2. Global apprenticeship

Abstract

‘Global apprenticeship’ discusses how Henry James pursued a global apprenticeship, during which he produced formidable reviews of European and American writers. He schooled himself deliberately in the methods of an international array of masters, including Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Ivan Turgenev. James’s early heroines from this apprenticeship period include Eugenia Münster, Daisy Miller, and Catherine Sloper, of, respectively, The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1879), and Washington Square (1880). By making complexly imagined young women the engines of these stories, these narratives show how riveting the question of what the young woman will do, and why, can be.