The Guest’s Confession

The Guest’s Confession is an early short story by Henry James (1843-1916), first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1872, when the novelist was still in his twenties and writing the magazine fiction from which his mature art would grow. The story is told by a young man who witnesses his stepbrother force a humiliating public confession from a man who has wronged him in a business matter, only to discover that the humiliated man is the father of the girl he loves. James works the moral entanglement of the narrator, caught between loyalty, love, and his own compromised silence, in the analytic manner that already marked him out among American magazine writers. The story belongs to the apprentice work James later excluded from the New York Edition, and it is of interest for the formation of his method. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.