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    The Jolly Corner
    The Jolly Corner
    The Jolly Corner
    Ebook69 pages1 hour

    The Jolly Corner

    By Henry James

    3/5

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 1, 1990
    Author

    Henry James

    Henry James (1843-1916) was an American author of novels, short stories, plays, and non-fiction. He spent most of his life in Europe, and much of his work regards the interactions and complexities between American and European characters. Among his works in this vein are The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), and The Ambassadors (1903). Through his influence, James ushered in the era of American realism in literature. In his lifetime he wrote 12 plays, 112 short stories, 20 novels, and many travel and critical works. He was nominated three times for the Noble Prize in Literature.

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    Reviews for The Jolly Corner

    3/5

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    • 4/5
      I read somewhere that The Jolly Corner is considered to be the second greatest ghost story written by James, after [Turn of the Screw], so I was happy to learn that my maiden voyage into James’ works was with such a worthy story. I was surprised by the depth and complexity of the story’s structure. James wrote such lush prose, even if the concept of the story – a man haunted by himself – is a strange situation to encounter. I am a fan of narratives that involve internal musings with a writing style that leads to thoughts flowing together. Stories written in this manner are meant to be read at a more leisurely pace, especially as the pacing of the story is key to the building psychological suspense.
    • 2/5
      I expected too much from this edition after I saw that it was listed as "Illustrated." I had just finished reading Domenico Starnone's "Trick" in which a senior-aged illustrator is himself actually working on illustrations for "The Jolly Corner" (1908) while revisiting his own childhood home in order to babysit his grandson.Unfortunately the illustrations in this specific edition of "The Jolly Corner" are mostly a random selection of landscape paintings that have nothing to do with the actual story. The story itself is rather obscure and primarily in an experimental stream of consciousness style (it is late Henry James) and it isn't that impactful.There was a nice unadvertised bonus though with the addition of Thomas Hardy's short story "The Three Strangers" (1883) which didn't seem to have anything in common with the Henry James.
    • 3/5
      I read this for a Tales from the Crypt reading challenge. I was expecting a ghost story of the same ilk as The Turn of the Screw. I was sorely disappointed. The story had some interesting ideas - the fetishisation of the past, the potential for alternative worlds to exist where the opposite of our actual decisions take alternative versions of ourselves down different paths, the possibility that what we think is happening is actually the reverse. Ultimately, the story didn't work as either ghost story or psychological thriller for me. It was too cautious. The suspense didn't build. I wasn't immersed in Spencer Brydon's world enough to believe anything more than self indulgent imagining was happening, or that Brydon's experiences were anything other than a mental breakdown in the face of regret for the life he has lived.I think my expectations were too high, but the story has stayed with me. The quality of James's writing is as rich as ever and, viewed not as a ghost story but as a love story, it is a good read. I just wanted it to be spooky!
    • 2/5
      Ironic title in that there was nothing remotely "jolly" about the story. A nothing story ... it was all psychological and boring as hell.

    Book preview

    The Jolly Corner - Henry James

    The Jolly Corner, by Henry James

    The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Jolly Corner, by Henry James

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

    Title: The Jolly Corner

    Author: Henry James

    Release Date: May 13, 2005 [eBook #1190]

    Language: English

    Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

    ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JOLLY CORNER***

    Transcribed from the 1918 Martin Secker edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

    THE JOLLY CORNER

    by Henry James

    CHAPTER I

    Every one asks me what I ‘think’ of everything, said Spencer Brydon; and I make answer as I can—begging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense.  It wouldn’t matter to any of them really, he went on, for, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my ‘thoughts’ would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only myself.  He was talking to Miss Staverton, with whom for a couple of months now he had availed himself of every possible occasion to talk; this disposition and this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in fact presented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in the considerable array of rather unattenuated surprises attending his so strangely belated return to America.  Everything was somehow a surprise; and that might be natural when one had so long and so consistently neglected everything, taken pains to give surprises so much margin for play.  He had given them more than thirty years—thirty-three, to be exact; and they now seemed to him to have organised their performance quite on the scale of that licence.  He had been twenty-three on leaving New York—he was fifty-six to-day; unless indeed he were to reckon as he had sometimes, since his repatriation, found himself feeling; in which case he would have lived longer than is often allotted to man.  It would have taken a century, he repeatedly said to himself, and said also to Alice Staverton, it would have taken a longer absence and a more averted mind than those even of which he had been guilty, to pile up the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the bignesses, for the better or the worse, that at present assaulted his vision wherever he looked.

    The great fact all the while, however, had been the incalculability; since he had supposed himself, from decade to decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change.  He actually saw that he had allowed for nothing; he missed what he would have been sure of finding, he found what he would never have imagined.  Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected, the ugly things of his far-away youth, when he had too promptly waked up to a sense of the ugly—these uncanny phenomena placed him rather, as it happened, under the charm; whereas the swagger things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay.  They were as so many set traps for displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring.  It was interesting, doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been too disconcerting hadn’t a certain finer truth saved the situation.  He had distinctly not, in this steadier light, come over all for the monstrosities; he had come, not only in the last analysis but quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with which they had nothing to do.  He had come—putting the thing pompously—to look at his property, which he had thus for a third of a century not been within four thousand miles of; or, expressing it less sordidly, he had yielded to the humour of seeing again his house on the jolly corner, as he usually, and quite fondly, described it—the one in which he had first seen the light, in which various members of his family had lived and had died, in which the holidays of his overschooled boyhood had been passed and the few social flowers of his chilled adolescence gathered, and which, alienated then for so long a period, had, through the successive deaths of his two brothers and the termination of old arrangements, come wholly into his hands.  He was the owner of another, not quite so good—the jolly corner having been, from far back, superlatively extended and consecrated; and the value of the pair represented his main capital, with an income consisting, in these later years, of their respective rents which (thanks precisely to their original excellent type) had never been depressingly low.  He could live in Europe, as he had been in the habit of living, on the product of these flourishing New York leases, and all the better since, that of the second structure, the mere number in its long row,

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