The Wheel Of Time

The Wheel of Time is a short story by Henry James, first published in the Cosmopolitan magazine in December 1892 and January 1893 and collected in a volume of the same name later in 1893. It is one of his middle period social stories and one of his quietly affecting meditations on aging, beauty, and the way time changes what each generation values.

The story follows Maurice Glanvil, an aging English gentleman, and his relationships across many years with two generations of a single family. In the first part of the story the young Maurice fails to marry Fanny Knocker, a plain young woman whose obvious devotion he could not bring himself to return. Years later the now older Maurice meets Fanny again as Lady Greyswood and finds her transformed by life into a woman of considerable presence and authority. Her daughter Vera is now of marriageable age and the daughter is a great beauty. The wheel of time has turned. The plain mother of Maurice’s youth has produced a beautiful daughter, and the situation that had once been so easy for Maurice to dismiss has now reversed itself.

The story turns on whether Maurice can correct his earlier mistake by attaching himself to the daughter, and on what such a correction would actually mean given what has happened in the years between. James handles the material with the careful attention to small social signals that defined his middle period work. There are conversations in country houses, walks in parks, the slow exchange of looks between people who understand more than they are willing to say. The ending arrives at a resolution that is more painful than the surface plot suggests.

The story runs about a hundred pages and is one of the longer middle period pieces. The title is meant literally. The wheel of time turns and what looked one way to the young man looks very different to the older one, and the story is essentially about what a thoughtful person does with the slow accumulating recognition that the world he has been living in is not the world he thought it was. For readers who liked The Marriages and The Pupil, this is the natural follow on. It pairs naturally with the late story Crapy Cornelia.