The Outcry

The Outcry is a novel by Henry James, published in 1911. It is one of his last completed works and has an unusual history, having begun life as a play that was never produced and that James then rewrote as a novel. The story belongs to the late James period but is much shorter and more direct than the great novels of the 1900s like The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl.

The story turns on a question of national art treasure. Lord Theign, an English peer with an old country house full of inherited paintings, has decided to sell a particular Renaissance painting to a wealthy American collector. The painting is a great work and its export from England would represent a real loss to the national cultural patrimony. A young English art critic named Hugh Crimble takes up the cause of preventing the sale, raising what becomes a public outcry. The novel works through the complicated negotiations between the family, the art experts, the press, and the American collector, with romantic complications and a question of attribution running underneath the main plot.

The subject was directly topical when James wrote the book. The export of old master paintings from English country houses to American collectors was a major cultural issue in the early twentieth century, and Lord Theign is recognisable as a type of the period. James handles the subject with the kind of detailed knowledge of the art world that ran through much of his late work. The novel is also one of his most accessible late books, partly because its origin as a play has given the structure a tighter scene by scene shape than his late novels usually had.

The book runs about three hundred pages and reads quickly by late James standards. For readers who have found the major late novels difficult, The Outcry is a friendly alternative that gives the late voice in a more straightforward form. It pairs naturally with The Ivory Tower, James’s unfinished last novel, and with the essays on London and on collecting collected in his late nonfiction volumes.