We offered them their chance

Michael Wood

  • The Ivory Tower by Henry James
    NYRB, 266 pp, £8.99, July 2004, ISBN 1 59017 078 4

The story opens on a picture of a very large young lady, ‘a truly massive young person’, crossing from one house to another in Newport, Rhode Island, site of ‘florid’ villas and other structures ‘smothered in senseless architectural ornament’. On the verandah of the second house she finds her father, an inordinately rich man, sourly awaiting the death of his former partner, a slightly less rich man. Her father is described as ‘a person without an alternative’, the very worst fate that can befall anyone in a Henry James novel, and all he thinks about is his neighbour’s legacy, or more precisely ‘what old Frank would have done with the fruits of his swindle, on the occasion of the rupture that had kept them apart in hate and vituperation for so many years’.

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Vol. 27 No. 11 · 2 June 2005 » Michael Wood » We offered them their chance (print version)
Pages 7-9 | 3685 words