Henry James's Fluid Texts of the 1890s: The Other House as a Transgeneric Case Study

Abstract

In the 1890s, and following his involvement with theatre, Henry James conceived and executed a series of works whose original ideas, he argued, were equally good for narratives as for plays. Though discussed in dramatic terms in his notebooks, some of these ideas were novelized directly and became The Spoils of Poynton (1896), What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Awkward Age (1898–99). Others, however, fluctuated between narrative and drama for more than a decade in such a way that critics have seen them as experimental milestones leading to a new novel. This paper seeks to question this benevolent view with concrete reference to The Other House, contributing evidence, both textual and contextual, towards a more realistic and pragmatic assessment of James's genre-switching strategies in the late 1890s.