Washington Square

Washington Square is a short novel by Henry James, serialised in Cornhill Magazine and Harper’s New Monthly during 1880 and published in book form the same year. It is one of his most accessible novels and one of the most quietly devastating things he ever wrote.

The novel is set in New York in the 1840s and is told in a clear third person voice that James never quite recovered in his later more elaborate style. Catherine Sloper is the plain unloved daughter of a successful and snobbish New York physician, Dr Austin Sloper. Her mother died at her birth and Catherine has grown up under the cold judgment of her father, who has never managed to forgive her for not being the brilliant woman her mother was. Into this household arrives Morris Townsend, a handsome young man without means or prospects, who begins to court Catherine. Dr Sloper immediately concludes that Townsend is a fortune hunter and forbids the marriage. The novel works through the resulting conflict between father, daughter, suitor, and a meddling aunt across several years.

What makes the book unforgettable is Catherine herself. She is not clever, not beautiful, not socially graceful, and she has none of the wit and verve that James’s later heroines like Isabel Archer would carry. She is plain and quiet. But over the course of the novel she develops a kind of moral toughness that is one of the most original things in his early fiction. The famous final scene, where she returns to her Washington Square sewing after refusing the second proposal of her now older suitor, is one of the great quiet moments in nineteenth century English fiction.

The novel runs about two hundred pages and is the easiest of James’s serious novels to recommend to a first time reader. It moves quickly, the prose is clean, and the moral weight is unmistakable. For readers new to James, this is the recommended starting point after Daisy Miller. It pairs naturally with The Spoils of Poynton and with What Maisie Knew, two other novels in which a quiet female protagonist outlasts the noisier adults around her.