A Cut Version of what Maisie Knew

Abstract

CURRENT references all give mistaken dates for the serial publication of James's What Maisie Knew in the British monthly, the New Review, February-July, i897.' Actually the story continues through the September issue. The error, presumably originating in Phillips's bibliography of Henry James, would be insignificant were it not associated with another peculiarity of the serial, that the full text of the novel is severely cut in the numbers beginning with July. The size and the special nature of the excisions make it clear that they are not more of the stylistic revisions James habitually made in his texts. The cutting of a work in which he took particular pride calls for some explanations of its cause and its results. The cuts are so extensive as to reduce the text of the last half of the novel by one third. By a rough estimate they are equivalent to about 55 pages in the first British edition, which has 304 pages in all. The individual omissions range in length from a sentence to, in one instance, two chapters. Most of them are descriptive passages and cycles of dialogue from a fraction of a page to two pages long. The substance of the thirty-one chapters of the complete novel appears in twenty-four chapters, the last fourteen having been condensed into seven. The novel appeared without cuts in the American periodical Chap Book, January I5-August I, I897, and was therefore nearly