The Novels of the 1890s

Abstract

The years between The Tragic Muse and the production of James’s next novels were filled with the writing of stories and reviews, but also with his great attempt at writing for the stage. The story of this attempt and failure is well documented,1 and there has been speculation as to the effect this period had on the subsequent novels. Looking broadly at the three novels which followed — The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew (1897), and The Awkward Age (1899) — there seems to me to emerge a general shift in framework and direction from the novels discussed in Chapter 5. The world portrayed is no longer a public but a private one, and along with this there is no longer a sense of a general, public consensus as to the nature of events or realities. Perhaps this shift away from a large many-faceted public world was in part due to a failure of confidence after the dismal reception afforded his drama; but the changing premises of the novels opened up the possibility of a greater weight being given to the individual vision. Part of the same development is the loss of the ‘omniscient narrator’, the voice speaking over and above the characters, convincing the reader of some certainty as to what ‘really’ happened. Each novel still contains a society which has rules and structures, but the possibility of a personal view of all of this, even of a re-naming and re-structuring, is opened up for the conscious individual — often a vulnerable figure armed only with perception, an artist or a woman.