What Maisie Knew

What Maisie Knew is a novel by Henry James, first serialised in the Chap Book and the New Review during 1897 and published in book form the same year. It is one of the central novels of his experimental middle period, alongside The Spoils of Poynton and The Awkward Age, and one of the most original treatments in nineteenth century English fiction of a child as the observer of adult disorder.

Maisie Farange is the young daughter of Beale and Ida Farange, a wealthy English couple who have divorced bitterly. The court has ruled that Maisie will spend alternating six month periods with each parent. The novel follows what happens to Maisie across the next several years as both her parents remarry, divorce again, take various lovers, and shuffle Maisie between households according to whichever arrangement is currently most convenient or most spiteful. Maisie acquires a series of governesses, a stepmother who briefly cares about her, a stepfather who becomes the closest thing to a real parent she has, and a slow accumulating understanding of the moral character of the various adults whose lives have been imposed on hers.

What makes the book extraordinary is the technical achievement of telling the story almost entirely from Maisie’s developing point of view, beginning when she is six and continuing into her early adolescence. James does not write in a child’s voice. He writes in his own sophisticated adult voice but limits himself rigorously to what Maisie can actually see and understand at each stage. The result is a novel in which the reader gradually understands more than Maisie can articulate, and in which the child’s slowly developing moral sense becomes the centre of the book. The famous ending, where Maisie must finally choose what she wants, is one of the most quietly devastating moments in late Victorian fiction.

The novel runs about three hundred pages and is one of the most demanding of the middle period works. For readers who have liked The Spoils of Poynton or The Awkward Age, this is the next book to attempt. It pairs naturally with The Pupil, the short story that handles similar material at much shorter length, and with the later novella The Turn of the Screw.