Crapy Cornelia

Crapy Cornelia is a short story by Henry James, first published in Harper’s Magazine in October 1909 and collected in The Finer Grain in 1910. It belongs to the very late period of his short fiction, written after the major late novels and after most of the work that gets called his late style. The story is shorter and more concentrated than the late novels but uses the same elaborate sentence construction and the same patient unfolding of small social material.

The story is set in New York and follows a wealthy aging bachelor named White Mason who has returned to the city after many years abroad. He is in the middle of considering whether to propose to a younger woman, Mrs Worthingham, who has invited him to her drawing room one afternoon. While he is there a second visitor arrives, Cornelia Rasch, an old friend of White Mason from his New York youth before he ever went to Europe. Cornelia is plain, modest, and entirely outside the world Mrs Worthingham represents, but she carries with her the memory of a New York that has now vanished and that White Mason discovers he cares more about than he had realised.

The story turns on the contrast between the two women. Mrs Worthingham is the bright modern present. Cornelia is the long unfashionable past. White Mason has been about to propose to the present, and the visit from Cornelia reminds him that the past has its own claims. The resolution is quiet and characteristic of late James, with the proposal not happening and a different kind of attachment forming instead.

The story is short, perhaps thirty pages, and works as a single sitting read. It is one of the best late James short stories for readers who find the late novels too difficult but want to see what the late style does at shorter length. It pairs naturally with The Jolly Corner from the same year, which handles a similar theme of an aging American man confronting the New York he abandoned.