The Diary of a Man of Fifty

The Diary of a Man of Fifty is a short story by Henry James, first published simultaneously in Macmillan’s Magazine and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in July 1879 and collected in The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales in 1885. It is one of his middle length stories from the late 1870s and one of the most concentrated of his early treatments of the question of how the past keeps returning into the present.

The story is presented as the diary kept by an unnamed English general, retired from a long military career in India and other parts of the empire, who has returned to Florence after an absence of nearly thirty years. As a young officer he had been deeply in love with the Countess Salvi, a beautiful Italian woman whom he had loved without ever marrying, partly because of his uncertainty about her character and partly because of his own youthful timidity. The countess died years before the story opens. On his return to Florence the general meets her daughter, the young Countess Bianca, who looks remarkably like her mother and who is being courted by a young Englishman named Edmund Stanmer, in circumstances that strikingly parallel the general’s own former courtship.

The story works through the general’s complicated reaction to seeing his own former dilemma being lived out by a younger man. He tries to warn Stanmer away from the marriage, repeating the doubts he had once entertained about the Countess Salvi. Stanmer goes ahead with the marriage anyway. The story ends with the question of whether the general was right to have stayed back from his own marriage all those years before, or whether his caution had cost him a happy life that the younger Englishman is now correctly choosing to risk.

The story is one of the most concentrated examples of James’s interest in the double, the situation that returns into a new generation. The diary form gives the general a self awareness about his own situation that the third person voice would not have permitted, and the story works partly as a study of an old man trying to understand whether he had been wise or merely afraid. The story runs about fifty pages and pairs naturally with Crapy Cornelia and The Beast in the Jungle.