The Madonna of the Future and Other Early Stories

The Madonna of the Future and Other Early Stories is a gathering of Henry James’s short fiction from the 1860s and 1870s, organised around the title story which first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in March 1873. The collection presents James at the very start of his career, before the major novels of the 1880s and 1890s, when he was still discovering what he could do with the short story form.

The title piece is set in Florence and follows an aging American painter named Theobald who has spent twenty years preparing to paint a great Madonna. He has studied every Madonna painted by anyone and refined his vision to the point of paralysis. When the narrator meets Theobald’s longtime model, an Italian woman who has now grown middle aged, the painter realises that the masterpiece will never be painted. The canvas in his studio is blank. The story is one of the cleanest statements of a theme James kept returning to, which is the cost of waiting too long to begin.

The other stories in the collection vary across his early Italian and American settings. There are Florence pieces in the same Italian mode as the title story. There are stories set in New England before the Civil War. There are several psychological tales that anticipate the more famous later stories of the 1880s and 1890s. The quality is uneven, as is normal in a collection covering several years of early work, but the best pieces have the kind of clean structural force that James was already mastering.

The book runs about three hundred pages and works well as an introduction to the early James for readers who only know the late novels. For more in the same vein, the natural follow on is Daisy Miller and Other Tales, which collects the more famous middle period stories.