Lady Barberina

Lady Barberina is a novella by Henry James, first published in The Century Magazine in 1884. It returns to a subject he was thinking about all through the early 1880s, which is what happens when an American with money marries into the English aristocracy and tries to import that marriage back to New York.

Dr Jackson Lemon is a young American physician with an inherited fortune, in London for the season. He meets and falls in love with Lady Barberina Clement, the daughter of an English lord. After some negotiation about settlements that James lays out with cold accuracy, the marriage goes through. The second half of the book follows the couple in New York, where Lady Barb finds the city not at all what she expected and certainly not what she is prepared to live in.

The novella is funnier than it sounds. James is good on the small details of bored aristocratic life and on the practical Americans who do not understand why this beautiful well bred English wife will not just settle down and enjoy Fifth Avenue. The doctor’s mistake is assuming that money plus love would be enough to relocate a woman whose whole identity is tied to the country house and the season she left behind. By the end she has more or less negotiated her way back to England, and the marriage continues in name only.

Lady Barberina sits alongside An International Episode and The Reverberator as one of James’s middle length studies of the international marriage. It is sharper than An International Episode and less dramatic than The Reverberator, sitting in a comfortable middle range where he is most readable. At about ninety pages it is a single sitting read for most people, and it pairs naturally with Edith Wharton’s later novels about similar money and aristocracy.