A Bundle of Letters

A Bundle of Letters is a short epistolary novella by Henry James, first published in The Parisian in December 1879 and then collected in book form the following year. It is a small comic piece that James wrote quickly, almost as a sketch, but it has stayed in print because it is one of the most entertaining things he ever did.

The whole story is told through letters written by guests at a Parisian boarding house. There are five voices in total, including an enthusiastic young American woman named Miranda Hope, a stiff Bostonian, an Englishman in Paris on business, a French man of letters with strong opinions about everything, and a German philosopher who takes notes on everyone else. Each writer describes the same dinners and conversations from a wildly different angle, and the comedy comes from how badly they read each other.

James is poking fun at national stereotypes and at the kind of person who travels abroad to write home about it, but the satire is gentle. Miranda Hope in particular comes across as silly and sincere at the same time, and her letters to her mother in Maine are full of the cheerful misunderstanding that James found so interesting about young Americans in Europe. The German philosopher’s contributions are the sharpest, because James gives him just enough academic vanity to read the entire boarding house as a case study in race and culture.

This is one of the easiest James novellas to recommend to a first time reader. There is no thick James paragraph here, no late style with its endless qualifications. Each letter is short and ends quickly, and the whole thing can be read in an afternoon. It also makes a good pair with Daisy Miller and An International Episode, both from the same period, when James was working out his ideas about Americans abroad in shorter forms.