The Marriages

The Marriages is a short story by Henry James, first published in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1891 and collected in The Lesson of the Master the next year. It is one of his most economical late short stories, and it has a small piece of family cruelty at its center that lifts it out of being a comedy of manners.

Adela Chart is the devoted daughter of Colonel Chart, a widower whose first wife Adela is determined to honour through her own kind of permanent mourning. When her father plans to remarry to a woman named Mrs Churchley, who is in every visible way a perfectly suitable second wife, Adela cannot bear the idea that her mother’s place will be taken. She decides to break up the engagement by going to Mrs Churchley and making up a story about her father, presenting him as a man whose first marriage was unhappy and whose character is darker than Mrs Churchley realises. The lie works. The engagement is called off.

The story turns when Adela learns what the broken engagement has actually cost. There is a quiet scene with her older brother that reframes everything, and the reader has to revise the picture of Adela as the devoted daughter who simply went too far. James is interested in how love and possessiveness wear the same clothes, and how the people who hurt each other most inside families are often the ones who most loudly speak the language of loyalty.

At about thirty pages it is a good way into James’s middle period stories. The structure is clean, the prose is less elaborate than the late novels, and the emotional logic is firm without being obvious. Readers who liked Washington Square will find a similar coldness about family life here, although the scale is much smaller. It pairs naturally with Brooksmith and The Patagonia, both from around the same period.