A Most Extraordinary Case

A Most Extraordinary Case is a short story by Henry James, first published in the Atlantic Monthly in April 1868 and collected in Stories Revived in 1885. It is one of his early Civil War stories, written while the war was still fresh in memory, and one of the more affecting pieces of his early career.

The story follows Colonel Ferdinand Mason, a young Union officer who has been seriously wounded in the war and who has been brought to the country house of his aunt to recover. Mason is weak, depressed, and uncertain whether he wants to recover at all. His cousin Caroline, a young woman of considerable charm and intelligence, takes responsibility for nursing him through the long convalescence. A young doctor named Horace Knight is engaged to attend Mason and visits the house regularly. The story follows the slow recovery and the developing relationships among the four characters across a summer in the country.

Mason gradually comes to love Caroline. The doctor is also attracted to her. Caroline, sympathetic to the wounded soldier but practical about his prospects, finds herself in a position the story does not let her resolve easily. Mason’s physical recovery is uncertain, his future is unclear, and the doctor offers her a more straightforward path. The story works through the slow recognition by Mason of what is happening and his quiet resignation to a situation he cannot really compete in.

The ending is one of the more painful in his early work. James does not soften the result and does not give Mason any easy consolation. The story is structurally similar to several other early James pieces in which a wounded or weakened male character watches a healthier rival win the woman they both love, and is one of the better worked out versions of that pattern. The young James was clearly thinking through the question of what war and illness do to a man’s place in the romantic and social world he returns to, and this story is one of his most concentrated answers.

The story is about forty pages long and works as a single sitting. It pairs naturally with Poor Richard and The Story of a Year, his other early Civil War tales.