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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From the LRB letters page: [ 8 May 2003 ] Chris Baldick.

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.