Roderick Hudson

Roderick Hudson is the first novel Henry James completed, serialised in the Atlantic Monthly across 1875 and published in book form the same year. He later said it should not really count as his first novel since Watch and Ward came before it, but Watch and Ward was a magazine serial James never wanted to acknowledge. Roderick Hudson is where he begins for most readers.

The story follows Rowland Mallet, a wealthy New England aesthete in his thirties who discovers a brilliant young sculptor named Roderick Hudson in a small Massachusetts town. Mallet decides to fund Roderick’s training in Rome and brings him to Italy along with the hope that Roderick will become a great artist. What happens instead is a slow collapse. In Rome, Roderick meets a beautiful and complicated woman named Christina Light, falls in love with her, neglects his work, loses his moral footing, and ends in a way Mallet has not allowed himself to imagine.

The novel is a study in patronage and the cost of giving someone everything they could possibly need. Mallet has good intentions and almost no self knowledge, and James lets the reader see this even when Mallet cannot. Christina Light is one of his great early creations, a young woman whose energy and beauty are both real and dangerous, and she returns later as the central figure in The Princess Casamassima.

The Rome of the novel is also a character. James knew the city well and he uses it to create the kind of overripe atmosphere where a young American artist might genuinely lose his head. The book runs to about four hundred pages and shows James still finding his style, with some loose patches but also long stretches of strong writing. For readers who want to start with early James, Roderick Hudson is the place to begin, and it pairs naturally with The American, written the next year.