Henry James's most read book, because it's short and easily assigned to students, Washington Square is also more accessible than most of his ouuvre, perhaps because he seems to take as much joy in hating his characters as we do. but let's not go overboard with the accessibility bit, because the reader is still confronted with those notorious multi-page paragraphs which decimate any desire to read further.

By some happy coincidence, the book I read immediately before this is by another author whose characters are unlikable and it gives me an idea for how to save the novels of Henry James. Every time you get about 30 pages in to one of his works the following should appear on the page: "And a moment later Cujo's foam-covered, twisted face popped up..."

(Reviewed:06-May-21)

Grade: (C-) Orrin C. Judd

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Henry James Links:

    -WIKIPEDIA: Henry James
    -ENTRY: Henry James (Famous Authors)
    -ENTRY: Henry James (New World Encyclopedia)
    -ENTRY: Henry James, American writer (Leon Edel, Encyclopaedia Britannica)
    -ENTRY: Washington Square (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
    -The Henry James Review (Project muse)
    -
    -PODCAST: Episode 207: The Bostonians by Henry James: (HOSTED BY JOHN J. MILLER, December 7, 2021, Great Books)
    -PODCAST: On Henry James’s Very Long Short Story (From the History of Literature Podcast with Jacke Wilson, LitHub)
    -ESSAY: The Best of Henry James (Susan L. Mizruchi July 23, 2021, The Millions)
    -ESSAY: More than a Matter of Taste: The danger of relegating beauty to the trivial pursuit of pleasure. (Joshua Hren, 6/02/21, Hedgehog Review)
    -ESSAY: The Top 10 Henry James Novels (Michael Gorra, Aug 24, 2012, Publishers Weekly)
    -ESSAY: Henry James and the American Idea: The Atlantic Monthly helped establish the expatriate author as a literary great (Susan Goodman, July/August 2011, Humanities)
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    -ESSAY: Why The Turn of the Screw Haunts Us 125 Years Later: “That queasy opacity is at the heart of the novella’s power... The reader is never sure what, exactly, is happening.” (Kate Griffin, June 5, 2023, LitHub)
    -ESSAY: Henry and Louis: An unlikely literary friendship (Max Byrd, November 18, 2021, American Scholar)
    -ESSAY: Henry James and the Joys of Confusion: On James’ The Golden Bowl (Dick Turner, 8/26/22, Splice Today)
    -ESSAY: The High Altar of Henry James: What’s implicit in Henry James’ works is his familiarity with matters Catholic. What’s implicit is also subtle, so that Protestant and Catholic readers alike might enjoy reading about such matters. (Daniel J. Sundahl, January 3rd, 2022, Imaginative Conservative)
    -REVIEW: of The American by Henry James (Complete Review)
    -REVIEW: of Turn of the Screw< by Henry James/a> (Micah Mattix, The Spectator)
    -ESSAY: On the Most Adapted Ghost Story of All Time: Adam Scovell Looks Into the Cinematic Appeal of Henry James’s Turn of the Screw (Adam Scovell, 12/20/21, LitHub)
    -ESSAY: What Henry James can teach us about the culture wars: The author understood the dangerous allure of the romantic reactionary (Sameer Rahim, January 3, 2022, Prospect)
    -REVIEW: of The Aspern Papers by Henry James (Elizabeth Lowry, TLS)
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    -REVIEW: of The Tragic Muse by Henry James (Complete Review)


FILM:

    -FILM REVIEW: The Bostonians (Paddy Mulholland, Spectrum Culture)

Book-related and General Links:

    -ENTRY: Washington Square (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
    -WIKIPEDIA: Washington Square
    -AUDIO BOOK: Wasington Square (LibriVox)
    -ETEXT: Washington Square (Project Gutenberg)
    -ENTRY: Henry James (Online Literature)
    -READING GUIDE: Washington Square (Lit Charts)
    -STUDY GUIDE: Washington Square (Grade Saver)
    -STUDY GUIDE: Washington Square (Super Summary)
    -STUDY GUIDE: Washington Square (Lit Lovers)
    -ESSAY: Henry James’s New York (Colm Tóibín, February 9, 2006, NY Review of Books)
    -ESSAY: Native Son: Henry James’s depictions of home’s powerful pull (Colm Tóibín, Summer 2015, Book Forum)
    -ESSAY: Colm Tóibín: how Henry James's family tried to keep him in the closet: After Henry James’s death 100 years ago, his relatives were at pains to remove any hints of his sexuality from his letters and biography (Colm Tóibín, 20 Feb 2016, The Guardian)
    -ESSAY: To Have and Withhold: What lurks beneath Henry James’s style (Colm Tóibín, Summer, 2019, Book Forum)
    -ESSAY: On Washington Square (Elizabeth Hardwick, November 22, 1990, NY Review of Books)
    -REVIEW ESSAY: ‘Washington Square’ & ‘The Heiress’: Summer Readings & Screenings (Griffin Oleynick and Anthony Domestico, September 20, 2019, Commonweal)
    -ESSAY: The Modernism of Henry James’ Washington Square (Lesley Jenike, 5/09/19, Ploughshares)
    -ESSAY: Henry James and Washington Square (Claire Wolford, November 1, 2011, greenwich Village History)
    -ESSAY: The Value of Irony: Legal Orthodoxy and Henry James's Washington Square (Ticien Sassoubre, California Law Review)
    -ESSAY: “The retribution of time”: slow thought and empathic judgment in Henry James’s Washington Square (Janina Levin, Review of Communications)
    -ESSAY: "It's All a Blind": Scopic Economies in Henry James Washington Square (Carrie L. Hill, Clemson University)
    -ESSAY: Catherine of Washington Square: Henry James and Northanger Abbey (Juliet McMaster, Jane Austen Society of North America)
    -ESSAY: James's Washington Square: The Hawthorne Relation (Robert Emmet Long, The New England Quarterly)
    -ESSAY: Washington Square: A Centennial Essay (Darshan Singh Maini, The Henry James Review)
    -ESSAY: Money and the Question of Materialism in Henry James's Washington Square (Sufyan Al –Dmour, Department of English Language and Literature- Mu'tah University- Jordan)
    -ESSAY: Henry James' Style in Washington Square (Greg W. Zacharias, Studies in American Fiction)
    -ESSAY: An American Antigone: Henry James's Washington Square (Tatjana Juki?, December 2017)
    -REVIEW: of Washington Square by Henry James (Mona Simpson, The New Yorker)
    -REVIEW: of Washington Square (Algis Valiunas, Claremont Review of Books)
    -REVIEW: of Washington Square (McKenzie Fetters, The Lawrentian)
    -REVIEW: of Washington Square (Uncle Guido)
    -REVIEW: of Washington Square (Pages Unbound)
    -REVIEW: of Washington Square (Rich Horton, Strange at Ecbatan)
    -REVIEW: of Washington Square (Christopher Hook, Medium)
    -REVIEW: of The Complete Letters of Henry James, edited by Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias (Colm Tóibín, London Review of Books)
    -FILMOGRAPHY: Washington Square (IMDB)
    -FILMOGRAPHY: Washington Square (Rotten Tomatoes)
    -FILM REVIEW: Washington Square (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times)
    -FILM REVIEW: Washington Square (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality & Practice)
    -FILM REVIEW: Washington Square (Teresa Huang, the Tech [MIT])