic London drawing rooms).
The novel developed in a way I was completely not expecting. I had anticipated James was contrasting the apparently innocent Nanda, the late teen at the eponymous (or is it?) awkward age, with her morally void, socially ambitious, manipulative mother. I assumed we’d find out Nanda was the really manipulative one. Mrs Brookenham does end up languishing abandoned and defeated in her drawing room, whilst Nanda loses her man (not a particularly unusual event in James) but gains the promise of a fortune and escapes the corruption of her family circle.
I’m still puzzling it out. I’ll have to read the last few chapters again. Very near the end, there is a chapter where all the characters repeatedly comment on the momentous events of the previous chapter, and in retrospect this particular chapter would appear to have been somewhat climactic in the novel as a whole. I had read it entirely innocent of any particular significance - it seemed to at the time just another social chit chat chapter (90% of this novel is set in aristocratic London drawing rooms).
The novel developed in a way I was completely not expecting. I had anticipated James was contrasting the apparently innocent Nanda, the late teen at the eponymous (or is it?) awkward age, with her morally void, socially ambitious, manipulative mother. I assumed we’d find out Nanda was the really manipulative one. Mrs Brookenham does end up languishing abandoned and defeated in her drawing room, whilst Nanda loses her man (not a particularly unusual event in James) but gains the promise of a fortune and escapes the corruption of her family circle.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 30, 2011
The Awkward Age is a truly interesting work of James', from a time when he was very involved with plays. It is a work of prose carefully crafted to read much like a play-script; it has very little narratorial voice and concerns itself mostly with dialogue. This was fascinating for me because, with nearly no narration, reading the novel was like being in the same room with these people, hearing what they say and seeing what they do, but nothing else. Thus, one must draw upon his own experiences in conversing--motives, gestures, etc.--in order to properly "figure out" the characters. Brilliant.
November 30, 2007
Just kidding.
February 9, 2017
I am always amazed how Henry James has an effect on me after I have read one of his stories & this one sure left me feeling quite sad & in awe of his ability to create a story with characters so unique to the times he writes. In almost all his books that I have read thus far, I start out uncertain where the story is going & really more confused in this one, where whole attention is needed but feeling rewarded at the end but many lose ends & unexplained happenings are still apparent, yet I loved this story nonetheless. It is written in almost all dialogue format with some scenery to have a feeling of a room or location but even that is scant. It is a turn of the twenty century in London society where a married woman yet a mother of two is the center of this circle of friends whose main focus is for entertaining themselves, others & commenting on their circle. This coming of age written in Harper's Weekly in 1898-1899 about 2 young girls, Nanda & Aggie, where placement in society is the focus of their mothers. One girl is quite exposed to her mother's corrupt circle & the other quite protected tells their story & of the circle of friends. An elderly gentleman who was in love with one of the young girl's grandmother comes to the London from the country with an idea in mind. The parents looking more for their own pleasures than of their children. The humor is present but not the focus of the story. The use of the words Vulger & Beautiful abound in this novel, Henry James must have been having such a play of words.
June 25, 2019
Thank god we don’t choose who we marry based on familial expectations anymore. (Says the gay man on his second marriage because he was expected to marry a woman the first time.)
July 18, 2014
I think Henry James must have had some issues with parents as he was growing up. Now I'm not saying that his parents were bad parents or bad people, but he sure has created some truly monstrous parental units in a good bit of his fiction, and the parents and adult guardians in The Awkward Age are certainly no exception and are right up there with 'Dr, Sloper' ("Washington Square"), 'Gilbert Osmond' ("The Portrait of a Lady"), or little Maisie's parents ("What Maisie Knew").
This is a novel that requires careful reading and attention to the details. This entire novel is a series of set pieces of dialog and 'thought-balloons' that all revolve around a salon of conniving schemers and plotters that are involved in trying to marry off their daughter or guardian to any number of wealthy older men; or, a man who is actively trying to marry one of the young women; or, the man having an affair with one young lady's mother; or, the man trying not to become married to either of the young women; and a kind of creepy much, much older man trying to replace a long-lost love with his quasi-fantasy-based fixation on one of the young women--Miss Fernanda 'Nanda' Brookeham, one of the young heroines of the novel.
It is my understanding that this novel was written shortly after the traumatic experience of his failed play, Guy Domville in the London theater in late-1895. The plotting, dialog, and scenes utilized in the novel I think are reflective of James's theatrical experiences, and I frankly don't know that it really helps the novel in the long run. Because of this reliance on dialog and inner thought, this is not a novel that one can read casually, or with the television on in the background, it really does demand one-hundred percent of the reader's concentration. If the reader commits to it in this fashion, he or she will be greatly rewarded as the 'veils are lifted' and one is given a rare glimpse into the day-to-day (and dare I say, at times, tedious) hum-drum of English society in the late-19th century.
I found The Awkward Age a fascinating book to read, and certainly one that I will pick up again and find a quiet corner of the world to sit down and re-enter the salon of 'Mrs Brook' and her gaggle of 'hangers on'.
This is a novel that requires careful reading and attention to the details. This entire novel is a series of set pieces of dialog and 'thought-balloons' that all revolve around a salon of conniving schemers and plotters that are involved in trying to marry off their daughter or guardian to any number of wealthy older men; or, a man who is actively trying to marry one of the young women; or, the man having an affair with one young lady's mother; or, the man trying not to become married to either of the young women; and a kind of creepy much, much older man trying to replace a long-lost love with his quasi-fantasy-based fixation on one of the young women--Miss Fernanda 'Nanda' Brookeham, one of the young heroines of the novel.
It is my understanding that this novel was written shortly after the traumatic experience of his failed play, Guy Domville in the London theater in late-1895. The plotting, dialog, and scenes utilized in the novel I think are reflective of James's theatrical experiences, and I frankly don't know that it really helps the novel in the long run. Because of this reliance on dialog and inner thought, this is not a novel that one can read casually, or with the television on in the background, it really does demand one-hundred percent of the reader's concentration. If the reader commits to it in this fashion, he or she will be greatly rewarded as the 'veils are lifted' and one is given a rare glimpse into the day-to-day (and dare I say, at times, tedious) hum-drum of English society in the late-19th century.
I found The Awkward Age a fascinating book to read, and certainly one that I will pick up again and find a quiet corner of the world to sit down and re-enter the salon of 'Mrs Brook' and her gaggle of 'hangers on'.
June 3, 2012
Ordinarily, I enjoy a good Henry James book. But this book left me so cold. Ostensibly, it is about a coming-of-age girl and the immoral influences she is surrounded by. The characters are a bit flat, but what irritated me most about the book was certain little catch-phrases the author used to death. Instead of saying, "he said," when a character expressed himself warmly, he always says "he ejaculated." After the third time on one page, it got very annoying. Another term he used, to describe the other person in a conversation besides the speaker was to call him/her the speaker's "interlocutor/interlocutress." This grew extremely old after the fiftieth usage. And finally, if a speaker hesitated, he always says "he hung fire." This was also outrageously overused. And since 92% of the book is dialogue, these phrases came into use way too frequently. I had forgotten how James can elongate a sentence with innumerable parenthetical expressions, and endless commas, until you have quite lost the sense of what he is trying to say. I would not recommend this book to anyone, even people who enjoy a good James novel.
June 30, 2012
Damn you, Henry James. I remain a faithful apologist but your social nuance has stopped aging well. The wine's turning to vinegar or something. To be fair, it seems this one's just for the hardest of the hardcore, which makes sense because I didn't understand half of the subtle intrigue going on, or when people in conversations were being wildly controversial or spoiling secrets or just speaking off the cuff. In true Jamesian fashion, the heroine is neither beautiful nor plain but aesthetically captivating for her grace and how she looks like her dead gran, and she's also seemingly vivacious and full of dangerous candor (O! of the times) now that she's been "let out" to sit downstairs and take her own teas and suddenly disappear out into the country with an old man. I think I missed a lot of fun little bits, like her mom is a cougar and totally hates her in a sort of supportive little way.
Anyway, damn you Henry James! You slowed me down.
Anyway, damn you Henry James! You slowed me down.
January 26, 2009
So...this is not my favorite Henry James book, and I generally love Henry James.
It's not awful, but it's particularly difficult to follow (even for James, who is famously esoteric with his character's thoughts) and just...not terribly interesting.
It's not awful, but it's particularly difficult to follow (even for James, who is famously esoteric with his character's thoughts) and just...not terribly interesting.
June 29, 2016
I really hate giving any book a low rating but this one was really bad. I've tried other Henry James books and only found one I really liked. Not sure if it's the author or me.
August 15, 2022
A young woman learns of adults’ callous selfishness. A study of adolescence in a libertine/liberated society.
January 3, 2020
Nu m-a prins deloc. M-am chinuit sa o termina si am renuntat la ultimele 50 de pagini.
December 2, 2018
Unyielding: A Review of The Awkward Age (1899) by Henry James
James mentions at one point in this novel that he assumes a reader unusually attentive to the “mutual relations” of his characters. The scarcity of such readers may explain the frequent estimation of the book as little more than “talk” carried on by a set of lightweight English aristocrats and saturated with sexual innuendo. I agree that following this story demands patience and that its length and frequent opaqueness can be irritating. But the idea at the heart of it is worth the trouble.
Not long before he wrote The Awkward Age (1899), the London theatrical audience had rejected James’s efforts at playwriting—a failure that reminded him of the hurts of his childhood. Back then young James had a sense that the adult world had all but forgotten him and that his masculinity was in question. As usual James turned to his writing to deal with the return, some forty years later, of these feelings of self-doubt. He invented youthful characters, often female, who are at the mercy of insufficiently protective, sometimes brutal, grown-ups. Thus in The Other House (1896) a woman prevented from marrying a man while his three year old daughter was still alive drowns that daughter in a lake. Then Maisie, the slightly older girl in What Maisie Knew (1897), painfully discovers that only one person in her entire adult world, parents included, cares enough to protect her.
In The Turn of the Screw (1898) James identifies not just with Miles and Flora, two children under the care of an unnamed governess, but with that twenty year old, religiously educated governess herself. The ghosts in the story represent the governess’ own fears, implicitly sexual, of reaching maturity—fears she projects onto her young charges. One of them, six year old Flora, finally breaks off her connection with the governess in favor of living in the secular world of her uncle, the distant master of a spooky English castle called Bly. Flora stands for the governess’s desire to enter the master’s decadent environment. By contrast Miles, Flora’s eight year old brother, is intrigued by the mysterious ghosts of Bly. He represents everything in the governess that is afraid of “damnation” and that, under the guise of shielding Miles from it, hopes to shield herself. At the end of the story, when Miles heart stops in the protective and inappropriately sexual embrace of the governess, the reader is witness to the impossibility of reaching maturity free from the taint of evil.
The morally value-free world beyond Bly in The Turn of the Screw has multiple equivalents in The Awkward Age. The scenes of this novel take place in various, mostly aristocratic, households. A typical one belongs to the ugly Mr. Mitchett (Mitchy) who, shortly after marrying one young lady, has no qualms about planning to marry another.
A less well-to-do household is that of Mr. Vanderbank—a bachelor, civil servant, and the darling of a social circle presided over by Mrs. Brookenham who, though married to the ineffectual Edward Brookenham, “loves” young Vanderbank. So indeed does her daughter Nanda (short for Fernanda), an attraction that awkwardly makes the daughter a competitor with her mother for the chronically noncommittal “Van.” Mrs. Brookenham reigns throughout the novel as the very queen of “talk,’ much of it implicitly sexual. Her whole social set, as it moves from one Victorian household to another, reminds me of the rotating guests on our T.V talk shows. Not much of what these people say rises above juicy gossip.
At the center of James’s interest here, however, is the relationship of eighteen year old Nanda and Mr. Longdon, a bachelor like young Vanderbank but one old enough, again awkwardly, to be her grandfather. Something of an outsider to Mrs. Brookenham’s circle, Mr. Longdon admires qualities like constancy and forthrightness without always having practiced them himself. He wants to protect Nanda, and has the money to do so, in part because he understands her vulnerability in the marriage market and in part because of his long ago love for her grandmother, Lady Julia, who rejected him but to whom Nanda bears a remarkable physical resemblance.
Without protest from Nanda, Mr. Longdon takes her under his morally protective but also sexually attracted care. At the end of the novel the two retire from the decadence of London to Longdon’s comfortable country house—a slightly scandalous arrangement that is nevertheless more or less safe, considering the “couple’s” huge age difference.
This awkward relationship is close to what James wanted for himself. Nanda is a careful observer of life, as is Longdon, and although he often calls her “child” and she gives every indication of sexual innocence, he is charmed by the vitality of her presence and by her uncanny insight into the behavior of others in contrast to the chatter of her mother’s social set. Nanda shares Longdon’s controlling protectiveness. Just as he offers Vanderbank a handsome dowry to entice him into marrying Nanda, she works to engineer a marriage between her friend “little Aggie” and the wealthy Mitchy (it quickly turns disastrous). Longdon’s country house is a place for the insightful observation James considered vital to his art, and Nanda is his likeminded muse. She offers him the sexual attractiveness of a mate without the complicated risks of sexual and husbandly involvement.
It is important to our understanding of James that we do not shrink from the narcissism, even abusive control, in this fictional relationship of Longdon to Nanda. Henry James, as we have seen, revisited the damaging self-doubts of his childhood in The Other House, What Maisie Knew, The Turn of the Screw and again here in The Awkward Age. But he did not do so to overcome these doubts, as in self-therapy, but to ratify decisions he had made at the very outset of his career: to be a spectator of life more than a participant in it, to appease his fear of women, to avoid committed relationships like marriage, and in all these ways to satisfy his ambition to become a master of his art.
The Awkward Age should be read in the context of James’s first novel, Watch and Ward, which he disowned most likely because it contained fairly blunt sexual references likely to offend his Victorian audience. Watch and Ward is about an affluent man who melodramatically acquires a female child as his ward. As she grows older, he in effect trains her to become his wife which, still more melodramatically, she eventually does. But of course she does not become his wife in the sense that she retains her independence of him. She is a sexy statue whose life he has managed so as keep her in his collection.
James mentions at one point in this novel that he assumes a reader unusually attentive to the “mutual relations” of his characters. The scarcity of such readers may explain the frequent estimation of the book as little more than “talk” carried on by a set of lightweight English aristocrats and saturated with sexual innuendo. I agree that following this story demands patience and that its length and frequent opaqueness can be irritating. But the idea at the heart of it is worth the trouble.
Not long before he wrote The Awkward Age (1899), the London theatrical audience had rejected James’s efforts at playwriting—a failure that reminded him of the hurts of his childhood. Back then young James had a sense that the adult world had all but forgotten him and that his masculinity was in question. As usual James turned to his writing to deal with the return, some forty years later, of these feelings of self-doubt. He invented youthful characters, often female, who are at the mercy of insufficiently protective, sometimes brutal, grown-ups. Thus in The Other House (1896) a woman prevented from marrying a man while his three year old daughter was still alive drowns that daughter in a lake. Then Maisie, the slightly older girl in What Maisie Knew (1897), painfully discovers that only one person in her entire adult world, parents included, cares enough to protect her.
In The Turn of the Screw (1898) James identifies not just with Miles and Flora, two children under the care of an unnamed governess, but with that twenty year old, religiously educated governess herself. The ghosts in the story represent the governess’ own fears, implicitly sexual, of reaching maturity—fears she projects onto her young charges. One of them, six year old Flora, finally breaks off her connection with the governess in favor of living in the secular world of her uncle, the distant master of a spooky English castle called Bly. Flora stands for the governess’s desire to enter the master’s decadent environment. By contrast Miles, Flora’s eight year old brother, is intrigued by the mysterious ghosts of Bly. He represents everything in the governess that is afraid of “damnation” and that, under the guise of shielding Miles from it, hopes to shield herself. At the end of the story, when Miles heart stops in the protective and inappropriately sexual embrace of the governess, the reader is witness to the impossibility of reaching maturity free from the taint of evil.
The morally value-free world beyond Bly in The Turn of the Screw has multiple equivalents in The Awkward Age. The scenes of this novel take place in various, mostly aristocratic, households. A typical one belongs to the ugly Mr. Mitchett (Mitchy) who, shortly after marrying one young lady, has no qualms about planning to marry another.
A less well-to-do household is that of Mr. Vanderbank—a bachelor, civil servant, and the darling of a social circle presided over by Mrs. Brookenham who, though married to the ineffectual Edward Brookenham, “loves” young Vanderbank. So indeed does her daughter Nanda (short for Fernanda), an attraction that awkwardly makes the daughter a competitor with her mother for the chronically noncommittal “Van.” Mrs. Brookenham reigns throughout the novel as the very queen of “talk,’ much of it implicitly sexual. Her whole social set, as it moves from one Victorian household to another, reminds me of the rotating guests on our T.V talk shows. Not much of what these people say rises above juicy gossip.
At the center of James’s interest here, however, is the relationship of eighteen year old Nanda and Mr. Longdon, a bachelor like young Vanderbank but one old enough, again awkwardly, to be her grandfather. Something of an outsider to Mrs. Brookenham’s circle, Mr. Longdon admires qualities like constancy and forthrightness without always having practiced them himself. He wants to protect Nanda, and has the money to do so, in part because he understands her vulnerability in the marriage market and in part because of his long ago love for her grandmother, Lady Julia, who rejected him but to whom Nanda bears a remarkable physical resemblance.
Without protest from Nanda, Mr. Longdon takes her under his morally protective but also sexually attracted care. At the end of the novel the two retire from the decadence of London to Longdon’s comfortable country house—a slightly scandalous arrangement that is nevertheless more or less safe, considering the “couple’s” huge age difference.
This awkward relationship is close to what James wanted for himself. Nanda is a careful observer of life, as is Longdon, and although he often calls her “child” and she gives every indication of sexual innocence, he is charmed by the vitality of her presence and by her uncanny insight into the behavior of others in contrast to the chatter of her mother’s social set. Nanda shares Longdon’s controlling protectiveness. Just as he offers Vanderbank a handsome dowry to entice him into marrying Nanda, she works to engineer a marriage between her friend “little Aggie” and the wealthy Mitchy (it quickly turns disastrous). Longdon’s country house is a place for the insightful observation James considered vital to his art, and Nanda is his likeminded muse. She offers him the sexual attractiveness of a mate without the complicated risks of sexual and husbandly involvement.
It is important to our understanding of James that we do not shrink from the narcissism, even abusive control, in this fictional relationship of Longdon to Nanda. Henry James, as we have seen, revisited the damaging self-doubts of his childhood in The Other House, What Maisie Knew, The Turn of the Screw and again here in The Awkward Age. But he did not do so to overcome these doubts, as in self-therapy, but to ratify decisions he had made at the very outset of his career: to be a spectator of life more than a participant in it, to appease his fear of women, to avoid committed relationships like marriage, and in all these ways to satisfy his ambition to become a master of his art.
The Awkward Age should be read in the context of James’s first novel, Watch and Ward, which he disowned most likely because it contained fairly blunt sexual references likely to offend his Victorian audience. Watch and Ward is about an affluent man who melodramatically acquires a female child as his ward. As she grows older, he in effect trains her to become his wife which, still more melodramatically, she eventually does. But of course she does not become his wife in the sense that she retains her independence of him. She is a sexy statue whose life he has managed so as keep her in his collection.
June 9, 2022
I quite like all the obscurity and indirection, but unfortunately this is a bit like reading an 800 page long Oscar Wilde play that isn't funny. The Europeans (including the UK, because no matter what they say, they're European compared to the rest of us) did terrible things to each other in those bourgeois drawing rooms, and they did astonishingly terrible things to young women in those bourgeois drawing rooms, and it's reasonable to make fun of that... but only if it's funny.
March 30, 2018
How can a Henry James novel be dull? Too much conversation, idiotic characters, and a lack of languid description, that's how.
April 1, 2024
”Everything’s different from what it used to be.”
Perhaps James’s funniest book? How I love his wistful and bewildered old men!
Perhaps James’s funniest book? How I love his wistful and bewildered old men!
August 31, 2013
This is an extremely difficult and slow moving novel. It is a novel of transition, transition in several respects too, from the conventional novel to a novel of consciousness of the kind to be expected from say Virginia Wolf. It tells a story but one has the feeling that the stors is often the pretext, the line, on which to hang out the linen, some of it less than wholly clean of personal motivation and drive. Apparently it was written in reaction by the writer to his rebuff when his first play was performed. The first of his plays (and the last? I am not sure) to be produced was received with derision by a section of the audience and, so I have read, Henry James staggered home to begin to write a theatre piece in the disguise of a novel. Certainly, the dialogue dominates to the extent that there is almost no physical description of events and if this is a play, then I suppose it is left to the producer/imagination to conjure up the scenes. I hope I do not anger or irritate anyone by suggesting that it is something of a "ladies' book" being so much of a natter and gossip, so extremely dainty and fastidious in its suggestion of the illicit with so little space for reflection, no space at all. All thetime it is as though one hears the gigling of adolescent girls behind a curtain with a forbidden text or pictures in their eager, nervous hands.
The power for me lies in the contrast between the facade of convention and the struggle for position and wealth and satisfaction including erotic satisfaction which is persued relentlessly under the surface of a placid seeming social pond of polite discourse and appropriate behaviour. The pond is temming with covetous life. This is a book of conversion too in that people are converted to new positions not of belief but of realisation, about others most especially. There is probably room here for a seering Marxist critique. I do not know if Raymond Williams wrote on this book, but I can well imagine how he might have done. As in Balzac, the striving for possession and security seems to drive the characters relentlessly. I am tempted to give this book only three stars, because I did not at a first read anyway, find the charcaters for the most part very well dilineated but it may be that this would change upon a second read. Above all, the novel is intelligent, so inteligent in fact that it is a little awesome (in the old fashioned sense of that word). It also has little patience with readers with, er... little patience. It requires time and more time. However, I think that time invested will bring a substantial reward to the discerning reader. For each of us to decide how corrupted and corruptible the characters are and how much to blame for their own misdeeds, if the quest for money and possession are after all to be seen as misdeeds and not immortal biologically impelled behaviour.
The power for me lies in the contrast between the facade of convention and the struggle for position and wealth and satisfaction including erotic satisfaction which is persued relentlessly under the surface of a placid seeming social pond of polite discourse and appropriate behaviour. The pond is temming with covetous life. This is a book of conversion too in that people are converted to new positions not of belief but of realisation, about others most especially. There is probably room here for a seering Marxist critique. I do not know if Raymond Williams wrote on this book, but I can well imagine how he might have done. As in Balzac, the striving for possession and security seems to drive the characters relentlessly. I am tempted to give this book only three stars, because I did not at a first read anyway, find the charcaters for the most part very well dilineated but it may be that this would change upon a second read. Above all, the novel is intelligent, so inteligent in fact that it is a little awesome (in the old fashioned sense of that word). It also has little patience with readers with, er... little patience. It requires time and more time. However, I think that time invested will bring a substantial reward to the discerning reader. For each of us to decide how corrupted and corruptible the characters are and how much to blame for their own misdeeds, if the quest for money and possession are after all to be seen as misdeeds and not immortal biologically impelled behaviour.
December 17, 2019
I appreciate the experimental nature of the book, and the experiment was productive if not successful. But the effete characters and their dull problems weighed on me from the start. Glad I read it, but not likely to read it again. A important but kind of boring moment in the history of the novel.
August 7, 2014
Cuenta Henry James en 'The middle years' que cuando visitó Londres por primera vez sintió una honda emoción cuando pasó por Craven Street y creyó casi místicamente que estaba ante un auténtico escenario dickensiano. James pudo conocer en vida a Charles Dickens si hubiera viajado a Inglaterra antes, puesto que acababa de morir al llegar. No obstante, ya lo percibía como un clásico y no podía evitar ver Londres con los ojos del autor de 'Oliver Twist'. Hoy Craven Street parece una calle anodina, aunque por esos años vivió en ella Herman Melville. Ahora, por tanto, tenemos a tres escritores entre los que escoger al recorrer la calle y los sedimentos de recuerdos van aumentando.
"(...) no fui a Craven Street en busca de alojamiento sino que lo hice, y a la primera oportunidad, en busca de una atmósfera, ni más ni menos (...) Y forma parte de esta reminiscencia (...) que, en ese instante, al hallarme en pleno Craven Street, sufriera una de esas alucinaciones cuyo precioso efecto tanto detestamos a pesar de que somos incapaces de expresarlo, y en el cual se entremezclan el dueño estético en presencia de su objeto con la caída mortal en la desesperación (...)
El precioso efecto en el caso de Craven Street (...) era sólo que toda la procesión de Dickens marchaba de arriba abajo, todo el mundo de Dickens se asomaba por las extrañas y algo siniestras ventanas, pues era el Dickens socialmente siniestro, me temo, antes que el optimista o el desconcertante cómico, quien a esas alturas resultaba ser el más apto para recibirme con sus argumentos. Y entre estos argumentos estaba la imagen de aquella inescrutable calle a la orilla del río, poblada de sombras por la acumulación de sufrimientos indescriptibles".
"(...) no fui a Craven Street en busca de alojamiento sino que lo hice, y a la primera oportunidad, en busca de una atmósfera, ni más ni menos (...) Y forma parte de esta reminiscencia (...) que, en ese instante, al hallarme en pleno Craven Street, sufriera una de esas alucinaciones cuyo precioso efecto tanto detestamos a pesar de que somos incapaces de expresarlo, y en el cual se entremezclan el dueño estético en presencia de su objeto con la caída mortal en la desesperación (...)
El precioso efecto en el caso de Craven Street (...) era sólo que toda la procesión de Dickens marchaba de arriba abajo, todo el mundo de Dickens se asomaba por las extrañas y algo siniestras ventanas, pues era el Dickens socialmente siniestro, me temo, antes que el optimista o el desconcertante cómico, quien a esas alturas resultaba ser el más apto para recibirme con sus argumentos. Y entre estos argumentos estaba la imagen de aquella inescrutable calle a la orilla del río, poblada de sombras por la acumulación de sufrimientos indescriptibles".
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