The Story of a Year

The Story of a Year is the earliest story Henry James ever published. It appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in March 1865, when James was twenty one years old, and is the work with which his publishing career officially begins. The story sits at the very beginning of his fifty year writing life and shows him already working in territory he would refine across the rest of his career.

The story is a Civil War tale. Young Lieutenant John Ford is engaged to Elizabeth Crowe when he leaves for the front. The first part of the story follows Elizabeth at home in a small New England village across the months of John’s absence at the war. She is genuinely fond of him and entirely intends to remain faithful. But the village offers her other distractions, including the attentions of a young man named Bruce who is in town for the summer, and Elizabeth gradually finds herself drifting from her absent fiancé toward this nearer presence. News then arrives that John has been seriously wounded in action.

The story works through Elizabeth’s complicated reaction to the news. She is sincerely distressed and yet not as straightforwardly devastated as she would have been a few months earlier. When John returns home dying from his wound, the long final scene at his bedside is one of the more quietly painful things James wrote in his early career. The dying soldier gives Elizabeth permission to marry Bruce after his death, and the story ends with the question of what such permission actually means and what Elizabeth will do with it.

The writing is uneven in places and the plot devices are conventional for a Civil War story of the period. What gives the story its lasting interest is the psychological observation James already brings to Elizabeth’s situation. He is not interested in straightforward melodrama. He is interested in the small movements of feeling that the situation produces, and the story already shows the patient attention to interior states that would define his mature work. The story runs about forty pages and works as the natural starting point for any reader tracing James’s career chronologically.