The Princess Casamassima by Henry James

This novel is unique among James's fiction in having a major character who appeared in an earlier work: Christina Light, the mademoiselle fatale of Roderick Hudson(1875), was married off by her mother at the end of that novel to theItalian Prince Casamassima. Now, in a novel bearing her name as itstitle, we discover her some ten years or so later, estranged from thePrince, living in London and taking an interest in the condition of thedestitute poor. However, despite her brightness as 'perhaps the mostremarkable women in Europe' and her name on the title page, the bookactually has as its truly central character a hero, or anti-hero,Hyacinth Robinson. Like Christina, Hyacinth seems to have a troubledrelationship with the idea of 'aristocracy'; a relationship which mayultimately prove fatal.

It wasn't originally my intention to spend time producing an electronic edition of The Princess Casamassima,which is one of the longest of Henry James's novels and which didn'tmake an immediate impression when I first read it some fifteen yearsago. However, no one else seemed to be taking on the challenge and,until the recent disappearance of the etext of The outcry(1911, adapted from a play), it was the only novel by James notavailable on the web, so, when a copy of the first edition came on themarket at a reasonable price (it was not in its originalbinding!), I paid up and started work. And I'm very pleased that I did,since in working carefully through the text twice and following up themany factual references in the text (to provide the requisite notes inmy edition), I've come to appreciate the many subtleties in James'streatment of themes in his 'social realist' novel. Working partly inthe tradition of Dickens but more in the French one of Balzac and Zola,although within constraints imposed by English prudery of course, Jameshas dissected not so much the revolutionaries based in London in theearly 1880s but that tension between economic and 鎠thetic approachesto life, which is still, or perhaps even more, in play today.