Georgina’s Reasons

Georgina’s Reasons is a short story by Henry James, first published in three parts in the New York Sun in July and August 1884 and collected in The Author of Beltraffio in 1885. It is one of the longer and more melodramatic of James’s middle period short stories and one of the few of his stories to deal openly with the subject of bigamy.

Georgina Gressie is a strong willed young New York woman from a wealthy family. She has fallen in love with a naval officer named Raymond Benyon, but knows that her parents will never accept him as a husband. The two marry secretly, with the agreement that the marriage will be kept entirely hidden from her family until she chooses to reveal it. A child is born and given out for adoption to a couple in Italy. Then Georgina decides that she does not actually want to be Mrs Benyon at all. She returns to New York society, marries another man without revealing the existing marriage, and lives as the wife of a Mr Roy. The story turns on what Benyon discovers about her and what he chooses to do when he discovers it.

The story is more openly melodramatic than most of James’s work, with the kind of plot machinery that he generally distrusted. He himself was not entirely happy with it and the late style had largely moved away from this kind of dramatic event. What gives the story its interest is the character of Georgina herself, who is one of the most cold blooded women James ever drew. She is not a villain in the conventional sense. She simply wants what she wants and arranges her life to get it, without troubling herself about the moral or legal consequences for anyone else. James does not condemn her directly but the portrait is unmistakable.

The story runs about a hundred pages and is one of the longest of his middle period short pieces. For readers interested in James in a more melodramatic vein, this is a useful counterweight to the more characteristic psychological stories of the same period. It pairs naturally with Washington Square for the cold blooded female lead and with the early novels generally.