Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classi - Henry James [274]
He heard her out in stillness, watching her face but not moving. Then he only said: “I’ll marry you, mind you, in an hour.”
“As we were?”
“As we were. ”
But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. “We shall never be again as we were!”
THE END
Endnotes
1 (p. 3) Long had I turned it over ... seeing the theme as formidable: Henry James is writing the preface in 1909, years after he first sketched out his ideas for the story in his notebooks (1894), and after the actual writing of the novel (1901-1902). In The Ambassadors, he worked from a lengthy and very detailed outline that he had submitted to his publishers; this outline survives, and is now in the Widener Library at Harvard University. James prepared a similar but shorter and less detailed outline for Wings at some point and submitted it to his publishers, but it has been lost.
2 (p. 4) the poet essentially can’t be concerned with the act of dying.... it is still by the act of living that [the sick] appeal to him, and appeal the more as the conditions plot against them and prescribe the battle: This is as clear a statement as one finds in the novel summing up James’s negative attitude toward the death scene of the nineteenth-century novelistic tradition. Characters in James’s novels are not depicted on a death bed, surrounded by mourning relatives and gasping out final words. Death is more of a disappearance. Characters die offstage and out of sight, and the focus is on the impact of the death on the living.
3 (p. 13) There is no economy of treatment without an adopted, a related point of view: James’s conception of the well-made novel stressed the importance of the point of view from which the story is told or narrated, an idea that has been influential in modern literary criticism. See R. P. Blackmur, “Introduction,” in James’s The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, pp. vii-xxxix (see “For Further Reading”).
4 (p. 33) He put the question with a charming air of sudden spiritual heat.... “what’s called in the business world, I believe, an ‘asset’ ”: James seems to have originally projected a larger role for Lionel Croy in the story, but Croy disappears after book first. Croy’s comments on the business world, as well as subsequent references by Lord Mark, display a hostility to all things commercial that was probably close to what James himself felt. James never had much direct experience with or knowledge of industry and commerce, but he was keenly aware of the business details of publishing. He did not like the tendencies that were evident even in his own time for publishers to push the popular “blockbuster” over serious fiction. Some of these issues are explored in James’s short story “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896); see Peter Rawlings, ed., Henry james’ Shorter Masterpieces, vol. 2, pp. 46-88.
5 (p. 53) the present winter’s end: James does not tell us exactly when the novel takes place. We infer that it is set at the end of the Victorian era—around the turn of the century. The 1997 lain Softley movie version of The Wings of the Dove assigns a later date (1910), perhaps to bring the setting closer to World War I and heighten the sense of foreboding that hovers over the action.
6 (p. 55) all the high dim things she lumped together as of the mind: James does not tell us in detail what education Kate Croy has received. We learn that she has attended schools on the Continent and has become attracted to all things foreign. In post-Victorian England, women were not yet “in business” or in “the professions.” While young Victorian women of any social standing usually received enough education to become governesses if they were not able to marry, the general intent was to have one’s daughters exposed to art, music, and modern languages with a view to finding a desirable partner in marriage. Kate Croy felt shortchanged in the life of the mind and was attracted to Densher in part because he filled