Victorian Era PDF EPUB Audio

The Spoils of Poynton

by Henry James

Downloads: Under 100
First published: 1897
Pages: 184

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Listen to The Spoils of Poynton Audiobook Free

Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019) · 7 h 14 min · 22 parts

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01 - Chapter 1
15:26
02 - Chapter 2
15:34
03 - Chapter 3
21:01
04 - Chapter 4
21:36
05 - Chapter 5
16:43
06 - Chapter 6
22:44
07 - Chapter 7
26:48
08 - Chapter 8
31:06
09 - Chapter 9
9:27
10 - Chapter 10
17:57
11 - Chapter 11
13:46
12 - Chapter 12
21:29
13 - Chapter 13
15:34
14 - Chapter 14
25:46
15 - Chapter 15
16:13
16 - Chapter 16
31:37
17 - Chapter 17
23:02
18 - Chapter 18
24:52
19 - Chapter 19
11:19
20 - Chapter 20
16:57
21 - Chapter 21
12:48
22 - Chapter 22
22:19

The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a public domain work.

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About this book

The Spoils of Poynton is a short novel by Henry James, first serialised in the Atlantic Monthly during 1896 and published in book form in 1897. It is one of his most tightly constructed middle period works, and one of the few James novels where the main characters and the reader are equally aware that the central question is, who gets the furniture.

Mrs Gereth has spent her widowhood at Poynton, an English country house that she has filled with carefully chosen antiques, paintings, and furnishings collected over decades. The collection is the great work of her life. By English law, when her son Owen inherits Poynton he gets everything in it as well, including her treasures. Owen is decent but limited and is about to become engaged to Mona Brigstock, a young woman from a family with terrible taste who Mrs Gereth knows will spoil everything. To save the spoils, Mrs Gereth befriends a thoughtful young woman named Fleda Vetch and tries to push Fleda toward Owen instead.

The novel is partly about the wrangle over the furniture and partly about Fleda, who is one of James's most morally serious heroines. Fleda's refusal to make the kind of cynical move Mrs Gereth wants her to make is the heart of the book, and her quiet integrity costs her almost everything she might have gained. The ending is one of James's most painful, and the final image of Poynton stays with anyone who reads it.

The book runs about two hundred and fifty pages and is shorter than the later great novels. The compression suits the material. There is no waste in it, and the central image of a woman who loves objects more than she loves people is unforgettable. It pairs naturally with Washington Square and What Maisie Knew, two other James novels where a young woman's moral life is what really matters and where the adults around her keep failing to notice.

About the author

Henry James

Henry James was an American-British writer and a master of the psychological novel. Works such as The Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw, and The Ambassadors explore consciousness, society, and the clash between American and European life.