How’s the Empress? 
James Wood
- The Light of Day by Graham Swift
Rummaging around, in a notebook entry of 1896, for the properly grim place to deposit his unfortunate heroine, Maisie Farange, Henry James alights on Folkestone, and with grey satisfaction asks himself: ‘don’t I get an effect from Folkestone?’ James does indeed get an ‘effect’, in What Maisie Knew, from Folkestone: from the name, from the town, from its seaside hotel, from the ‘cold beef and Apollinaris’ consumed by Maisie and her stepfather.
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James Wood’s How Fiction Works is just out. He is also the author of The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief and is a staff writer at the New Yorker.
Other articles by this contributor:
Puffed Wheat · How serious is John Bayley?
At the tent flap sin crouches · The Fleshpots of Egypt
Addicted to Unpredictability · Knut Hamsun
Damaged Beasts · Peter Carey’s ‘Theft’
Gossip in Gilt · John Updike’s Licks of Love
The Slightest Sardine · a literary dragnet
The Lie-World · D.B.C. Pierre
A Long Day at the Chocolate Bar Factory · David Bezmozgis
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