Longstaff’s Marriage

Longstaff’s Marriage is a short story by Henry James, first published in Scribner’s Monthly in August 1878. It belongs to the period when James was working out the international theme in shorter forms before he committed to The Portrait of a Lady. It is one of his odder early stories, and it has a slightly fairy tale quality that he later mostly moved away from.

The story is set in Italy. Reginald Longstaff is a young Englishman in a hotel at Sorrento, dying of an unspecified illness and very far from home. He becomes fascinated with an American woman named Diana Belfield, who is traveling with her companion. He sends word that he is dying for love of her and asks her to marry him on his deathbed so that his name and fortune will pass to her. Diana refuses, both because she is a proud and independent person and because she finds the request faintly distasteful.

The second half of the story reverses everything. Years later, in England, the situations have swapped. Diana herself is fading and the man she once refused has recovered and is in good health. What happens between them in the second meeting is what gives the story its small shocked silence as an ending.

This is not one of the major James stories, and he himself did not include it in the New York Edition, but it has a strange persistence. The romantic logic is heightened almost to the point of fable, and the writing is direct in a way the later James no longer cared to be. Readers who like the symmetrical structure of stories like The Beast in the Jungle will recognise an early version of the same thinking here, where two lives mirror each other across years and the mirror is what matters more than the events themselves.