Embarrassments

Embarrassments is a collection of short stories by Henry James, published in 1896. It belongs to the middle period of his short fiction, during the years when James was producing some of his sharpest shorter work between the early novels and the great late novels of the 1900s. The collection brings together four stories that had appeared in various magazines in the early to mid 1890s.

The four stories are The Figure in the Carpet, Glasses, The Next Time, and The Way It Came. The Figure in the Carpet is the most famous piece in the collection and one of the central stories in James’s running argument about literary critics and the writers they fail to understand. It tells of a young reviewer who interviews an aging novelist and learns from him that all his books contain a single hidden theme that no critic has ever noticed. The reviewer becomes obsessed with discovering what the figure in the carpet actually is, and the story turns the search into one of the great metafictional fables of the period.

The Next Time is the other strong piece in the collection, a comedy about a serious novelist who keeps trying to write a popular successful book and keeps producing another masterpiece that nobody will read. Glasses is a stranger story about a young woman with bad eyesight who refuses to wear her glasses, with consequences that play out across several years of romantic complication. The Way It Came is a ghost story or what James called a tale of the supernatural, about two people who finally meet only after one of them is dead.

The book runs about three hundred pages and is one of the strongest single collections of James’s middle period short fiction. The Figure in the Carpet alone would be worth the price of admission, but the other three pieces are all also among the better stories of the period. For readers who liked The Aspern Papers and The Lesson of the Master, Embarrassments is the natural next collection.