The Siege Of London And Madame De Mauves

This volume pairs two of Henry James’s middle period novellas, both written before his late style turned famously thick and difficult. The Siege of London, published in 1883, is one of his sharper social comedies. Mrs. Headway is a divorced American woman trying to be received in London society, and the gentlemen who recognize her past have to decide whether to expose her or look the other way. James plays the situation for both humor and quiet judgment, and the book sits comfortably alongside his more famous Daisy Miller as a study of Americans abroad.

Madame de Mauves, written almost a decade earlier in 1874, is the more melancholy of the two. The title character is an American woman married to an unfaithful French aristocrat, and the story follows the young American Longmore who falls in love with her and tries to figure out what, if anything, he should do about it. James was working out themes here that would occupy him for decades. Innocence colliding with European cynicism, the cost of moral rigidity, the difficulty of doing the right thing when the right thing is not at all clear.

Readers new to Henry James will find these novellas more accessible than his late masterpieces like The Wings of the Dove or The Golden Bowl. The sentences are still long and the social codes can take some getting used to, but the plots move and the psychological observation is razor sharp. For anyone curious about what made James central to the development of the modern novel, this is a sensible place to begin.