Volume 49, Number 7 · April 25, 2002
James's Last Bow
By Jean Strouse
Reviewing a new novel by Henry James on October 5, 1911, the Times Liter-ary Supplement announced: 'And now comes 'The Outcry' to astonish [James's] admirers with the phenomenon of a positively exciting plot. We venture to add also, a plot almost excessively 'up-to-date.''[1] That the reviewer so heralded the plot had to do with the famous inaccessibility of the author's great previous novels—The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. When The Wings of the Dove appeared in 1902, James's brother William complained: 'You've reversed every traditional canon of story-telling (especially the fundamental one of telling the story, which you carefully avoid).' The dramatic, plot-driven Outcry, which had in fact started out as a play, proved far more popular than its immediate predecessors, running through five printings in a few weeks, 'whereas,' its pleased but somewhat embarrassed author told Edith Wharton, it had 'taken the poor old [Golden Bowl] eight or nine years to get even into a third.'
Feature, 2025 words
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