The Patagonia

The Patagonia is a short story by Henry James, first published in the English Illustrated Magazine in 1888 and collected in The Aspern Papers and Other Stories the same year. The story takes place almost entirely on a transatlantic steamer, the Patagonia of the title, during a summer crossing from Boston to Liverpool, and it is one of James’s tightest pieces of confined psychological observation.

The narrator is an unnamed American gentleman who has booked passage to England on the steamer. Before sailing he is asked by a Boston acquaintance to keep a friendly eye on a young woman named Grace Mavis, who is making the crossing alone to join her fiancé in England. Among the other passengers is Jasper Nettlepoint, a young American gentleman of the kind Boston disapproves of for his idleness and his way with women. Over the course of the long crossing, Jasper and Grace develop an attachment that becomes increasingly obvious to the other passengers. The narrator watches the situation develop with a mixture of sympathy, judgment, and helplessness, knowing both what the young people are doing and what waits for Grace at the other end of the voyage.

The story builds steadily to a conclusion that has the quiet shock of inevitable tragedy. James uses the closed setting of the ship to compress his usual social observation into a particularly tight frame. The other passengers are sketched in quickly and the narrator’s slow recognition of what the situation is going to lead to gives the story its emotional weight. The ending is one of the most devastating in his middle period work.

The story runs about fifty pages and works as a single sitting read. For readers who have liked his other shipboard pieces or his stories of Americans in transition between worlds, The Patagonia is one of the most concentrated examples. It pairs naturally with Lady Barberina, which handles a similar transatlantic subject at greater length, and with The Aspern Papers, the famous novella with which it was originally collected.