At Isella

At Isella is an early short story by Henry James, first published in the Galaxy magazine in August 1871. It is one of his Italian stories from the early period, written during the years when James was first discovering the European subject matter that would define his career.

The story is set in the small Italian village of Isella, just over the Simplon Pass from Switzerland on the road into Italy. The narrator is an American traveler who has stopped at the village inn for the night during a journey south. While there he meets an Italian woman who has fled an unhappy marriage in Milan and is making her way north to find refuge with relatives in Switzerland. The story is essentially a long evening conversation between the two, in which she tells him her history and he listens with the particular American sympathy James gives to his early travelling narrators.

The story works through several of the themes that would become permanent in James’s later work. There is the American observer encountering a more complicated European situation than his framework had prepared him for. There is the woman with a long unhappy history who has finally taken a decisive action that nineteenth century convention would condemn. There is the slight gap between what the narrator thinks he understands and what the reader can see is actually going on in the conversation. James handles all of these with a lighter touch than in the major work that would come later, but the elements are already in place.

The story runs about twenty pages and is one of the more readable of his very early pieces. It pairs naturally with Travelling Companions and The Last of the Valerii, two other Italian stories from the same early period. For readers tracing James’s development across the 1870s, this is one of the better short pieces to look at.