Four Meetings

Four Meetings is a short story by Henry James, first published in Scribner’s Monthly in November 1877 and collected in Daisy Miller and Other Tales in 1879. It is one of the most economical of his early American international stories and one of the most quietly painful.

The story is built around exactly the four meetings of the title. The narrator first meets a young schoolteacher named Caroline Spencer at a friend’s house in a small American town. She is in her twenties, has been saving her money for years to make a trip to Europe, and is full of the kind of innocent and intense enthusiasm that the figure of the American young woman discovering Europe will eventually become in James. The narrator meets her again at the dock in Le Havre when she finally arrives in France. The third meeting is also in France, when the narrator finds her again unexpectedly. The fourth meeting is years later in her American hometown.

The story works through what happens between the second and fourth meetings without ever making the events explicit. Caroline arrives in France full of hope and is met by a relative who is supposed to help her travel onward through Europe. That relative cheats her of most of her money in ways the reader gradually understands but that Caroline herself never quite admits. Her European trip is over before it has begun. She returns to her American town and spends the rest of her life there, never having seen the Europe she had saved for years to visit.

The story is short, perhaps thirty pages, and is one of the most efficient examples of James’s early skill at narrative compression. The cumulative effect of the four meetings, with everything that has happened to Caroline between them left in the gaps, is more powerful than a direct narrative of her disappointment could have been. For readers new to James the story is one of the easiest places to begin. It pairs naturally with Daisy Miller and An International Episode from the same early period.