Travelling Companions

Travelling Companions is a short story by Henry James, first published in the Atlantic Monthly in November and December 1870. It is one of his early Italian stories, written during the period when James was first discovering the European subjects that would become his lifelong material.

The story is set in northern Italy. The narrator, a young American gentleman traveling alone, meets in Milan an American father and daughter, Mr and Miss Evans, who are doing a similar Italian tour. The three become traveling companions, moving on together through Padua, Vicenza, Venice, and various smaller towns. The narrator falls in love with Miss Evans across the course of the journey. She is an unusual figure for James’s early American girls, more reserved and more inward than the more famous Daisy Miller who would come a few years later. The story works through the slow development of the attachment and the various small misunderstandings and recognitions that pace it.

What is most enjoyable in the story is the writing about Italy itself. James was at the beginning of his lifelong love affair with Italy and the descriptions of Venice and of the small north Italian cities have the particular intensity of a young writer recording what is new to him. The pictures, the churches, the canals, the small inns, all turn up with the kind of fresh observation that James would never quite recover when he was writing about Italy from greater familiarity later in his life. The romantic plot is conventional but the setting is everything.

The story runs about fifty pages. It is one of the more readable of his very early pieces and one of the best examples of his early Italian writing. James did not include it in his collected New York Edition, but it has stayed in print in various selections of his early work. For readers who liked At Isella or The Madonna of the Future and want more early Italian James, this is the natural follow on. It pairs also with his later Italian Hours, the travel essays from his mature period, where the same country is described by a much older man.