Glasses

Glasses is a short story by Henry James, first published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1896 and collected in Embarrassments the same year. It is one of the stranger short stories of his middle period, with an opening that suggests an ordinary social tale and an ending that turns into something more disturbing.

The narrator is a young portrait painter who encounters a young woman named Flora Saunt at an English seaside resort. Flora is extraordinarily beautiful but is also myopic in a way that the doctors have warned her will damage her eyesight permanently unless she wears the heavy corrective glasses they have prescribed. She refuses to wear them in public. To wear them would mean to admit to the world that her face is not the perfect surface she has built her life around. The narrator paints her portrait and watches her become engaged to a young man named Geoffrey Dawling, a man who clearly cares more for her beauty than for any other quality she possesses.

The story then jumps forward several years. The narrator meets Flora again in unexpected circumstances. She has lost her sight entirely. The marriage has happened in a way that the narrator only slowly understands. The story works through the long consequences of her early vanity with a quiet inevitability that gives the conclusion its weight. James is doing something more difficult than a simple moral fable about vanity. He is interested in the question of what it means to build a life entirely on a single physical advantage and what happens when that advantage is taken away.

The story runs about fifty pages. It is one of the better pieces in Embarrassments, alongside the more famous Figure in the Carpet. For readers who have liked the other James stories where a single physical or psychological detail becomes the center of a whole life, Glasses is one of the most concentrated examples. It pairs naturally with The Beast in the Jungle and with The Altar of the Dead, two later stories that work in similar territory.